Why the Marketers Who Get Promoted Ask Different Questions in Strategy Meetings

McKinsey published a study of approximately 5,000 companies. Only 61 outperformed their peers in profitable revenue growth over five years — about one in seven. They beat the rest by an average of five percentage points in revenue growth and seven points in profitability, every single year.

The study profiles five of those companies: Walmart, ASML, Progressive Insurance, Builders FirstSource, and JPMorgan Chase. McKinsey explains what they did — invest consistently, build multiple growth engines, embed technology in their operations. All true. All useful.

But if you are earlier in your career — still building your strategic thinking, still learning to connect what you do day-to-day with why a company grows — the most valuable thing in this research is not the list of what the winners did. It is the question it raises about the company you work for right now.

Why is your company in the 6-in-7 that didn't outperform — or if it is outperforming, which specific things are making that happen?

That question is harder to answer than it looks. And the gap between marketers who can answer it and those who cannot is one of the biggest factors in who gets promoted, who gets trusted with bigger decisions, and who builds a career that compounds over time.

Here is a way into the answer.

Why Most Strategy Conversations Miss the Real Diagnosis

One of the patterns you will notice if you attend enough strategy meetings is that the conversation jumps immediately to solutions. "We should invest more in content." "We need a better CRM." "We should be doing more with AI." "We need to improve the customer experience."

These may all be true. They may also all be expensive ways to treat symptoms while the underlying condition goes undiagnosed.

The Marketing Canvas Method (MCM) is a 6-step strategic framework built to diagnose before it prescribes. It starts not with "what should we do?" but with three prior questions that most marketing conversations never reach: who specifically is the customer we are building this strategy for, what market conditions are we actually operating in, and what is the company's primary competitive logic?

Those three questions produce what the MCM calls an archetype — a description of the specific strategic position your company is in, based on market lifecycle stage, competitive value model, and primary growth goal. There are nine archetypes in the framework, each with its own set of eight critical dimensions to maintain (the Vital 8), and each with different priorities.

The reason this matters for your career is not that you need to run the full MCM analysis from day one. It is that learning to ask these three questions — about your own company, about competitors, about companies you read about in McKinsey articles — will train a kind of strategic thinking that most marketers at your level are not yet doing. The ones who are become visible very quickly.

The Finding That Should Change How You Read Strategy Research

Here is the finding in McKinsey's research that is not in the headline summary but that I think is the most important one.

When you apply structured MCM analysis to the five companies McKinsey profiles, most of them are not running unusual or exotic strategic positions. They are running the same type of position as their underperforming competitors. Progressive Insurance is in the same strategic position as every other US auto insurer. JPMorgan Chase is in the same position as every other major retail bank. Walmart is in the same position as the retailers it has spent decades outcompeting.

The archetype is not what differs. What differs is how well each of these companies executes the eight dimensions that matter most for their specific position.

In plain terms: the winners are not doing something different. They are doing the same thing better, in a more disciplined, more consistent, more rigorous way — across all eight critical areas simultaneously, not just the ones that are easy or obvious.

This has an implication that I want you to sit with, because it is uncomfortable and important.

It means that most underperformance in strategy is not a strategic problem. It is an execution discipline problem. And execution discipline at the dimension level is exactly what marketing and product teams are responsible for. Not the board. Not the CEO alone. The people running campaigns, managing customer journeys, building products, allocating budgets.

If your company is in the 6-in-7, there is a reasonable chance that part of the reason is dimensions below target — areas where the work is happening but not at the level required. And part of your job, as you build seniority, is to develop the ability to see which dimensions those are and advocate clearly for fixing them before adding new initiatives on top.

Three Ways to Start Applying This Thinking

You do not need to run the full MCM process to start building this way of thinking. Here are three practical places to begin.

1. Learn to ask "who specifically?" before any strategy conversation

The MCM starts at Step 0 with what it calls the Lead Segment Junction: before any strategic decision is made, you identify one specific customer segment that the strategy is being built for. Not "our customers" in aggregate. One specific group, with a specific Job-to-be-Done (JTBD) — the specific outcome they are trying to achieve when they use your product or service.

The reason this matters is that the same company, the same product, and the same market data can produce completely different strategies depending on which customer segment you are designing for. Aldi's "efficiency at lowest cost" strategy works perfectly for the price-primary household shopper and fails completely if applied to an aspirational lifestyle buyer. These are not subtle differences in tone — they produce different archetypes, different priorities, and different campaigns.

In your next strategy meeting, try asking: "Which specific segment of our customers are we making this decision for — and what is the Job they are trying to do?" You will often discover the room is assuming different answers. That discovery alone is valuable.

2. Develop the habit of separating market context from company choices

The second MCM parameter is the market lifecycle stage — is the category growing, mature, or declining? The third is the competitive value model — are customers choosing between options primarily on price (commodity), features (product), relationship (service), or outcome transformation (experience)?

These two questions narrow the strategic options available to your company dramatically. A company in a declining commodity market cannot rationally pursue customer acquisition — the MCM flags that combination as capital destruction. A company in a growth services market has different priorities than one in a mature services market, even if the product looks similar.

When you read about companies in the press — including the five McKinsey profiles — practice asking these questions before you assess the strategy. Is this market growing or mature? Are customers choosing on price, features, relationship, or outcome? You will start to see strategic decisions differently. What looks like a bold move often turns out to be the logical response to market context. What looks like a conservative move often turns out to be the right response to a market that the company understood and the press did not.

Progressive Insurance's telematics programme is a good example. McKinsey presents it as bold technology adoption. The MCM analysis shows that Progressive was simply executing the most important dimension of its strategic position — pricing precision — with better tools than competitors. The boldness was not in the technology. It was in the consistent, 30-year investment in one specific dimension that its market position required.

3. Start scoring your company's own situation informally

The MCM uses a scoring scale from −3 to +3 across 24 strategic dimensions, grouped into six meta-categories: Customers, Brand, Value Proposition, Journey, Conversation, and Metrics. Each archetype has eight of those twenty-four that are most critical — the Vital 8.

You do not need to know which archetype your company is in to start developing an instinct for this kind of assessment. Try this: pick three dimensions from the MCM that are relevant to your company — your customers' understanding of what makes you different, the quality of their experience, or how clearly your pricing reflects your value — and score each one honestly on a −3 to +3 scale. Not a marketing team score. Not what you would say in a pitch deck. An honest assessment of where customers actually are.

