Engineer · Strategist · Teacher
Pragmatic Optimist: someone who believes the future is good but insists on building the road to get there
Bio
The short version
Laurent Bouty is the creator of the Marketing Canvas Method — a structured framework for building marketing strategy with clarity and speed. Over 30 years as CMO and CTIO across telecoms and digital services, he ran the experiments that built it: executive cohorts at Solvay Brussels School, in-company workshops, and transformation programs with leadership teams across Europe. He co-leads The Beyonders Agency, a consultancy that helps organisations apply AI to strategic change. Marketing Strategy, Programmed is the definitive guide to the method.
Lessons
What thirty years taught me!
Engineering taught me to think in systems.
Most marketers jump to solutions. Engineering trained me to find structure first. That instinct is the foundation of everything I've built since.
Telecoms taught me that speed without direction is just noise.
Thirteen years launching products, growing subscriber bases, leading digital infrastructure. The organisations that won weren't the fastest — they were the clearest.
Teaching taught me where strategy actually breaks.
Every cohort at Solvay, every workshop revealed the same fracture: smart people stuck between strategic ambition and operational reality. That gap is what the Marketing Canvas Method was built to close.
Consulting taught me that tools only work when people trust them.
Working with Orange, Vodafone, Swift, STIB, ING and others — the best framework in the room is useless if the team doesn't own it. Methodology is only half the job.
AI is teaching me that the next frontier is augmentation, not automation.
Not replacing strategic thinking — making it faster and more accessible for teams who can't afford to wait.
I started building this method in 2014 because I couldn't find one that was complete. Every framework I'd used in my career — and I'd used most of them — illuminated part of the problem but left the connections to the practitioner's judgment. I wanted a method where two people looking at the same data arrive at the same conclusion, not because they agree, but because the logic is traceable. Ten years of iteration later: 24 dimensions, 9 archetypes, 6 steps, and 20 case studies. The method is open-sourced. The full framework is freely available.