Distinctive Brand Assets
Non-name brand elements — colours, characters, sounds, shapes — that trigger the brand in memory, scored on fame and uniqueness.
Breaks when A new brand has no assets to score — investment first, measurement much later. And changing an asset resets everything accumulated in it.
Feldwick's Six Models
Six mutually incompatible theories of how advertising produces its effect, set out together because the industry uses all six while claiming only one.
Breaks when It will not tell you what to do. Useful at the start of a brief, useless at the end of one.
SUCCESs
Six properties — simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story — shared by ideas that survive being retold.
Breaks when An evaluation tool posing as a generation tool. Chase all six at once and you achieve none.
Value Proposition Canvas
A paired diagram mapping a customer's jobs, pains and gains onto a product's features, pain relievers and gain creators.
Breaks when Filled in around a table without talking to a customer, it becomes a register of assumptions — which is how it is usually filled in.
StoryBrand SB7
A seven-beat narrative template that casts the customer as hero and the brand as guide, applied to marketing copy.
Breaks when Produces the same shape in every sector: clarity bought at the cost of differentiation. Note also that no independently verified outcome case exists — every circulating figure traces back to a certified StoryBrand guide's own marketing.
Message House
A one-page hierarchy of a single overarching message, the pillars supporting it, and the evidence beneath each pillar.
Breaks when An internal alignment device. Copied straight into public-facing copy it produces corporate boilerplate.
Fluent Devices
A character, format or structure reused across successive campaigns so that recognition accumulates instead of resetting each time.
Breaks when Nothing compounds for a brand that repositions or changes agency often. Without accumulation the device is just a mascot.
Cialdini's Six Principles
Six levers of persuasion — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity — presented as a general toolkit for changing behaviour.
Breaks when It breaks when laboratory effects are assumed to transfer at laboratory size. Several of the underlying findings shrink sharply or fail to reproduce in field replication. It breaks harder when the principles are applied to brand advertising, where the audience is not deciding anything — scarcity aimed at someone who was not going to buy either way is a message with no mechanism. Compliance research generalises badly to advertising, which is mostly not asking for compliance.
Purchase Funnel / AIDA
The model that buyers pass in sequence through attention, interest, desire and action, with the population narrowing at each step.
Breaks when It breaks as a description of behaviour, which is the thing it claims to be. No empirical work has established that buyers move through these stages in sequence; measurement finds interrupted, non-linear, re-entered paths, and finds that most category buyers are in no stage at all at any given time. Treating it as real produces the characteristic errors: chasing “interest” as if it converts downward on a schedule, and building stage-gated budgets for a population that does not queue.
Creative Effectiveness
The repeated finding that the advertisement itself accounts for the largest single share of the sales effect — larger than targeting, reach, or where it ran.
Breaks when Two limits. The decompositions are run on campaigns that were already bought and distributed competently, so the finding says creative dominates among ads people actually saw — it does not say good creative rescues a campaign with no reach. And “creative quality” in these studies is largely an outcome-defined residual: what is left after the measurable variables are accounted for. Without a pre-test that predicts it, the claim edges toward circularity. Add that the major decompositions come from measurement vendors with a commercial interest in the conclusion, and this stays a Frame rather than a Law.
Stages of Awareness
A five-step ladder describing how much a prospect already knows — unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most aware — used to decide where a message has to start.
Breaks when There is no measurement attached to it. Nothing tells you which stage a visitor occupies, so the stage is assigned afterwards from what the copy did — a page that failed gets re-diagnosed as aimed at the wrong stage, and the ladder is never wrong. It also assumes one reader per page, and paid traffic delivers all five stages to the same URL at once.
Market Sophistication
A five-level scale of how many times a market has already heard a claim, used to decide whether to lead with the promise, a bigger promise, a mechanism, a better mechanism, or identification with the reader.
Breaks when The level is asserted, never measured, and it is asserted about a whole market when sophistication is a property of an individual buyer's exposure history. Someone entering a level-five category for the first time has heard none of the claims. The scale also runs one way only: it says markets get more jaded and never less, which is contradicted by the constant inflow of new category buyers that keeps the naive level populated indefinitely.
Message–Market–Media
The rule that a campaign has three parts — who you are talking to, what you say, and where you say it — and that they must be chosen in that order.
Breaks when The strict ordering is wrong wherever the channel constrains the message, which is most paid media: a six-second pre-roll and a long-form email cannot carry the same argument, so media is an input to message rather than a consequence of it. And the rule names the three variables without saying how to choose any of them — it is a checklist presented as a strategy.
The Golden Circle
The claim that organisations should communicate from the inside out — why, then how, then what — because purpose persuades and specification does not.
Breaks when Its supporting argument is a neuroanatomy claim — that the limbic system handles the why and has no capacity for language — asserted rather than sourced. The evidence offered is a handful of famous companies chosen after they succeeded, and it is the same company in every retelling. The model also has no procedure: it says start with why and does not say how to arrive at one, so in practice the why is reverse-engineered from a what that already worked.
Hierarchy of Effects
The model that advertising moves a buyer up an ordered set of mental steps — awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction, purchase — each one a prerequisite for the next.
Breaks when The ordering has been examined and not found. Hierarchy models neither describe the effects of advertising accurately nor conceptualise how advertising works as a market force, and forty years of reviews have failed to establish the sequence they assert. Treating the steps as prerequisites produces the standard error: money spent lifting awareness on the assumption that preference and purchase follow it on a schedule, and a tracker that reports movement at the top of the ladder as progress toward the bottom.
Elaboration Likelihood Model
A two-route account of persuasion: when a person is able and motivated to think about a message they process its arguments; when they are not, they respond to the cues around it instead.
Breaks when Elaboration is not observable in advance. In the field the route gets inferred from what worked, which makes the model unfalsifiable there: a rational ad that failed is relabelled a low-elaboration situation and the model is preserved. It also presumes a decision worth thinking about, and most category purchases are low-attention repeats where neither route is engaged and availability decides the outcome.
Mere Exposure
Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking for it, with no argument, no reward and no recall required.
Breaks when The curve turns over. A meta-analysis of 268 curve estimates from 81 articles finds the effect is inverted-U shaped — liking rises with exposure and then falls — so the schedule that built preference destroys it if it keeps running unchanged. The effect is also strongest where the exposure is not consciously recognised, which means the attention an ad wins can cost it the mechanism it was relying on.