If you cannot score them confidently, that itself tells you something: either the data does not exist, or the team has not been asking the right questions in customer research. Both are findings worth surfacing.

What the Five Companies Can Teach You About Your Own Company

Reading McKinsey case studies is more useful when you use them as mirrors rather than models. Here is a short observation about each of the five companies that is relevant regardless of which industry you work in.

Walmart demonstrates that a clear, specific customer — in this case, the price-primary household shopper — maintained consistently over decades, produces compounding strategic advantage. Every time Walmart drifted from that customer (lifestyle repositioning, financial services, the Jet.com acquisition), the drift was expensive and the recovery took years. The discipline of saying "we serve this specific customer with this specific logic, and we will not dilute it" is harder to maintain in practice than it sounds in theory. But the companies that maintain it tend to outperform the ones that broaden.

Progressive Insurance demonstrates that the same strategic position, executed with genuine rigour across all eight critical dimensions simultaneously, produces dramatically better results than competitors in the same position. Progressive is not in a more advantaged market than State Farm or Allstate. It is more disciplined at the dimension level. This is one of the most useful things to understand early: competitive advantage often lives not in strategy but in execution quality across specific, measurable areas.

ASML demonstrates the value of deep technical authority in a narrow domain, maintained across technology generations. The company is the only supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment in the world — a position built over decades of investment in the two things that matter most for its strategic context: technical positioning and customer roadmap alignment. The lesson for earlier-career marketers is not to become a monopolist (obviously) but to observe what it looks like to maintain absolute clarity about which two or three things matter most, and to invest in them without distraction.

Builders FirstSource demonstrates that the most interesting strategic moves are often M4 shifts — deliberate changes in where the customer makes their competitive purchase decision. BFS is moving from being a commodity and product distributor (customers choose on price and specification) toward being an integrated project partner (customers choose based on scheduling certainty, reliability, and the ability to outsource complexity). This is not a pivot — it is a deliberate value ladder climb within the same customer base. It changes pricing power, margin structure, and competitive moat simultaneously. When you read that a company is "investing in services" or "moving toward solutions," this is often what is actually happening at the strategic level.

JPMorgan Chase's Consumer Banking demonstrates A4 execution at scale. The A4 archetype — mature services market, retention-anchored — is where most large established companies in B2B and B2C services live. The companies in A4 that underperform are typically failing at two specific dimensions: customer experience quality and lifetime relationship value. The companies that outperform — Chase being the clearest example — have both of those dimensions above target and sustain them through disruption (the pandemic branch expansion, the digital pivot) rather than letting them degrade.

The Career Implication

The MCM Quick Assessment takes about ten minutes and maps your company's strategic position to one of nine archetypes. It also surfaces which of the eight critical dimensions for your archetype are likely below target based on your responses.

Running it for your company — even informally, even incompletely — will give you a map of the gap between where your company's strategy should be focused and where it actually is. That map is worth something in every meeting, every briefing, and every conversation about priorities.

The marketers who develop strategic literacy early — who can read McKinsey research and ask "which dimensions are these companies scoring above target, and which of ours are below?" — are the ones who become trusted advisors rather than just capable executors. That transition is the most important one in the first ten years of a marketing career. The MCM is one of the most direct tools for accelerating it.

Take the Quick Assessment at laurentbouty.com/quick-assessment. If you want the full framework — all 6 steps, all 9 archetypes, all 24 dimensions — the book Marketing Strategy, Programmed covers it in full.

The Marketing Canvas Method is a 6-step strategic marketing framework built for entrepreneurs and marketing leaders who need to turn strategy into action. Learn more at laurentbouty.com.

Source: McKinsey & Company — "Inspired for business growth: How five companies beat the market," February 2026.

Your Marketing Budget Is Wasting 10% to 30% of Itself. Here's How to Stop It.

BCG published a sharp piece in June 2025 called For CMOs, the Future Starts with Smarter Spending. The headline finding is one of the most commercially direct things a major consultancy has said about marketing in years:

A typical marketing organisation can unlock 10% to 30% of its total spend by addressing inefficiencies across working and nonworking categories.

On a $10M marketing budget, that's $1M to $3M sitting in waste. On a $100M budget, that's up to $30M available to redirect into growth — without touching revenue targets or headcount.

BCG doesn't stop at the diagnosis. They show a real case: a global multibrand apparel company captured $48M in identified savings ($28M working + $20M nonworking) and generated $70M in bottom-line impact by redirecting those dollars into higher-ROI activities.

$70M from fixing how an existing budget was allocated. Not from a new product launch. Not from a market expansion. From spending the same money better.

Here's the thing: BCG tells you what to do. The Marketing Canvas Method is how you do it — systematically, with every decision traceable to a revenue number.

What BCG Actually Found

BCG splits marketing spend into two buckets, and both have significant waste.

Working spend (55%–80% of total budget) is your media — the money that directly reaches consumers. BCG finds that most companies continue to fund channels that no longer reflect where their customers' attention is, and spread budget too thinly across too many tactics without a clear link to business impact. Fix this, and you recover 20%–30% working spend productivity.

Nonworking spend (20%–45% of total budget) is everything else: agency fees, content production, martech, measurement, and overhead. BCG's diagnosis is blunt: "The common thread is inertia. These costs stem from legacy workflows and are rarely scrutinised with the same rigour as media investments." Fix this, and you recover 15%–25% nonworking spend productivity.

Add them together: 10%–30% of your total budget freed up, available to fuel the growth initiatives you keep saying you don't have budget for.

The question is not whether the waste exists. BCG confirms it does. The question is whether you have a system to find it, fix it, and redirect it — or whether you're running on the same allocations as last year because no one has forced a clean-sheet review.

The Three Mistakes That Create the Waste

Before I show you how the Marketing Canvas Method addresses each of BCG's findings, you need to understand what's actually creating the inefficiency. BCG identifies three root causes.

Mistake 1: Spend is allocated by inertia, not by objective.

David Edelman, former CMO of Aetna, puts it precisely in the BCG piece: "Too many marketers get into a cycle of escalating performance marketing spend because they have to compensate for consumers' shrinking awareness of their brand."

You over-index on performance marketing. Performance spend goes up. Brand awareness goes down. You add more performance spend to compensate. Margins erode. Awareness falls further. It is a self-reinforcing loop, and it is expensive.

