Making a Concept Begins Not from Analysis but from Your Own Criteria of Judgement

The damage from a weak concept does not always appear as a failure to communicate. Most of it appears as rephrasing, and then as not lasting.

A concept settles on the other side only after the same words have been said for years. Yet words derived from analysis bring a question with them every time they are said: is this really right? Carrying that question while repeating the words is heavy work, so rephrasing usually begins partway through. Once rephrasing begins, nothing settles. On the other side you are recorded as someone who says something different each time.

What gets settled below comes to three. What the taught procedure takes as its input. Why the words that come out of that procedure can only take the form of a difference. And what reversing the order actually consists of. All three keep the same shape whatever the product or trade, because they describe the maker’s process. That is why they can be written from outside.

Three things stay unsettled. What your concept ought to be, how far to narrow the audience, when it is safe to change the words. These cannot be written. Criteria of judgement exist only inside the judgements that person has already made. A criterion handed from outside stops working as an instrument of judgement at the moment it is handed over. Judgement functions only when it sits with the person judging. And handing over a template here would leave everyone who filled it in holding words of the same shape. An instrument that produces no difference cannot be used for the purpose of making one.

When the order has not been reversed, the first symptom is a thinness of conviction. Derived from analysis, the grounds sit outside. Grounds that sit outside wobble when circumstances change. And when they wobble, no material for holding them up is in hand.

The thinness is invisible from outside. Looking only at the words on display, both orders produce the same shape. The difference emerges when the same words are said in the second year. Words from analysis have been rephrased by then; words from criteria are still saying the same thing. And only the second kind stays on the other side.

The object here is the process that makes the words, not the words on display. The procedure in circulation runs in four stages, and at no point in those four is what the maker regards as important taken as an input. Until the process changes, however many words are rebuilt, what comes out lands in the same place. So what needs correcting is not the words.

The Making of a Business Concept Is Taught in Four Stages

The procedure taught for making a business concept differs in detail, but the four-stage skeleton is shared.

The first stage is a survey of the present. Where the product or service currently stands, what the strengths and weaknesses are, what problems the customers hold. Material is gathered here.

The second stage is understanding the customer. Decide whom it is for, and grasp the desire they have not put into words — this is called an insight. Behaviour and remarks are observed and the psychology behind them inferred.

The third stage is condensation. The gathered elements are brought into a single core message. Concise, concrete, with the distinctiveness showing.

The fourth stage is verification. Whether the finished message carries. Here six principles — simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, story — are used as criteria.

All four stages function in practice. The first two in particular prevent the situation of squeezing out words with no material in hand. The procedure itself is useful.

The four stages each draw on a different source. The first stage takes the present state of market and firm, the second takes observation of customers, the third takes the previous two, the fourth takes the finished message.

The maker is the one gathering material, the one assembling it, and the one judging it. They are not counted as a source of material.

The property of the procedure shows here. The four stages treat the maker as an interchangeable processing device. Analyse the same market by the same method and anyone arrives at a similar answer. As a matter of reproducibility this is a strength. Where what a concept is asked for is the one point that differs from others, high reproducibility becomes the weakness itself.

One objection deserves taking on. Build words from your own thinking while ignoring the market and you end up self-absorbed. The concern is legitimate. And what follows is not a case for skipping analysis. It is a case for moving analysis from the position of producing the answer to the position of confirming it. Change the position and the same data produces a different answer.

The four stages also have conditions under which they work correctly. They hold where what you handle is a product whose use is already settled. In deciding what to improve, or which layer to restate it for, the material is already there in the market. The four stages were designed to organise that material. The condition fails where the use of the thing itself has to be decided by you. Building a business alone usually falls on that side.

What a Book on Making Concepts Handles Is the Condition of Transmission

The six principles used at the fourth stage are worth checking at the source. The framework is not built for deciding what to say.

Simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, story. The six come from the 2007 book Made to Stick by the brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath, where the initials are arranged as SUCCESs.

And the question the book handles is why one idea stays in memory while another disappears. An urban legend is retold for decades while a carefully written internal policy is forgotten in a week. It is a book that takes apart where that difference comes from.

So the six are conditions of transmission and retention. The same content, placed so that it stays or placed so that it vanishes. They describe that divide. What to say is not contained in them. The six conditions judge how content is placed, once the content is decided.

If it does not carry it means nothing, so pinning down the conditions of transmission first should be rational — this is one reading.

However apt the content, placed in a form that does not stay, it does not stay. That is where the conditions of transmission work. What is wrong is a confusion of order and division of labour. The six are instruments of judgement, not instruments of generation. Use an instrument of judgement at the stage of generation and what gets generated is whatever passes the judgement.

