Why this keeps happening
The problem is almost never where the symptom is.
A brand is not a set of assets. It is a sequence of four decisions, each built on the answer to the one before it.
Market Truth. Who is this genuinely for? The customer, the job they are hiring a brand to do, and what they really weigh you against.
Product Truth. What do we own that this market actually values? Unanswerable until the market is settled.
Value Proposition. What, therefore, do we promise? Which slice of the true thing, and how much.
Brand Signal. How do we show up? What a stranger reconstructs in seconds, everywhere, fast.
The brand is assembled, not integrated.
Why they break
Each decision inherits the one above it, and is sound only if that decision was sound, and was actually checked. The second half of that sentence is where brands break. In practice, each decision gets made well, and made alone: settled by different people, at different times, none of them asked to question the decision theirs depended on.
And a flawed decision does not fail where it was made. It is inherited, quietly, by everything built on top of it, and its cost surfaces downstream, often several steps below the decision that actually broke. So every fix gets aimed at the bottom, where the pain is. A fix aimed below the fault improves things for a quarter and then reverts, because the break was never there.
Four decisions make six relationships. They are not six equal places to look.
A surface is never repaired because nothing is wrong there. It is an exit wound. Followed back up the chain, it always leads to an origin.
The symptom is never the source.
Sequencing is not new to frameworks. They run a brand in order, first decision to last, treating all decisions as equal. Audits check the parts for fit and alignment.
None of them run backward.
That's what makes MAPS different. It reads a brand as a chain of unequal decisions, each one carrying the weight of everything built on it.
The diagnosis starts at the symptom you can feel, and traces up the chain to the decision that broke.
Repair that one decision and the correction flows down.
You fix one thing. You do not rebuild four.
The re-validation cascade
Each decision beneath the repair is re-checked against it; what still holds is left alone, and only what no longer holds is realigned, in order. Which decision broke, and where its cost surfaces, are two different places. Treating them as one is the misdiagnosis.
A diagnosis is only worth what it can withstand.
Most diagnoses are the result of confirmation bias: the collective feeling in the room that something might be the reason gets subconsciously evidenced. That is not how MAPS works.
Before anyone inside the business is interviewed, the suspected cause is committed to in writing, dated, together with the specific evidence that would prove it wrong. Nothing is counted as evidence until two independent sources carry it. And the finding stands only if the attempt to disprove it failed.
Why the finding travels
What you receive is not a point of view delivered with confidence. It is a conclusion you can audit, resting on evidence you can check against records you already hold. That matters most after the readout: a diagnosis has to hold in rooms its author never enters. In front of the board, in front of finance, in front of whoever asks why this repair and not another. A finding built on counted, sourced evidence travels into those rooms intact. An opinion, however experienced, does not.
What working together looks like
One diagnostic, built around your business.
No two businesses present the same way. The same symptom sits inside a different history, a different set of people holding the decisions, a different trail of evidence. So the diagnostic is not sold off a shelf. It is scoped to your business in the first conversation: who holds which decision, what your records already contain, how many markets and channels the brand runs across. The system never changes. The scope is fitted to you.
Your time, protected.
The bulk of the work happens at my end, between the conversations. Your side of the engagement is a handful of sessions, none longer than an hour, placed where your calendar allows.
What you receive.
The Fault Line Report:
- The symptom you brought, and what it has been costing you, in your own terms.
- The trace: the walk from the symptom up the chain, with the evidence shown at each step.
- The finding: the one broken decision, named plainly.
- What leaving it in place keeps doing.
- The single upstream repair: its shape, its owners, and a success measure tied back to the symptom.
And one sentence you can repeat, unhedged, to anyone who asks what was found.
One finding. One decision to repair. Direction included.
The observation behind the system
Twenty years of watching the same break happen in different places.
My name is Abhishek Alok Tyagi. I am a brand and communication strategy consultant, and have spent two decades inside the rooms where brand decisions are made: at Ogilvy and Grey in Mumbai, and across London agencies like Here & Now 365 and Team ITG, serving some of the most demanding categories there are. Brand architecture, positioning, launches, rebrands and repositionings, across food, personal care, financial services, hospitality, telecom, travel and retail, in two markets that could not be less alike.
That range is the point. When you watch brands break across enough categories, geographies and sizes, the local explanations stop holding. It is never just this market, this team, this category's dynamics. The shape repeats: four good decisions, made by capable people, none of them checked against the decision it depended on. And the fix aimed at the symptom, again, because the symptom is where the meeting was called.
How the discipline was earned
Campaign effectiveness was my accountability long before it was my argument: across three hundred television campaigns, the work I planned took EFFIE effectiveness awards, and effectiveness is a habit of evidence, not of conviction. Professional education at the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, sharpened the thinking. Two decades of watching what actually holds supplied the one insight the established frameworks did not carry: the direction of the break.
MAPS is that observation, built into a system. Not a philosophy of brands. A way of finding the decision that broke, run so that another practitioner could follow the same trace and reach the same finding.
The system, run on real problems → The traces
The first conversation is about your symptom, in your words.
Reach out to Abhishek.