The correct sequence is the opposite: build awareness and brand trust first, then activate performance. But most organisations don't have a mechanism that enforces this sequence. So they default to what's measurable — lower-funnel spend — and bleed the upper funnel dry.

Mistake 2: There's no clear primary objective driving the allocation.

BCG identifies three distinct business objectives that should drive working spend decisions: acquiring new customers, retaining the existing base, and expanding basket size (growing revenue per customer). Most organisations pursue all three simultaneously, which means none of their channel choices are actually optimised for any one of them.

When you try to do everything, you do nothing well. Your media mix is a compromise. Your content is a blur. Your agency brief is a contradiction.

Mistake 3: Nonworking spend is invisible.

Overlapping agency relationships. Production costs that exceed the media budget for the same campaign. Martech tools that 40% of the team can't use. These costs don't appear on the performance dashboards. No one is accountable for them with the same rigour as CPM or ROAS. They accumulate over years. BCG finds they account for 20%–45% of total budget — and a material share of that is recoverable.

What the Marketing Canvas Method (MCM) Does About It

The MCM doesn't fix these problems with recommendations. It fixes them with structure.

You should pick one revenue lever and build everything around it.

MCM Step 2 (Revenue Ambition & Goal Setting) requires you to decompose your revenue into its moving parts — beginning-of-period customers, churn rate, gross additions, average revenue per user, transactions per month — and then declare one primary lever: Acquisition (GET new customers), Retention (KEEP existing customers), or Stimulation (GROW revenue per customer).

One lever. Not three. Not "it depends." One.

This single constraint prevents Mistake 2. Your channel mix, your content strategy, your agency brief — they all flow from the same primary objective. A company focused on Retention doesn't spend money the same way a company focused on Acquisition does. The MCM enforces the discipline that BCG identifies as missing.

You should score your budget allocation and treat a low score as a crisis.

MCM Dimension 640 (Budget/ROI) scores four properties: allocation logic, planning integration, monitoring discipline, and innovation reserve. The specific scoring question is: is your budget based on strategic goals and urgency — or on what you spent last year?

A negative score here isn't a yellow flag. For A6 (Value Harvester) companies, 640 is a Fatal Brake — the most severe classification in the method. A Fatal Brake means all other strategic investment is blocked until the dimension is fixed. Inertia-based budgeting cannot coexist with a properly scored MCM strategy. The method structurally prevents Mistake 3.

The MCM also applies a 90/10 discipline to budget: 90% allocated to proven tactics, 10% protected for experimentation. BCG recommends this balance. The MCM makes it a scored, non-negotiable requirement.

You should sequence your spend the right way: brand foundations first, performance second.

The MCM's three-cycle roadmap (FIX → ALIGN → SCALE) enforces exactly the sequence BCG describes. Cycle 1 allocates 80% of resources to fixing Fatal Brakes — which includes brand dimensions like Values (230) and Engagement (140). Performance activation scales in Cycle 3, when the brand foundation is verified.

For archetypes where brand is a Fatal Brake — specifically A3 (Brand Evangelist) — the method will not allow you to proceed to performance investment while brand scores are below target. The Edelman cycle BCG describes — escalating performance spend compensating for brand decay — is architecturally impossible if you follow the MCM. The system blocks it.

The Four-Step Programme — and Why You Need It to Be Permanent

BCG's case study breaks the apparel company's recovery into four steps:

1. Create a baseline — analyse spend to identify waste and value pools

2. Capture savings — fix working and nonworking inefficiencies

3. Reinvest — redirect savings to higher-ROI activities

4. Update the operating model — lock in the new allocation with dashboards and playbooks

This programme generated $70M in bottom-line impact. It's a clean, logical sequence. But it has one structural weakness: it's a one-time project.

The MCM is the same loop, made permanent.

• Step 1 (Context Mapping) + Step 3 (Vital Audit) = BCG's baseline

• Step 4 FIX stream = BCG's savings capture

• Step 4 ALIGN + GROWTH streams = BCG's reinvestment

• Step 5 (Cycle Roadmap) with Integrity Gates = BCG's operating model update

The difference is the Integrity Gate. Between Cycle 1 and Cycle 2, the MCM runs a binary test: are all Fatal Brakes above threshold? If not, Cycle 2 doesn't start. You cannot reinvest in growth on a broken foundation. The gate is automatic. It removes the human tendency to skip the hard fixes and jump to the exciting growth initiatives.

BCG's programme worked once for one company. The MCM makes the programme run every 4 months, continuously, with built-in verification.

What About GenAI?

BCG reports that ~50% of CMOs expect GenAI to save 5%–10% of total marketing spend. 44% expect 20%–40% employee productivity gains. The top two impact areas are content creation and data measurement.

The barrier? "Nearly one in three CMOs know how to execute successful pilots in sandbox environments, but don't have clarity on how to scale up."

Pilots fail to scale when they have no structured workflow to embed them in. GenAI produces output, but it doesn't tell you which output to produce, for which segment, in service of which revenue goal. Without that context, you generate more content, faster, for no clear strategic purpose. BCG calls this a scaling problem. I'd call it a strategy problem.

The MCM provides the structure GenAI needs: a defined Lead Segment (Step 0), a validated strategic context (Step 1), a clear revenue goal (Step 2), and a specific set of dimension gaps to address (Step 3). GenAI content initiatives slot into Step 4 as named initiatives tied to specific Vital 8 scores. They don't scale in a sandbox. They scale within a strategy.

Three Things You Should Do This Week

BCG's research is a diagnosis. Here is the prescription.

1. Separate your spend into working and nonworking buckets. Add up every nonworking cost: agency fees, content production, martech licences, measurement tools, overhead. If that number is above 30% of your total marketing budget, you have a 640 problem. Score Dimension 640 against your current revenue goal and be honest about whether your allocation is based on strategy or inertia.

2. Declare one primary revenue lever. Acquisition, Retention, or Stimulation. Write it down. Now ask whether your current working spend allocation matches it. If you're focused on Retention but your biggest spend line is prospecting ads, you have a mismatch. Fix the mismatch before you add any new budget.

3. Map your channel spend against your Lead Segment's actual behaviour. Where does your target segment spend their attention? Are you funding channels that reflect that — or channels that were relevant three years ago? A below-target score on Dimension 430 (Channels) or 530 (Media) is recoverable in 4 months. Continuing to fund the wrong channels is not.

BCG has quantified exactly how much money you are leaving on the table. The Marketing Canvas Method is the system you use to pick it up.