What happens concretely? Seek unexpectedness and phrasings that sound unexpected get chosen. Seek story and elements that fit a story get chosen. What is being chosen is the part that fits the form, not the content. The result is a state in which all six conditions are met while what is being said is no different from anyone else.

The state is hard to detect. All the criteria have been passed. With the checklist full, nothing appears to be wrong. That an absence of blanks and a presence of substance are different things is not visible from the side of the checklist.

Using the six is not itself a problem. Used as a judgement after the content is decided, they do their proper work. Carefully built content does disappear through nothing more than poor placement, and that loss does happen.

What matters is where in the process the six sit. Most guides introduce them as the final verification. The position is correct. The mismatch arises from the circumstances of practice. Deciding content has no procedure; judging has one. Starting from the side that has a procedure is natural. And start from the judging and content is worked backwards from it. Even with the six correctly placed in the diagram of the process, in the actual order of work they arrive first.

Start from Analysis and What Comes Out Is a Difference

The input of analysis is what already exists. So the output can only be written in relation to what already exists.

Analysis observes existing elements and structures them. Products in the market, competitors’ claims, customer remarks, your own record. Structure them and the vacant places become visible. What nobody says, conditions not met, ground nobody has touched. Putting yourself there is the basic form of a concept born from analysis.

The placement has a name. A difference. You are defined as the gap from what already exists.

A definition as a difference carries two properties.

The first is that it presupposes comparison. A difference does not stand without something to be different from. So every time you explain the concept, you summon the comparison alongside it. The phrasing unlike the usual X comes out of this structure.

The second is that you move when the object moves. Vacant places fill. Once filled, the difference disappears. Then you look for the next vacancy.

Definition as a difference has situations where it works. At the start, before you are anyone, explaining yourself in relation to existing things carries faster. You are borrowing the map already in the other person’s head. The dividing line is whether you keep using it as the starting point. A borrowed map works as an entrance to an explanation, but put the centre of the business there and the centre moves whenever the map does.

And words of difference do not accumulate. Say unlike the usual X for years and nothing is built from those words. What is built is the presence of the thing compared against. Every explanation puts their name in your sentence.

On the receiving side, something else takes place. Words of difference summon a comparing posture. Told unlike the usual X, ours is Y, the listener first recalls the usual X and lays the thing in front of them beside it. At that moment the judgement enters the frame of comparison. And what enters that frame settles most easily on price.

So a concept built to escape price competition invites comparison through the very form of its explanation. However distinctive the substance, if the placement is a difference, the reception is comparison. What is being said and the processing the way of saying it demands point in opposite directions. How that frame works is taken apart in Choosing to stop analysing competitors.

What Can Be Grasped as an Insight Is a Desire That Already Exists

The same structure runs through the second stage. What observation can reach is limited to what currently exists.

Grasping an insight is useful work in itself. What a buyer says and what they actually want often differ. Grasp the motive under the surface request and misdirected proposals fall away.

What can be grasped, though, is a desire already inside that person. Here it diverges from what a concept is asked for. A concept presents a frame for what counts as important. Change the frame and something that had not been conscious as a desire can stand up. That standing-up cannot be observed, because it does not exist yet.

Manufacturing a desire that does not exist sounds like imposition — this is one reading.

Put as manufacturing, yes. What actually happens is not manufacture, though. Something already there, unnoticed for want of a name, becomes visible on receiving one.

What separates them shows in the reaction. What is imposed produces resistance the moment it is said. What has received a name is received as that is what I wanted to say. The second is evidence that it was already inside that person.

The maker cannot judge which it will be in advance. Only the reaction to putting the name out tells you. Believe it can be judged in advance and stepping into imposition becomes easy.

And the more precise the insight, the closer the concept moves to a summary of the present. The more accurate the observation, the more what comes out is an accurate description of what buyers already think. An accurate description earns agreement and does not move a position.

Agreement has a second effect. The reaction exactly right returns the satisfaction of being understood on the spot. Once satisfaction has been returned, the need for a next action can fall.

The limit shows on the side of the sample. What can be observed is limited to the people already arriving. People who have not arrived, people who do not know the method exists, are outside the sample. So the more finely the insight is drawn, the sharper the outline of the current layer becomes. Adjust the words to that sharpened outline and you reach that layer more deeply and everyone outside it less. The movement always returns good numbers in the short term. Being good, the direction never comes into question.

Reversing the Order — What Goes First Is Your Own Criterion

Reversing means putting what you treat as important into words before the analysis.

This is not a case for doing what you like. Preferences cannot be used to judge. What can be used is a phrase in the shape of a criterion, which means it meets two conditions.

First, something falls out because of it. Fix what counts as important and what does not becomes fixed too. A criterion saying everything is important judges nothing.

