Today, I’d like to offer my evaluation of the commonly used analytical frameworks in the consulting industry. In fact, these existing frameworks are overly idealized and cannot fully capture actual market behavior—they have significant limitations. Take Porter’s Five Forces as an example: in the real world, there are non-market forces such as kinship, friendship, trust, and shared-interest communities. There are also various forms of bias caused by different factors (such as racial discrimination, dissatisfaction with the company or founder behind a product, or even simply disliking the packaging). Other factors like geographical location also play a role—the list goes on, and I won’t enumerate them all.

Very often, due to these various reasons, price and quality become less important. If one simply applies the Five Forces model to conduct analysis, a significant portion is missed from the very beginning. Can decisions based on an incomplete analytical framework be considered reliable? I wonder whether academic theorists are even aware of this issue.

Of course, it’s possible that some experienced consultants may make up for these gaps using their own judgment, but how much they can compensate for depends entirely on the individual consultant’s capabilities. There’s also another situation where multiple frameworks are used simultaneously. But in those cases, I wonder if they’ve ever considered whether doing so violates the MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) principle.