Audit 5 Draft Pillars Against the Competitor and Decision Tests

Marketing Academy · Field Work●Brand Strategy

MiniAudit· 25 minutes

Chewy

Objective: Given a set of 5 already-drafted pillar candidates, decide which pass the lesson's competitor test and decision-making test, and which are decoration.

Chewy's brand team has drafted 5 pillar candidates from a workshop. Before they go into the style guide, you've been asked to stress-test each one against the lesson's two filters.

Score each of the 5 supplied pillars against two questions: could a top competitor say this with a straight face, and would living by it ever force a real no.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets

FreeScore each pillar against the two pass/fail tests

Free, a simple scorecard table is sufficient

The process

1 step

Step 01 of 01

Testing each pillar for decision-making power

The lesson's Step 5 says a real pillar should be able to kill a bad idea in a meeting, if living by it fully wouldn't force you to say no to anything, it's too broad to be useful.

Given these 5 draft pillars ('Pet-first customer service', 'Quality', 'Fast, reliable shipping with real-time vet support', 'Innovation', 'We never upsell during a grief moment'), which pass both the competitor test and the decision test, and which should be cut?

Google Sheets— Build a 5-row scorecard with 2 pass/fail columns: competitor test, decision test.

Procedure

For each of the 5 pillars, ask whether Petco or Amazon Pet could plausibly claim the identical phrase
For each pillar, name one concrete decision it would force the team to say no to, or mark it 'none found' if nothing comes to mind
Flag any pillar that fails either test for removal or rewriting

Sample output

'Pet-first customer service' -> competitor test: FAIL (any pet retailer claims this) | decision test: none found -> CUT
'Quality' -> competitor test: FAIL | decision test: none found -> CUT
'Fast, reliable shipping with real-time vet support' -> competitor test: PASS (few competitors staff vets) | decision test: 'reject 3rd-party fulfillment partner with no vet line' -> KEEP
'Innovation' -> competitor test: FAIL | decision test: none found -> CUT
'We never upsell during a grief moment' -> competitor test: PASS | decision test: 'kill the auto-reorder email after a supplied end-of-life date flag' -> KEEP

Healthy

2-3 of the 5 candidates survive both tests and each maps to a real, nameable decision the pillar would force.

Unhealthy

All 5 pass on the surface because no one actually tried to name the decision each would force, generic language sails through unchallenged.

What this means

A pillar that survives to the style guide without a named example of a decision it forces will sit unused, exactly the gap the lesson's data shows between the 95% who write guidelines and the 25% who enforce them.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
A pillar has no concrete example of a decision it would force	Either find a real example from the last quarter's decisions or cut the pillar before it reaches the style guide	30 min

YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Final deliverable

A 5-row pillar scorecard marking each candidate KEEP or CUT, with the named decision each surviving pillar would force.

See a reference example

Sample output

Squarespace pillar scorecard (excerpt)

'Design that a beginner can ship in an afternoon' -> competitor test: PASS | decision test: 'reject a feature requiring a code edit to use' -> KEEP
'Trusted' -> competitor test: FAIL | decision test: none found -> CUT

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

Every one of the 5 supplied pillars is scored against both tests, not just the obviously weak ones
Each KEEP pillar has a real, specific named decision, not a vague justification