Second, it can be applied to a concrete situation. Be honest cannot be applied as it stands. Hand over enough material for the other side to judge, including in situations where withholding it sells better can be. Whether it can be applied is confirmed by whether you can name a concrete act that violates it.

Start from your own values and you build something unrelated to the market — this concern arises when the question of order is read as the omission of a stage. Nothing here omits analysis. It changes the order.

Put your criterion first and analysis comes next, with its purpose changed. Not find the vacant place but find where the people who need this criterion are. The input is the same market data; the question differs, so the answers differ.

The order carries a cost: a slower start. Putting a criterion into words has no clear procedure like gathering material. No estimate of how many days it takes. Work with no procedure gets pushed aside by work that has one. So the order that starts from analysis is the one usually chosen.

There is a second cost: it is hard to verify. There is no way to confirm in advance whether a criterion is right. A concept from analysis can claim a degree of soundness through consistency with data. Market size, number of competitors, search volume. Numbers line up as grounds. A criterion has none of that.

So the order is taken while the feel of solidity stays thin. A thin feel is often read as not thought through enough. Misread it and you return to analysis in search of backing, and adjust the criterion to the numbers you find there. At that point the order has returned to where it was.

The criterion itself, incidentally, does not come out of searching your head. It is already buried in the judgements you have made. Which records to draw from, and what to take out of them, is handled in How to build a worldview.

A Criterion Stops Working the Moment It Is Tidied

Extracted criteria usually come out in an ungainly form. And tidying the form reduces the function.

What actually comes out sounds like this. I hate ways of working that stop the other person from judging. I cannot stand being asked to decide for them. Repeating the same explanation every time is unbearable. None of it has the shape of something you would put on a wall.

At this point, tidying usually begins. The ungainly phrase is turned into something usable outward. I hate ways of working that stop the other person from judging becomes we respect our customers’ autonomy.

Said that way, the words stop being usable for judgement. Almost no concrete act violates we respect our customers’ autonomy. The second condition for a criterion — can you name an act that violates it — is not met by the tidied phrase.

Why does raising the level of abstraction remove applicability? The psychologists Robin Vallacher and Daniel Wegner set out a framework for the level at which people identify their own actions (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987, Psychological Review, 94(1), 3–15). The same act can be described as a fine motion or as a purpose. And while a high-level description carries meaning, which concrete motion falls under it is not uniquely fixed. That framework deals with how individuals identify their own actions, not with corporate statements of principle. What is borrowed here is only the point that as the level of description rises, the correspondence with concrete acts loosens.

So across the tidying, the meaning of the phrase survives while only the function of judging is lost. Ungainliness is evidence that the phrase is grounded in concrete situations. Remove the grounding and the judging function comes away with it.

This is not a case against outward-facing language. What is needed is holding the two separately. Keep the judging phrase grounded and in hand, and raise the outward phrase from it. Try to hold them as one and it tends to drift toward the outward side, because the outward phrase has occasions for display every day.

A way of telling them apart is worth writing down. Try naming three acts that violate the phrase you currently display. If none come, it is an outward phrase and not a criterion. If they come, those three are the raw form of your reasons for turning work down.

What Falls Away at the Stage of Condensing into One Phrase

Condensation at the third stage always carries a loss. And the kind of thing that falls away is fixed.

Whether you are making a concept for a single project or for a whole business, the work of reducing it to one sentence comes at the end. What survives is the part that applies to many people. What falls away is the conditional part — in which cases it does not apply, whom it does not suit.

The reason sits in the criteria for condensing. Where short, easy to carry and easy to remember count as good, qualifications get cut. A qualification lengthens the sentence, dulls its momentum and makes it harder to remember. To pass the judgement, removing it is the correct move.

And the qualifications that get cut are the substance of the criterion. The first condition for a criterion to hold is that something falls out because of it. Words that cut the falling-out side make nothing fall out. The work of condensing is structurally biased toward removing the judging function from a criterion.

Condensing itself need not be dropped. Without one sentence, nothing stays in anyone’s memory. What is needed is holding the sentence and what the sentence omitted as two separate things.

Concretely, they are held in two layers. The sentence you put outward, and behind it the record of the cases where this does not apply. The second is not displayed. Replies to enquiries, the preamble to a proposal, the explanation when you decline — it is used only where the other side is judging.

There is a cost. Held in two layers, the volume of writing increases. Every explanation runs longer than it would with the sentence alone. Dislike that and you compress back to the sentence, and the state without qualifications returns. The return is invisible from outside. The words are the same as before; only what sat behind them is gone.

One more thing happens easily at this stage. Making the sentence first and then rewriting the criterion backwards from it. The better the sentence, the stronger that pull. In order of judgement, the criterion comes first and the sentence second. Reverse it and what happened at the tidying stage happens again, one size larger.

