The index is organised by the question you are answering. Most people do not arrive with a question — they arrive with a symptom. These are the eleven most common ones, each mapped to the tools that bear on it, across categories.
The sets are deliberately mixed in evidence. A Folklore tool in a set is not a mistake — it is usually the one you will be handed first, and knowing what it cannot tell you is the point.
Usually one of three things: you are buying past the point of diminishing return, you are measuring credit rather than causation, or the metric being optimised has stopped tracking the outcome. Rule them out in that order — the first is arithmetic, the last is cultural.
8 tools Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: LawA memory problem, not a message problem. The question is not whether people like the brand but whether it is retrieved at the moment of buying, and whether anything about it is recognisable without the logo.
7 tools Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: LawBefore defending the price, establish what the price is being compared against and what is genuinely different rather than merely present. Most of what feels like a price problem is a reference-price problem.
8 tools Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: FrameSeparate saturation from mismatch. A channel that saturated needs a different channel; a channel that never fitted the economics was never working, it was subsidised by something else.
6 tools Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: FrameStart with the job being done and the size of the reachable market, and treat any segment description as a hypothesis. The tools here that carry a Folklore mark are the ones most likely to produce a confident answer that is wrong.
8 tools Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: FrameThe most common misdiagnosis in marketing. Loyalty metrics look healthy because they are being read off a small buyer base; the constraint is penetration, and loyalty spending will not move it.
7 tools Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: FolkloreThree different questions get confused here: what people say they would pay, what they would actually pay, and what the thing is worth against their alternative. Pick the one you are actually asking.
7 tools Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: LawNothing here produces proof. What they produce is evidence of different strengths and costs — an experiment is the strongest and the slowest, a model is the broadest and the most assumption-laden. Say which you are offering.
10 tools Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: FrameAlmost always a theory-of-effect problem: the message is being tested for comprehension and agreement, while the mechanism it needs to work through is memory or recognition. Decide how the advertising is supposed to work before testing whether it does.
10 tools Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: FrameThe decision is whether the new thing borrows the existing memory structures or builds its own, and that choice has a price either way. The frame will endorse whichever you have already chosen, so write down the cost first.
7 tools Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Folklore Evidence tier: FrameMost of the audience cannot buy today, so activity measured against this quarter's pipeline will always look wasteful. The argument to have is about what advertising is for, not about the numbers.
5 tools Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Law Evidence tier: Frame Evidence tier: Folklore