The Marketing Canvas Method is a 6-step strategic marketing framework for entrepreneurs and marketing leaders who need to turn strategy into action. Learn more at laurentbouty.com.

Source: BCG — For CMOs, the Future Starts with Smarter Spending — Hutchins, Sharma, Stortz — June 16, 2025.

Your Customers Don't Buy Your Product. They Buy Who They're Becoming.

B. Joseph Pine II just published a piece in Harvard Business Review that is worth reading carefully. It is adapted from his new book, The Transformation Economy, and it makes an argument that is both simple and commercially serious: the most valuable thing a company can offer is not a product, a service, or even an experience. It is change. Specifically, change in the customer.

Pine calls this the transformation business. The premise: "Offering transformations means understanding the why behind what people buy from you — and then bringing together the resources to make that outcome happen."

This is not a new idea philosophically. It is a new idea commercially. And it has very specific implications for how you should assess your marketing strategy — and, if you use the Marketing Canvas Method, for how you should score several of its dimensions.

What Pine Actually Said

Pine argues that customer aspirations have two dimensions: quality (change in kind vs. change in degree) and scale (large vs. small). Cross them, and you get four aspiration types.

Metamorphosis is a large change in kind — a profound identity shift. From non-parent to parent. From med student to surgeon. The customer doesn't just want a new skill. They want to become a different person.

Cultivation is a small change in kind — embedding new values or identity markers over time. Joining a fitness centre to become "a healthy person." Moving savings to a wealth manager to become "financially set." The change is real and identity-level, but gradual.

Ambition is a large change in degree — significantly improving something the customer already does. The programmer who immerses in AI courses to dramatically accelerate their career. The amateur filmmaker who takes technique seriously and starts making longer, more involved work.

Refinement is a small change in degree — honing, polishing, sharpening. The gardener who starts reading magazines and watching videos to get better at what they already love.

Pine's closing argument is the one that should get your attention: "As goods, services, and even experiences become more commoditised, transformations yield premium pricing and long-term loyalty because they result in lasting value for customers who become more and more of who they are meant to be."

Why This Maps Directly onto the Marketing Canvas Method

The Marketing Canvas Method was built on Pine & Gilmore's original Experience Economy (1998). M4 — the Economic Value parameter — uses their value progression as one of its two archetype-selection inputs: Commodity → Products → Services → Experience. And the MCM's M4 definition at the Experience level states explicitly: "compete on transformation."

Pine's 2026 article is a theoretical elaboration of the apex of that progression. Which means every insight he offers in this piece has a direct operational equivalent in the MCM.

Here is the translation.

Metamorphosis → A3 Brand Evangelist

A metamorphic customer doesn't want to buy something. They want to become someone. Harley-Davidson customers don't evaluate motorcycle specs. They become Harley people. Patagonia customers don't buy a fleece. They become members of a movement.

In the MCM, this is the A3 Brand Evangelist archetype — triggered by Maturity + Experience + Retention. The A3's two Fatal Brakes are Engagement (140) and Values (230). These are the structural components that enable or block the metamorphosis.

If your Values score negative, your tribal identity claim is inauthentic, and the metamorphosis cannot occur. If your Engagement score is low, the tribe has gone passive, and there is no community to absorb the new member. Both failures produce the same outcome Pine describes: customers who transact but don't transform, and who leave the moment a competitor's price is 10% lower.

You should score your Values (230) against Pine's test: can a customer point to a specific decision you made in the last year that proved the values were real, even when a different decision would have been more profitable? A +2 requires that evidence. Anything lower is aspiration without proof — and metamorphic customers detect that faster than any other type.

Cultivation → A8 Niche Expert

A cultivation customer is building an identity over time. They are becoming a runner, a wine enthusiast, an art devotee. They don't need a dramatic transformation. They need a guide who takes their emerging identity seriously and gives them progressively deeper access to it.

In the MCM, this is the A8 Niche Expert archetype and the Stimulation revenue option. The A8's strategic mission is to deepen specialised authority over time — which is exactly what cultivation requires from the company's side. Dimension 120 (Aspirations) is a Primary Accelerator for A8 — deep aspiration understanding is what separates a niche authority from a narrow generalist.

Pine's specific recommendation for cultivation businesses: apps and membership models that track progress against baselines, provide access to know-how and coaches, and connect the aspirant to others on the same path. In MCM terms, this is a Dimension 630 (User Lifetime) strategy — extending the customer relationship well past the initial transaction through ongoing value delivery.

If you serve cultivation customers, the worst thing you can do is treat each transaction as complete in itself. You should build the model where the first purchase is the beginning of a guided progression, not the end of a sale.

Ambition → Features + Proofs at Maximum Rigour

An ambitious customer has a specific gap they want to close. The programmer who wants to master AI isn't vague about this. The amateur filmmaker studying technique can articulate exactly what they can't yet do. They want measurable, demonstrable progress against a concrete goal.

In the MCM, ambitious customers respond to high scores on Dimension 310 (Features) and Dimension 340 (Proofs). Features must demonstrably close the gap. Proofs must show that others with the same starting point achieved the desired outcome.

Pine's GOLFTEC example is instructive. The company compares your swing to professional players on video, shows you exactly where the gap is, and provides targeted exercises to close it. That is a +3 on Features (the product is precisely calibrated to the aspiration) and a +3 on Proofs (the benchmark is explicit and objective). There is nothing vague about the value proposition. The ambitious customer doesn't want inspiration. They want a gap closure plan with evidence that it works.

You should ask: does your current value proposition tell an ambitious customer exactly how far they are from their goal and exactly what your product does to close that distance? If the answer is "not precisely," your Features and Proofs scores are below what this customer type requires.

Refinement → Stimulation + Ongoing Content

A refinement customer loves what they already do and wants to go deeper. They are not trying to become a different person or close a major gap. They just want to keep getting better at something they enjoy.

This is the Stimulation revenue option expressed at its most sustainable. Refinement customers are loyal by nature — they've already committed to the domain. The company's job is to keep providing the next level of depth: new techniques, harder challenges, behind-the-scenes access, community with other enthusiasts at the same level.

Pine's Home Depot example is useful here. Free in-person workshops that progressively expand DIY skills. Not a one-time purchase event. A continuing relationship built on "here's what you can learn next." In MCM terms, this is a Dimension 520 (Stories) and Dimension 630 (User Lifetime) dual strategy: content that continuously serves the aspiration, and a customer relationship designed to deepen over time.