A qualification is worth adding. Holding the qualifications behind the sentence works only in transactions where the other side actually judges somewhere. In formats where there is no occasion to explain in person and you are chosen from the displayed sentence alone — sitting in a comparison list, for instance — nothing held behind reaches anyone. The qualifications then have to sit inside the sentence, and the sentence gets longer as the price. Which to take is decided by where you are being chosen.

Analysis Is Not Discarded; It Moves from Producing the Answer to Confirming It

This is not a case for abandoning analysis. Analysis simply moves from the position of producing the answer to the position of confirming it.

Analysis is needed in three places.

Finding where the people who need this criterion are. Putting a criterion into words does not tell you where to deliver it. Who responds to it can only be found by observation.

Checking whether the criterion is already occupied. If someone saying the same thing already holds a large position, entering with the same words is a disadvantage. This is a question of sequence, not of phrasing.

Shaping the transmission. Here the six principles return to their proper place. Once the content is decided, they judge how to place it so that it stays. That is their intended use.

The input to all three is the same. Only the position has changed.

Since you analyse in the end anyway, reversing the order lands you in the same place — this is one reading. The landing differs, because what you discard by differs.

Start from analysis and you discard by can we win. Avoid fields with strong rivals, take the vacant ones. What you treat as important does not enter that judgement.

Start from the criterion and you discard by does it fit the criterion. Vacant or not, if it does not fit, you do not take it. The act of not taking is what forms the outline of the business.

The second order produces losses. Fields that are vacant, winnable and outside the criterion get left alone, and while they are left alone somebody else takes them. See that loss and reverse the order, and you are back at analysis-first.

The visibility of the loss is asymmetric. Someone else succeeding in a field you did not take is plainly visible. What accumulated because you did take your own fields appears only on the inside. Set the visible against the invisible and the visible tends to weigh more.

Taking nothing outside the criterion is not required. In some periods, work outside it pays for the present. That in itself is not a collapse of the order. The collapse comes when work outside the criterion starts being explained as though it were inside. Adjust the explanation and the outward words drift from the actual work. Drifted words get used in the next judgement too. From there on, the criterion no longer works as an instrument. Taking the work and calling it inside the criterion are separate acts.

Whether the Criterion Works Shows in How You Are Refused

Whether it works does not appear in whether you are remembered. It appears in how people refuse you, and in how often you hesitate.

The first is the words the other side uses. Whether the words you put out appear inside their explanation. Whether you are introduced to others in your own words. If so, the frame has been handed over.

The second is the shape of refusals. With the criterion not working, refusals are about conditions. Price, timing, size. With it working, the refusal becomes this is not for us. A judgement of not fitting cannot be made without understanding your criterion.

The third is how often you hesitate. With the criterion in words, deciding whether to take or decline gets faster. If the hesitation has not fallen, the criterion is not yet in a form usable for judging.

The three scenes run in the order of the inward effect arriving before the outward one. Deciding faster, being able to state a reason for declining, repeating the same explanation. All of them happen before anything reaches the other side. A concept works first as its maker’s instrument of judgement, and becomes a frame on the other side as a result of that working being observed from outside. So in the period when no outward reaction returns, what to look at is not the delivery but whether your own judgements changed.

And straight after the criterion goes out, responses fall. Make the criterion explicit and the people it does not fit learn that it does not fit them. Learning it, they leave. This appears in a form hard to distinguish from failure, because it takes the same shape: fewer enquiries. What separates them sits in the change on the remaining side. Fewer, yet the conversations start faster. No longer beginning from confirming premises.

How far to narrow, how many months until the words come back. Give those two a number and they break instead. Put a number on the narrowing in particular and narrowing becomes the goal in itself. Instead of the narrowing coming out of the criterion, the criterion gets written afterwards to fit the narrowing that was decided. The order this article reversed returns to where it was.

Why does a concept get weak? The answer is not on the side of expression. The procedure begins from analysis, the output of analysis can only be a difference from what exists, and words placed as a difference hold no grounds for being repeated. And words without grounds get rephrased. A concept’s strength is not the quality of the phrase but whether the reason for saying it for years is in your hands. The reason is not supplied by the market.

Next time you rewrite the words, one thing can be checked. Can you name three concrete acts that violate them? If you can, it is a criterion usable for judging. If you cannot, it is still an outward phrase, with no power to make decisions faster. The three you named work directly as reasons for declining.

The operation of putting the criteria of judgement on your own side is taken apart in Being unable to decide is not a personality trait. How the price moves once the criterion goes out first is handled in Do not begin pricing from cost.

Reversing the order is part of the work of returning the source of value to your own side. The whole of that work is surveyed in Stepping down from price competition.