The 4 Ps / Marketing Mix
The four decision areas a marketing plan is expected to cover — product, price, place, promotion.
Breaks when It breaks the moment it is used as a strategy tool. It is a list of levers with no theory of which lever matters, in what order, or by how much — four boxes of equal visual weight for decisions of wildly unequal consequence. It is also entirely firm-side: all four Ps are things the company does, and the customer appears nowhere. The long parade of proposed extensions — 7 Ps, 4 Cs, SAVE — are symptoms of a frame that organises without prioritising.
Product-Market Fit / The 40% Test
A survey rule of thumb: ask users how they would feel if they could no longer use the product, and treat 40% answering “very disappointed” as the threshold for fit.
Breaks when The 40% threshold has no published derivation — it is a remembered benchmark from a small set of startups, not an estimate with an interval around it. Worse, the survey only reaches people still using the product, so it measures the enthusiasm of survivors and is structurally silent on everyone who already left. A product with a small, devoted, unscalable audience passes it comfortably; that is the exact failure mode it is meant to catch.
Brand Architecture
The decision about how many brands a company runs and how they relate — one master brand, a house of separate brands, or a structure between the two.
Breaks when It gives no rule for where the line falls. The frame will describe any portfolio you already have and endorse almost any addition to it, because the case for a master brand (efficiency) and the case for a separate brand (focus) are both always available. The evidence on extensions is conditional — similarity between the extension and the parent, and the strength of the parent, both matter — so a frame that does not carry those conditions is a vocabulary, not a decision rule.
BCG Growth-Share Matrix
A 2×2 that sorts products into stars, cash cows, question marks and dogs by market growth and relative market share, with an investment instruction attached to each cell.
Breaks when It measurably worsens the decision it is used for. The damage comes from the cell labels rather than the axes: 'dog' carries a divestment instruction that the numbers inside the cell do not, and once a product has been placed there nobody re-reads the arithmetic. Market growth is also a poor proxy for attractiveness in any category where a shrinking market is consolidating into a profitable one.