Positioning
The practice of claiming a single defensible place in the prospect's mind relative to competitors, rather than competing on product attributes.
Breaks when Fails when you do not control the category definition, or when the category does not exist yet. And unless the mental position is actually measured, it decays into an argument about taglines.
Positioning Canvas
A five-step procedure that derives a market category from competitive alternatives, unique attributes, the value they produce, and the segment that cares.
Breaks when Powerful only where you can choose the category. In regulated or mature markets step five is locked, and the canvas quietly becomes a four-step exercise.
Category Design
The strategy of creating and naming a new market category rather than competing inside an existing one, on the premise that whoever defines a category captures most of its value.
Breaks when Heavy survivorship bias. The often-quoted 76% of category market cap comes from the authors' own unpublished analysis with no disclosed sample, method or period — and the companies that tried to create a category and failed are not in the book.
Points of Parity / Difference
The distinction between attributes on which a brand must merely match competitors and the attribute on which it must differ.
Breaks when Let the parity list grow and the product becomes a me-too. Matching is not free — most budgets disappear into it without anyone noticing.
Perceptual Mapping
A spatial representation of how customers perceive competing brands, derived from survey data, used to locate unoccupied positions.
Breaks when You choose the axes, so you can manufacture whichever gap you want. Unbounded by survey data it is wishful thinking — and the empty space is usually empty because nobody wants what is there.
Strategy Canvas / Blue Ocean
A plot of a category's competing factors against the level each player offers on them, used to force raise, reduce, eliminate and create decisions.
Breaks when Examples are selected after the fact and there is no evidence on the method's forward success rate. Uncontested space is frequently uncontested because there is no demand in it.
Challenger Brand
A set of asymmetric strategies for brands that are not the category leader and cannot win by matching the leader's resources.
Breaks when Backfires if you are the leader — challenger posture is the market leader's most expensive mistake. Note also that Avis “We try harder” is the pre-framework archetype Morgan draws on, not a case of his method.
Porter's Five Forces
An analysis of the structural pressure on profit in an industry from five directions: rivalry, new entrants, substitutes, supplier power and buyer power.
Breaks when It is the smaller half of the story, and Porter's own data says so: industry effects account for 19% of the variance in US public-company profitability, business-specific effects for 32%. The frame is also static and boundary-dependent — the industry has to be defined before the analysis starts, and the definition decides the answer. Applied to a young category, where the boundary is the thing being contested, it produces a confident reading of a structure that does not exist yet.
Purple Cow
The argument that only remarkable products — literally worth remarking on — can be marketed, because advertising can no longer buy attention for an ordinary one.
Breaks when It is defined so that it cannot fail. A product that sold was remarkable; one that did not was a brown cow; the test only becomes available after the result. The measurement points the other way too — buyers perceive very little differentiation between the brands they actually buy, and success does not track perceived differentiation. What does the work is distinctiveness, being instantly recognisable, which is a memory property rather than a remarkable one and is built by repetition the model has no place for.