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Tuesday, April 21, 2026
📂 Habit #4: Using mental models & frameworks
Habit #4: Using mental models & frameworks
Mental models are simple thought processes or ways of visualizing how things work in reality.
A mental model is any sort of concept, framework, or worldview that you carry around in your mind to help you interpret the world and understand the relationship between things. Think of them as mental tools and shortcuts you can use to get the best results.
They help us simplify complex things so we can reason through them and make better decisions.
And that's the crux of doing your best work, of being strategic, of being able to think for yourself: making better decisions repeatedly and avoiding bad decisions.
The source of all bad decisions is something you’re blind to. The only way to eliminate blind spots is to change your perspective. Mental models are a way to change your perspective.
What usually happens when we're faced with a decision — which channels to invest in, what to write, who to hire, how to structure a campaign — is we either (1) do whatever is easiest (copy, let someone else do it, roll the dice and gamble) or (2) we use our instincts and gut feelings (take an educated guess) or (3) we actually use incorrect mental models that we've developed.
When you think about it, these are all actually very risky ways of making a decision.
Copying someone could result in a lawsuit or negative press. Your instincts could be completely wrong, especially if you don't have any previous experience with something before. Using incorrect mental models could actually leave you worse off than before.
Let me give you an example of using incorrect mental models:
A lot of marketers make decisions by just asking themselves "what would I want?" This might work if you are very similar to your customers, but what if you aren't? You could have completely different buying behaviors, beliefs, values, and circumstances than your customers. Plus, how do you argue with another marketer who uses that same logic and asks themselves what they would want, but gets to a very different conclusion? Who's right? And how do you determine that? Using this mental model could be disastrous for you.
So using [correct] mental models offers you a way to consistently get more information and make those better decisions.
Let’s go through a few as an example.
Stages of Awareness
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Eugene Schwartz covered this in his classic book Breakthrough Advertising back in 1966.
He broke down prospect awareness into five distinct phases:
- The Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal.”
- Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, but isn’t sure it’s right for him.
- Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows the result he wants, but not that your product provides it.
- Problem-Aware: Your prospect senses he has a problem, but doesn’t know there’s a solution.
- Completely Unaware: Your prospect doesn’t know that they have a problem.
Marketing gets easier the further to the right you are.
Your job as a marketer is to create an engine that moves people to the right.
And knowing which stage of awareness you’re marketing to helps tremendously because you can tailor your message to the right amount of awareness.
For example, you can agitate the pain of problem-aware prospects so they become curious about solutions.
Marketing looks vastly different for each stage of awareness. For every ad that you run, email you send, and landing page that you publish... know which stage of awareness the intended audience likely is and tailor it to graduate them to the next stage of awareness.
People buy outcomes, not products and services.
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Your customers don’t care about your product. They don’t care about your competitor’s products either. In fact, your customers don’t care about any products.
All they care about is outcomes.
- Will this help me more attractive?
- Will this save me time?
- Will this make me more money?
- Will this impress by boss?
- Will this allow me to do something I couldn't previously?
- Will this ease a pain?
Marketing is about showing potential customers what they'll be able to do, who they'll be, or what they'll avoid by buying your product or service.
C.R.I.B.S.
I've had a love/hate relationship with feedback because on the one hand, it always used to feel awkward making a vague ask to someone — almost like a formality, but not really asking for feedback — and on the other hand, your work always ends up better for it.
Both giving and receiving feedback is difficult. If you don't have some sort of framework, you're probably not going to get what you're looking for.
I remember there were so many times when I'd post in Slack to ask for feedback on my latest blog post, email, or ad and everyone would return with completely different responses:
- Grammar corrections
- Rephrasing sentences
- Thumbs up
- "Looks good!"
- Random comments on certain sections
It's rare that you actually get the feedback you're looking for without a framework.
You have be specific.
And that's where the CRIBS framework comes in.
CRIBS stands for:
- Confusing
- Repeated
- Insightful
- Boring
- Surprising
By asking what's confusing, you give people an opportunity to tell you what doesn't make sense to them. Most of the time, when you ask for feedback, people will be afraid to critique in such a systematic way.
But by inviting it and asking for it, you can finally get the feedback you need.
Repetition can be good in the right context, but you want to remove things that are too repetitive unnecessarily.
Asking for what's insightful will give you the highlights, and maybe what to expand more on.
Boring is almost never something you'll hear without asking for it specifically, but it's important to know if what you're doing is boring.
And finally, surprising. And this can be surprising in both good or bad ways.
So now, when you ask for feedback, ask in this way, and encourage people to use it very objectively.
There are many many more mental models for marketing that you can add to your mental tool belt.
Cheers,
Corey
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