cep scorer
Which buying situations bring your brand to mind, and which bring a rival? Paste a category entry point survey and find the gaps.
1. Write the survey
A category entry point (CEP) is a situation, need or feeling that sends someone looking in the category. Ask category buyers, for each one: "When you are in this situation, which brands come to mind?" Let them pick any number.
Use the same brand list for every question, include the brands your buyers really consider, and show the questions in a random order.
2. Paste the answers
People who linked no brand to any situation do not appear in the rows, so enter the true number surveyed above. If you leave it blank, the tool assumes everyone linked at least one brand, which flatters every brand's penetration.
The link carries your settings and survey questions, not the pasted answers.
Every brand
| Brand | Mental market share | Range | Mental penetration | Network size | Situations covered |
|---|
Where each brand over- and under-indexes
Each cell is the brand's share of links in that situation minus its overall share, in points. Lime bars are above its usual share, grey bars below. The last column shows how much of all linking that situation carries.
Your biggest gaps
Situations that carry a lot of linking where you sit furthest below your usual share. These are the entry points to build first.
How it works
The measures
Mental penetration: the share of everyone surveyed who linked the brand to at least one situation. Network size: among people who linked the brand at all, the average number of situations they linked. Mental market share: the brand's share of all links made to all brands. Over- or under-indexing: its share of the links in one situation minus its overall share.
These follow the mental availability ideas of Romaniuk and Sharp. Commercial tools may weight things differently, so do not compare numbers across tools.
The ranges and the verdict
Mental penetration has a Wilson range. Mental market share has a range from 1,000 seeded resamples of the people in your data, which keeps each person's links together. The verdict compares your share with the best-placed rival in the same resamples: ahead if the gap is above zero in at least 97.5% of them at 95% confidence, behind if below zero, otherwise level.
Read this before you quote a number
Sample size matters more than it looks. Shares of links rest on a few hundred people at best. Small samples give wide ranges and noisy situation-level gaps. Read the biggest gaps as leads, not findings.
Ask category buyers only. Asking your own customers inflates your own numbers.
Prompting changes the answer. A shown brand list gives higher numbers than open recall. Do not mix the two across waves.
The situation list is your assumption. A missing situation is invisible. Build the list from real buyer language first.