The 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 across 3 of the 9 questions
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.
Decide what to offerA four-cell grid of growth options formed by crossing existing and new products with existing and new markets.
Breaks when It labels rather than directs. Knowing which box you are in says nothing about what to do inside it.
Reach peopleThe 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.
PositionThe 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 The often-quoted 76% of category market cap comes from the authors' own unpublished analysis with no disclosed sample, method or period — and the companies that tried to create a category and failed are not in the book.
PositionThe 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.
Decide what to offerA 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.
Decide what to offerAn 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.
Position