Marketing practice, written small
Method
The method has one premise: that most marketing problems are visible at a smaller scale than the one at which they are usually discussed, and that the smaller scale is cheaper to work at. A quarterly review argues about direction. A single sequence, read line by line, usually shows where the direction stopped being carried.
What follows is not a framework in the sense of a diagram to be filled in. It is an order of operations, and the only discipline it asks for is that each unit is read as a reader would meet it rather than as the person who wrote it remembers meaning it.
A unit is the smallest thing that still carries meaning on its own. A word is usually too small: it means whatever the sentence around it decides. A page is usually too large: it contains several arguments and averages their failures together. In practice the workable units are the sentence, the link, the step and the ask.
The test for a good unit is that you can say what it is doing without referring to anything else. “This sentence answers the objection about cost” is a unit doing a job. “This section builds trust” is not a unit; it is a hope about several of them.
Units are read in the order a reader meets them, which is rarely the order they were written in and almost never the order they appear in a planning document. The most common defect the method finds is positional: nothing is wrong with the sentence, only with where it sits.
Reading in order also exposes the assumptions carried between units. A step that makes sense only if the reader has retained a fact from two steps earlier is a step with a dependency, and dependencies are where sequences break when traffic arrives from somewhere unexpected.
The fourth question does most of the work. Any unit that only functions for a reader who took the intended path is a unit that will be met out of order by a substantial share of real traffic, and it is better to know that before the traffic arrives than after.
It does not settle questions of direction, audience or offer, and it will not tell anyone what to sell. It is a diagnostic, and it is only as good as the honesty of the reading. Its characteristic failure is a practitioner reading their own units as they meant them.
It is also slow at scale. Reading every unit of a large estate is not practical, which is why the method is normally applied to the sequences that carry the most consequence and to the ones that have started behaving differently without an obvious cause.