The Evidence Line · Quick Diagnosis
Where do your marketing beliefs sit against the evidence?
Eleven of the most common beliefs in marketing, about three minutes. You get your Evidence Line straight away: every belief plotted against the strength of the research behind it, with the studies named. Your answers are recorded anonymously so we can track what marketers believe over time. No name or email unless you choose to give one.
Answer as you believe, not as you think you should. The point is to find the gaps, and the gaps are where the money is.
Your Evidence Line
Vertical: strength of the evidence behind the finding, on the Evidence Line rubric. Horizontal: your position relative to that evidence. Bubble size: how sure you said you were. Hover or tap a bubble for the study.
Why this matters
This is an average, not a verdict on your career. Every score is a base rate across many brands, categories and decades. A base rate tells you what usually happens, not what happened to you. If you ran something that worked against the average, that is not a scoring error: it is either a real exception with a boundary condition (the amber cards below) or a sample of one. Both are worth knowing. The question this is built to answer is not "were you wrong" but "if you did that again in a category you do not know, what are the odds?"
Two kinds of truth. Some of what you just answered is personal truth: it happened in your career, it worked for a brand you ran, you saw it with your own eyes. Personal truths are real and they are also a sample of one. Objective truths are the patterns that hold whether or not anyone believes them, across categories, countries and decades: that big brands have slightly more loyal customers, not fewer; that competing brands sell to near-identical people; that buyers keep a repertoire. The chart above sorts your beliefs by which kind of truth stands behind them, and the sorting is done by a published rubric, not by opinion.
Why the evidence-based version is worth the switch. Not because it is certain. Because it moves the odds. Medicine did not get better by understanding disease first; it got better when Pierre Louis started counting patients in the 1830s and found the bleeding did harm. The marketing equivalents are on this chart: split-cable experiments, single-source panels, sixty years of purchase data. They do not tell you what will happen to your brand. They tell you the base rate, which is the thing intuition is worst at.
What is at risk by staying put. Every red bubble is a place where money moves on a prediction the evidence does not support. Believe raving fans grow brands and you spend on the 20% of buyers who already buy while the light buyers who deliver 40% of sales go unreached. Believe the targeting data and you pay a premium for audiences that are right a quarter of the time. Believe ads wear out in a year and you retire the campaign just as it starts to compound. Believe your customers are unique and you plan for a tribe that the panel data says does not exist. None of these show up as a line item called waste. They show up as growth that did not happen.
What changes when you shift. Reach replaces targeting as the default. Penetration replaces loyalty as the growth metric. Distinctive assets replace differentiation as the brand brief. Consistency replaces refresh as the creative plan. Price and distribution move to the top of the growth agenda, where the profit multipliers say they belong. And every remaining belief gets a prediction written down before the money moves, so that in a year you know whether it was a personal truth or an objective one.
Go deeper by topic
Each round takes about two minutes and adds its bubbles to your chart. Pick any order.
Where your experience may be the exception
These findings have real boundary conditions. The average runs against you; your category might not. Read the boundary, then decide.
Expensive beliefs
Held with confidence, contradicted by the research, with no boundary condition that rescues them. These are the ones worth a conversation.
Evidence you don't yet trust
Well-supported findings you disagreed with. Cheap to adopt, because the work is already done.
Your numbers
Where you already stand with the evidence
This was the quick diagnosis
You answered up to 33 questions against 178 scored models. A full diagnosis works the other way round: it starts from what your team actually believes, where those beliefs are costing you money, and what to do about it.
What the full version adds: the whole library rather than a sample, your team scored individually so you can see where they disagree with each other, the boundary conditions that apply to your category specifically, and a training plan built from your weakest areas rather than a generic curriculum.
Clients on a fractional CMO retainer get this as part of the engagement. If you are not a client, it can be bought on its own.
Want the full diagnosis when it opens?
Leave an email and Marc will tell you when the paid version with the training plan is ready. Nothing else, no list.
Scores come from The Evidence Line, Quatical's rubric-scored library of 178 marketing models: each finding is graded on study design, replication, independence and effect size, then adjusted for what the counter-evidence says. Where a statement was also put to Canadian marketers in the Calgary Marketing Association's member survey, their agreement is shown for comparison. This is a diagnosis, not a test: a belief below the line can still be useful, it just can't be cited as proof.