If you're serving refinement customers and your content calendar is promotional rather than educational, you have a misalignment. The refinement customer is not looking for your next offer. They are looking for their next level.

The Principle That Ties All Four Together

Pine writes: "There is no greater economic value you can create than to guide customers in achieving their aspirations — to help people become who they want to become."

The MCM's Dimension 120 (Aspirations) asks exactly this question as its assessment statement: "The knowledge of our customers' Aspirations is helping achieve our goal." A negative score here means you are selling a product to someone who is buying an identity. That mismatch is expensive — it shows up as low retention, low NPS, and price sensitivity that shouldn't exist in a category where emotional value should be high.

The good news is that the fix is specific. You don't need to reimagine your entire business. You need to answer one question clearly: which aspiration type does your Lead Segment represent?

• If Metamorphosis: your entire strategy is identity architecture. Fatal Brakes are Values (230) and Engagement (140).

• If Cultivation: your entire strategy is progressive depth. Primary Accelerator is Aspirations (120). Dimension 630 (User Lifetime) is critical.

• If Ambition: your entire strategy is gap closure. Features (310) and Proofs (340) must be rigorous and measurable.

• If Refinement: your entire strategy is continuous enrichment. Revenue option is Stimulation. Content is the product.

Once you know the aspiration type, the MCM's archetype selection, Vital 8 priorities, and Step 4 initiatives all flow from it. The aspiration is not a marketing message. It is a strategic input — as determinative as M3 (growth stage) and M4 (economic value level).

One Test You Can Run This Week

Take your Lead Segment. Write down what they buy from you. Now write down who they are trying to become. If the second answer is specific enough to design a product roadmap around, you have a strategy. If the second answer is vague — "they want to be better," "they want to succeed" — you have a gap in Dimension 120 that is limiting your retention, your pricing power, and your ability to build genuine loyalty.

Pine's four aspiration types are the diagnostic tool. The Marketing Canvas Method is the system that tells you what to do about what you find.

Source: B. Joseph Pine II. "Do You Know What Your Customers' Aspirations Are?" Harvard Business Review, February 6, 2026. Adapted from The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026).

The Marketing Canvas Method is a 6-step strategic marketing framework for entrepreneurs and marketing leaders who need to turn strategy into action. Learn more at laurentbouty.com.

McKinsey Just Told Europe's CMOs What They Need. Here's the Operating System to Get It Done.

McKinsey just released their State of Marketing Europe 2026 report. They surveyed 500 senior marketing leaders across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. The report is sharp, well-researched, and arrives at a conclusion I've been building toward for years.

Marketing leaders know what they need to do. They just don't have the system to do it.

Let me show you exactly what I mean.

The Three Things McKinsey Says European CMOs Must Fix

The report organises its findings around three themes. McKinsey calls them Be Trusted, Be Effective, and Be Bold. I'll use their language, but I want to show you what's underneath each one — and why the Marketing Canvas Method (MCM) is the structural answer to all three.

Be Trusted: Branding Ranks #1 for a Reason

Here's the finding that surprises some people: in an era of AI, data, and digital-everything, branding ranked #1 out of 20 marketing topics by importance. Authenticity ranked #4. These aren't soft, feel-good priorities. They're strategic necessities.

McKinsey's reasoning is hard to argue with. When markets are volatile and consumers are anxious, they move toward brands they trust. Not the cheapest. Not the most feature-rich. The most trusted. As one executive put it: "Customers want to know who will be there for them in the long run."

The data behind this is specific:

• 69% of European CMOs say purpose-driven, authentic brand experiences are essential for sustainable growth

• 71% have adopted full-funnel integrated campaigns — a 27-point jump from the prior year

• Creativity and uniqueness have overtaken customer experience as the #1 brand investment priority for 2025–2026

Here's what McKinsey doesn't say — but what you need to hear: there is a structural reason most brands fail at authenticity. They treat it as a campaign rather than a scored, evidence-based dimension of their strategy.

In the MCM, brand is a four-dimensional architecture: Purpose (210), Positioning (220), Values (230), and Visual Identity (240). For companies in mature markets competing on experience — which is the majority of European B2C and B2B brands — Values (230) and Engagement (140) are Fatal Brakes. If they score below target, no amount of media spend fixes the problem. You are structurally blocked.

McKinsey's "Be Trusted" imperative is not a brand campaign brief. It is a Vital 8 audit finding waiting to happen.

If you want to act on this: score your Values (230) dimension against your current revenue goal. Be brutal. A -1 score here isn't a brand problem. It's a strategic emergency.

Be Effective: Budget Management and ROI Are Urgent — and Most Companies Are Not Ready

McKinsey identifies Budget Management (#2) and Marketing ROI (#6) as two of the four topics with the highest urgency to act. That means they're both important and most companies are not yet mature in handling them.

The board pressure is real. 72% of European CMOs plan to increase marketing spend this year. That's optimism — but it comes with an obligation: you must prove the investment is working. And only 13% of marketers communicate well with finance. That's a systemic failure, not a talent gap.

McKinsey's prescription is clear: use Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) as a joint CFO–CMO planning tool. Link every marketing metric to the KPIs the board is already tracking. Make ROI defensible, not aspirational.

This is exactly what the MCM's Step 2 (Revenue Ambition & Goal Setting) was built to do. Before a single strategic decision is made, you decompose revenue into its moving parts: beginning-of-period customers, churn rate, gross additions, ARPU, average transaction value. The output is a SMART goal in the language of finance — not impressions, not reach, not brand health scores.

The MCM also has Dimension 640 (Budget/ROI) as a scored element of the Vital 8 for archetypes where budget discipline is make-or-break. Below target here triggers mandatory FIX initiatives. There is no "we'll get to it next quarter." The system mandates action.

And here is the finding that should worry every European CMO: 38% of European companies have no dedicated marketing leader at the C-suite level. The fastest way to change that is to show up in C-suite conversations speaking finance natively. The MCM gives you that language.

Be Bold: 94% of European Leaders Are Gen AI Laggards. The Gap Is Widening.

Only 6% of European marketing leaders rate their gen AI maturity as high. The leaders — that 6% — are already reporting 22% efficiency gains, which they reinvest in growth. The laggards are leaving that on the table every quarter.

McKinsey is direct about why most companies are stuck: "The most common barriers are weak data and technology foundations, as well as insufficient focus on adoption and scaling." They're not stuck because AI tools are hard to find. They're stuck because their strategic foundations are too fragile for AI to run on.

