I’m not sure I follow the inheritance component properly. Is that a reference to cumulative experience? If you can say a little more about that and the inheritance-product commodity overlap, I’ll have a stab at further ruminations.

Secondly, I remain entrapped in the same paradox of believing the world is too complex for a single model to “crack” great advertising while believing deeply in integrative principles that unite all mediums and communications founded on human traits paired with the hubris of wanting to create a unifying model.

However, principles are good to put some form around this valuable thing called marketing. I like the the key buckets of product, inheritance and pretending. However, prescribing things like comedy or imaginary fall down depending on the brand or even a specific challenge at a moment of time for a brand. EA’s Tiger Woods game wouldn’t do too hot with humour right now.

What is interesting is that different brands live more broadly and deeply to different degrees in each particular frame of product, inheritance and pretending. They are not together a frame but each their own.

A brand like Coke has a very small product frame as it’s simply sugary water but pretending is tremendous, increasingly so over time as it builds off it’s inheritance. Pretending is massive – its platform of happiness is entirely based on pretending. That is what Coke is.

Microsoft is very slender on the pretending, struggles with its inheritance but is strong in the product frame (yes, they are if we put away our Apple blinders on for a moment.) Its ads are playing to this and out performing per dollar spent Apple multiple fold.

Lululemon is big and deep on product though slim on pretending – you buy into a bit of imagining it will lead to a more slender you but primarily product drives it still and in fact the lack of advertising further builds its inheritance over time.

Don’t know if these make any sense but I’ll follow up with a note to you of a different visualization to allow a more dynamic representation of the interplay of the entire framework between frames. A Venn diagram is a little to simplistic and static for the complexity you’re trying to simplify. But what I really love is the incorporation of imagination/pretending – it’s interesting right now seeing an influence of behavioral economics and hard science proving the messaging model and left brand MBAism in marketing are not the most effective approach. It is flippant to say they are not effective or broken but relative to the payoff of imagination they are inferior.

Watch you email for some poorly designed graphic thoughts.