Misdiagnosis is the most expensive habit in marketing.
MAPS is a diagnostic system. It traces the symptom a brand can feel back to the decision that broke. It repairs the cause, not the cost.
↓Before anything else
Five things I keep finding in brands that have already paid to fix the problem, unsuccessfully.
You changed something, and it didn't hold.
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A new agency, a new campaign, new messaging, sometimes a whole new identity. The number it was meant to move moved a little, then settled back to where it started. You were told these things take time. Two cycles on, the number is still where it was.
The product is good. The market behaves as if it isn't.
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The product holds up against anything the competition fields; that part isn't in question. Yet the consideration it earns on merit keeps going elsewhere, and no brief has managed to explain why, let alone close the gap.
Described from the inside, it is three different brands.
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The founder describes it in one way. Marketing frames it in another. Sales tells whichever version the room responds to. Nobody calls this a problem. The market quietly experiences a brand that never quite adds up.
The work is admired. It isn't acted on.
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The creative is good. It looks right, it sounds right, it wins the room. And it under-converts anyway. Everyone is too professional to say the obvious thing out loud, which is that the problem was probably never the creative.
Real money has been spent, and the actual problem still has no name.
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The strategy offsites happened, the research was commissioned, the workshops were sat through. What came out was a cleaner way of saying what the brand is. What never came out was a diagnosis: which decision broke, and where.
If any of these sound familiar, then MAPS Decision System is for you.
One system. One move no framework makes.
A brand is four decisions, each built on the one before it. When one breaks, the cost surfaces somewhere else. Three of the six relationships between them are origins where faults are born and repaired. The other three are surfaces where the clients feel the problems.
The symptom is never the source.
MAPS runs the diagnosis backward, from the symptom you can feel to the decision that actually broke, and repairs that one decision.
You fix one thing. You do not rebuild four.
The system, run on real problems
Three traces. Find yours.
Campaigns worked, but only for the legacy line. The customer base was aging out.
A heritage food brand read it as a creative problem. The trace ran three decisions deeper, to a market chosen twenty years earlier and never re-validated.
Customer base nearly doubled; revenue up more than forty percent.
Read the trace →Loved for years. Renegotiated every six months.
A premium London gym treated it as an engagement problem. The break was the promise itself: a finite claim, sold to members who stayed for a continuing one.
The prescription: rebuild the proposition, and pricing power follows the promise.
Read the trace →Qualified traffic arrived, and left. "Once we get them on a call, we win."
A B2B software company refreshed its website twice. The promise was sound; it never survived into the signal, and nobody had checked upstream before redesigning the surface.
Re-encoded, the first impression starts doing the sales team's opening work.
Read the trace →Every diagnostic is scoped to the business it enters, and most of the work happens away from your calendar. What an engagement looks like →
Who is behind this
Abhishek Alok Tyagi
For twenty years I have advised founders, boards and marketing leadership on brand, positioning and communication: at Ogilvy and Grey in Mumbai, then across London agencies including Here & Now 365 and Team ITG. The work took EFFIE effectiveness awards, and the thinking was sharpened by professional education at the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. MAPS Decision System was not adopted or licensed. I built it, out of two decades of watching the same break happen in different places.
Two decades across
The first conversation is about your symptom, in your words.
Reach out to Abhishek.