This is the finding I want you to sit with. AI doesn't create clarity from chaos. It amplifies whatever you feed it. If your strategy is vague, your AI outputs will be confidently vague. If your data is fragmented, your AI analysis will be fluently wrong.

The MCM was designed to be the structured strategic input layer that makes AI actually work. The MC-RESEARCH agent collects evidence across 10 M-parameters and 24 dimensions using a differentiated approach based on company size and data availability. The MC-PROD agent performs goal-relative scoring and archetype selection. The entire architecture separates evidence collection from strategic assessment — which is what produces the clean, validated foundation that makes AI outputs reliable rather than convincing-but-wrong.

In MCM terms, the gen AI disruption is an M10 external force. It's an Accelerator for companies with structured foundations and a Brake for those without. If you haven't mapped it in Step 1 yet, you're already making strategy decisions without accounting for the most significant competitive force in your market.

The 94% who are lagging have an M10 Brake they haven't scored. The MCM surfaces it. Then it tells you what to do about it.

The Headline from McKinsey I Keep Coming Back To

The report's title is Past Forward: The Modern Rethinking of Marketing's Core. That framing is exact. The best CMOs in Europe are returning to fundamentals — brand, budget rigor, customer trust — while deploying modern tools to execute them at scale. It's not a contradiction. It's the only move that works.

McKinsey puts it well: "As tools get faster, the fundamentals matter more."

That is the sentence the Marketing Canvas Method was built around. The 24 dimensions of the MCM are not a technology framework. They are a codification of what has always driven marketing success — clear positioning, trusted values, well-defined customer jobs, meaningful emotional resonance, disciplined budget allocation — organised into a structured, evidence-based, AI-compatible system.

The MCM doesn't compete with gen AI. It provides the strategic architecture that makes gen AI worth running.

Three Things You Should Do This Week

McKinsey's report is a diagnosis. Here is the prescription:

1. Score your Values (230) and Engagement (140) dimensions. If either is below +1, you have a Fatal Brake. Stop investing in media until you fix it.

2. Decompose your revenue goal into its variables. Customers × ARPU × Transactions × 12. If you can't do that calculation in ten minutes, your marketing strategy is not yet connected to your business.

3. Map gen AI as an M10 force. Is it an Accelerator for you — because you have structured data foundations? Or a Brake — because you're deploying it on top of fragmented assumptions? The answer changes your priorities for the next cycle.

McKinsey has told you what the problems are. The Marketing Canvas Method is how you solve them — step by step, dimension by dimension, with every decision traceable to a revenue outcome.

The Marketing Canvas Method is a 6-step strategic marketing framework built for entrepreneurs and marketing leaders who need to turn strategy into action. Learn more at laurentbouty.com.

Source: McKinsey & Company — State of Marketing Europe 2026, Past Forward: The Modern Rethinking of Marketing's Core (2025). Survey of 500 senior marketing leaders across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

The 2026 Marketing Data Paradox — And the Framework That Solves It

Published: March 2026 | Category: Strategic Marketing | Reading time: 6 min

Funnel.io just published their 2026 Marketing Intelligence Report, and the headline finding is as uncomfortable as it is unsurprising: marketers today have more data, more tools, and more AI than ever before — and they still grade their own performance at B−.

72% say they can't turn data into useful insights. 86% say they don't have a clear signal through the noise. Only 13% communicate well with finance — the function that actually tracks business outcomes.

These aren't small numbers. They represent the majority of the profession.

And it raises a genuine question: if the problem isn't the tools, what is it?

Progress Without Transformation

The Funnel report calls it "progress without transformation." Teams are adopting more sophisticated technology while the fundamental way they work stays the same. Dashboards multiply. Vanity metrics accumulate. Reports get produced. Strategy remains unclear.

The problem isn't data volume. It's the absence of a decision architecture that tells teams which data matters, in what order, and what to do with it.

This is a framework problem. Not a technology problem.

What the Marketing Canvas Method Was Built For

The Marketing Canvas Method is a structured strategic framework that analyzes companies across 24 dimensions and produces a clear, prioritized action roadmap. When I read the Funnel report, what struck me was how precisely its findings map onto the MCM's architecture — not by accident, but because both are responding to the same fundamental market failure.

Let me walk through the five most striking alignments.

1. "We have data but no insight" → Step 1: Structured Context Mapping

Funnel's survey found that 72% of in-house marketers say turning data into customer insights is challenging. The problem isn't the absence of data — it's the absence of a structured framework for what questions the data needs to answer.

MCM's Step 1 resolves this directly. Rather than collecting everything, it requires teams to answer exactly 10 parameters— Market DNA (M1–M5), Competitive Mapping (M6–M9), and External Forces (M10). Every parameter has a defined scope and a specific downstream role. M3 and M4 determine archetype selection. M8 and M9 build the competitive Perceptual Map. M10 surfaces the forces — like the rise of AI-driven search — that will shape the market over the next 12 months.

The method doesn't ask "what does the data say?" It asks "what specific questions do we need to answer, and which data answers them?" That's the inversion Funnel is calling for.

2. "We're chasing vanity metrics" → The Vital 8

41% of in-house marketers say that when they report results, they don't analyze the "why" or identify actions to take. Teams are optimizing for clicks, impressions, and follower counts that are disconnected from revenue outcomes.

The MCM's Vital 8 is the structural solution. From 24 available dimensions, the framework selects the 8 that matter for your specific archetype — 2 Fatal Brakes, 2 Primary Accelerators, 2 Secondary Brakes, 2 Secondary Accelerators. Fatal Brakes are non-negotiable: if they score below target, all other investment stops until they're fixed.

Every score requires evidence. A score of zero — fence-sitting — is not permitted. You must commit to whether a dimension is helping or hurting your goal. This eliminates reporting theater at the architectural level.

3. "AI amplifies messy data" → MCM as the AI Input Layer

This is the finding with the most commercial urgency. Funnel states clearly: "AI doesn't fix messy data; it amplifies it."Without a clean, unified data foundation, neither generative AI nor machine learning delivers meaningful intelligence.

This is the gap the MCM was built to fill — not as a data platform, but as a structured strategic input layer. The MCM's MC-RESEARCH agent collects evidence across all 10 parameters and 24 dimensions using a differentiated approach based on company size and data availability. The MC-PROD agent performs goal-relative scoring and archetype selection. The separation of evidence collection from strategic assessment produces exactly the clean, structured foundation that makes AI analysis reliable rather than confidently wrong.

Companies operating the MCM are, by construction, AI-ready. Companies without it are deploying AI on top of fragmented assumptions.

4. "Only 13% talk well to finance" → Step 2: Revenue Architecture

The business acumen gap Funnel identifies — where marketers can't connect their work to financial outcomes — is a structural design failure, not a skills gap.

MCM's Step 2 (Revenue Ambition & Goal Setting) requires a complete revenue decomposition before any strategy is built: current customers × average revenue per customer, retention rate, gross additions, stimulation potential. The output is a SMART revenue goal and a primary revenue option (Acquisition, Retention, or Stimulation) that drives all subsequent decisions.

This means every MCM strategy is grounded in the language of finance from the start. Marketing dimensions connect to revenue outcomes through explicit, traceable logic — not correlation claims on a slide deck.

5. "Fear blocks experimentation" → FIX/ALIGN/GROWTH Resource Allocation

Funnel finds that 56% of in-house marketers don't feel empowered to experiment. The root cause? Lack of trust in the data. When every decision feels like a career risk, teams default to what they know.

The MCM's three-stream resource allocation — FIX (80%), ALIGN (10%), GROWTH (10%) in the first cycle, shifting progressively — does two things. First, it ring-fences experimentation from the start: the GROWTH stream runs in parallel even while foundational issues are being resolved. Second, mandatory evidence documentation at every scoring level creates a traceable decision record. Experiments become scored hypotheses, not gut-feel gambles.

This maps almost exactly to the "70/20/10" budgeting principle cited by Tom Roach (VP Brand Strategy, Jellyfish) in the Funnel report itself — 70% foundations, 20% optimization, 10% new experiments.

The Missing Layer

The Funnel report describes the problem with precision: teams have tools but lack direction. Data but lack insight. Reports but lack decisions.

What they never quite name is what the missing layer is. It is a decision architecture — a structured framework that sits between the data and the action and tells teams what matters, in what order, and what to do about it.

That is the Marketing Canvas Method.

The MCM's value proposition, stated in Funnel's own language: stop reporting what happened. Start knowing what to do next.

The Numbers That Matter

The Funnel report doesn't just describe the problem — it quantifies it:

• 72% of in-house marketers can't turn data into insights

• 86% lack a clear signal through the noise

• Only 13% communicate well with finance

• Only 8% consistently use advanced analytics

• Only 13% have continuous review embedded in culture

These are not abstract percentages. They are the size of the addressable problem. And they make the case for structured strategic frameworks more powerfully than any methodology document could.

Conclusion

The 2026 marketing challenge isn't about adopting the right AI tool, building better dashboards, or hiring more analysts. It is about having a thinking framework that transforms data into decisions — reliably, repeatably, and in the language of business.

The Marketing Canvas Method was built for exactly this moment.

The Marketing Canvas Method is a 6-step strategic marketing framework developed to bring consulting-grade rigor to marketing strategy decisions. For more information, contact [your contact details].

Source: Funnel.io — The 2026 Marketing Intelligence Report (Ravn Research, 2025)

Why Your Competitive Position Determines Which Revenue Lever to Pull

Your M8/M9 position is not just context — it is a hard constraint on what your revenue strategy can actually do.

About the Marketing Canvas Method

This article compares the Marketing Canvas Method against the Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, 4Ps, STP, SOSTAC, and brand positioning frameworks. The MCM structures marketing strategy across 6 meta-categories, 24 dimensions, and 9 strategic archetypes in a 6-step executable process.
Full framework reference at marketingcanvas.net →  ·  Get the book →

The Campaign That Made Everything Worse

The subscription software company had a problem. Revenue was flat. The executive team looked at their existing customer base — 2,400 accounts, an ATV sitting €20 below the category ceiling — and decided the answer was stimulation. They launched a campaign to grow average contract value: upgrade offers, bundled add-ons, a premium tier they'd been sitting on for six months. The campaign ran for a quarter. Satisfaction scores dropped four points. Churn climbed from 12% to 17%. Net revenue fell.

The campaign wasn't badly executed. The offers were real. The messaging was clear. The problem was that the company's position on the perceptual map made Stimulation structurally impossible. Their customers already felt overcharged relative to the benefits they were receiving. Asking them to spend more was not a growth move. It was an exit trigger.

The revenue lever was wrong. And the Perceptual Map — already built during Step 1 — would have told them exactly that, if anyone had read it as a strategic brief instead of a snapshot.

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The Map You're Probably Misreading

Step 1 of the Marketing Canvas Method produces a Perceptual Map built from two calculated scores. M8 (Perceived Price) captures how the cost feels to your Lead Segment relative to the competitive set, normalized to a −12 (feels very cheap) to +12 (feels very expensive) scale. M9 (Perceived Benefits) captures how your delivery on the category's key benefits is perceived, normalized to the same −12 to +12 scale. Plot both for every competitor and you get a positioning landscape for your category.

Most practitioners treat this map as a diagnostic. They look at where they sit, register whether they're above or below the diagonal, and move on to Step 2. That's the mistake. The Perceptual Map is not a historical record. It is an operating constraint. Where you sit on that map determines which revenue strategies your market position can sustain — and which ones it will punish.

The diagonal matters more than the dots. A position above the diagonal means your perceived benefits exceed your perceived price: customers feel they're getting a fair deal or better. A position below the diagonal means your price outweighs your benefits in the customer's mind. That gap — not your absolute scores — is what limits your options at Step 2.

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Each Quadrant Has a Natural Lever — and a Danger Zone

The Perceptual Map produces four meaningful positions. Each one loads a different default strategy at Step 2 (Revenue Lever Selection), and each has a lever that destroys value if chosen from the wrong position.

Premium (high M8, high M9, above the diagonal). Your price feels heavy and your benefits justify the weight. Stimulation is structurally available here — customers who already believe they're getting strong value are open to getting more. Retention is also reliable: satisfaction sustains the relationship. Acquisition is possible but expensive, because convincing new buyers to pay a premium requires proof your current customers have already experienced. The danger zone: trying to out-compete on price. A price cut from a Premium position signals that the premium was not real. You don't win on price from here. You erode the foundation that makes the whole position viable.

Value Leader (low M8, high M9, above the diagonal). Your price is accessible and your benefits are strong. This is the classic Acquisition position. The market opens to you because the barrier to try is low and the value is visible. The lever that destroys value here is over-investing in Stimulation before the base is large enough to make upsell economics work. With low M8, your ATV ceiling is visible — and you'll hit it faster than you expect. Grow the base first.

Commodity (low M8, low M9, on or near the diagonal). You are undifferentiated in both price and benefits. The only sustainable lever is cost-efficient Acquisition — the A2 (Efficiency Machine) archetype — or a deliberate move to reposition. Retention is defensive but fragile: customers have no strong reason to stay. Stimulation is close to impossible — what do you ask them to spend more on? The danger zone is any investment that increases costs without improving the M9 score. You cannot stimulate your way out of a commodity position.

Overpriced (high M8, low M9, below the diagonal). Your customers feel they are paying more than the benefits are worth. This is the position the software company above occupied. Stimulation is the most destructive lever you can pull here. You are asking customers who already feel underserved to spend more. Every upgrade offer reinforces the perception that you are extracting rather than delivering value. Churn accelerates.

The counterintuitive insight: Overpriced does not automatically mean "cut your price." Reducing M8 is one path, but it compresses margin and may not fix the underlying perception. The smarter move is often what the method calls ATV restructuring — not lowering the price, but including more at the existing price point to close the gap between M8 and M9. You reduce the perceived imbalance by shifting the value equation, not the price tag. Think of a SaaS company bundling previously paid features into the base tier. M8 stays constant. M9 rises. The diagonal moves in your favour. Stimulation becomes available in the next cycle, not this one.

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What Type of Benefit You Deliver Changes What You Can Ask For

Position on the map is not just a function of how many benefits you deliver — it's a function of what kind. This is where the dependency between Dimension 310 (Features) and Dimension 320 (Emotions) becomes revenue-critical.

Research by Almquist, Cleghorn, and Sherer (2018) on the B2B elements of value found that ease of doing business and productivity matter, but the elements most correlated with customer loyalty were higher up the hierarchy: growth enablement and social responsibility. In B2B categories, buyers consistently say they value price and functionality, then make renewal decisions based on whether the vendor relationship feels dependable, low-friction, and aligned with who they want to be. The functional claim gets you the meeting. The emotional experience keeps the contract.

The Marketing Canvas method structures this as a dependency chain: 310 (Features) must reach a viable threshold before 320 (Emotions) can do strategic work. You cannot sustain emotional loyalty on a product that doesn't deliver its functional promise. An M9 built entirely on functional performance is vulnerable to any competitor who matches those features — and they will. An M9 that includes emotional advantages (dimension 320 scoring at +2 or better) creates a premium that is genuinely hard to replicate, because the emotional benefit is embedded in the relationship and the experience, not the product specification.

The practical implication for lever selection: if your M9 advantage is predominantly functional, your Stimulation and Retention potential is fragile. A competitor with equivalent features and a lower M8 will pull your customers the moment they see the comparison. If your M9 advantage includes emotional dimensions — particularly the A3 (Brand Evangelist) and A8 (Niche Expert) archetypes, where identity and community matter — your Retention and Stimulation levers are far more durable. Customers with emotional skin in the game do not leave for a €10 saving.

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The Line That Actually Determines Momentum

Here is the assumption that costs the most: that your absolute M8 and M9 scores determine your strategic room to move. They don't. What determines momentum is your position relative to the competitive line — the Value Equivalence Line (VEL) that Leszinski and Marn identified in their 1997 work on dynamic value management.

The VEL is not the neutral diagonal. It is the line of actual market equilibrium in your specific category — the positions where customers judge price and benefits to be roughly equal given competitive alternatives. Companies above this line are gaining share momentum. Companies below it are losing it, even if their absolute M9 looks acceptable.

Your M8 of +4 and M9 of +5 might look like a Premium position until you plot your two main competitors and discover that both sit at M9 +7. The VEL in your category runs higher than you assumed. You are not above it. You are below it. And Stimulation from that position will accelerate the exit of your most informed customers — the ones who do the comparison before renewal.

Before you choose a revenue lever, locate yourself relative to where the market actually sets its line. Not relative to the diagonal. Relative to your competitors.

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The Competitive Map Feasibility Check

Before committing to a revenue lever at Step 2, run three questions against your Step 1 outputs:

• Am I above or below the Value Equivalence Line in my competitive set? Plot your M8/M9 alongside every competitor identified in M6. If you sit below the competitive cluster, Stimulation is not yet available. Fix M9 first — through Step 3 (Vital Audit) gap analysis on Dimensions 310 and 320 — before pulling the growth lever.

• Is my M9 advantage functional, emotional, or both? If your benefit lead is purely functional (features, price, speed), your Stimulation and Retention potential is limited. You can hold customers who haven't found a matching alternative yet, but you cannot reliably grow them. Emotional M9 advantages — particularly in Dimension 320 — are what make Stimulation economically durable.

• What is my churn rate telling me about the position the map shows? A churn rate above 15% while your map shows a Premium position is a contradiction. It means the map is wrong — your M9 is likely overstated — or the map is right and a specific experience failure is accelerating exits that the aggregate score masks. Either way, Stimulation before resolving that contradiction will make the number worse.

These three questions take fifteen minutes. They do not require new data. They require reading the data you already produced in Step 1 as a constraint, not a trophy.

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The Map Is the Brief

Your Perceptual Map is not a snapshot of where you are. It is a brief for what you can and cannot do next. An M8/M9 position above the VEL with emotional depth in your M9 scores: pull Stimulation with confidence. A position below the line with a functional-only benefit advantage: you are not ready to grow revenue per customer, and trying will cost you the customers you have.

The software company that launched the upgrade campaign had the map. The numbers were in their Step 1 output. Nobody stopped to ask whether the position could support the lever. That's not a strategy failure. It's a reading failure.

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What to Do Next

Check your Step 2 lever decision against your Step 1 Perceptual Map outputs right now. Plot your M8/M9 against every M6 competitor. Identify where the VEL runs in your category. Then ask whether your chosen lever sits above or below it.

If you haven't built your Perceptual Map yet, start at marketingcanvas.net — the full 24-dimension framework is there, with worked examples for every step.

If you want the complete methodology: Marketing Strategy, Programmed — the book walks through every step with live case studies, including the archetype selection logic that turns your M3 × M4 × Revenue Lever combination into a deterministic strategic brief.

If you want to run this in a workshop setting with your team: contact Laurent.

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Sources

Leszinski, R. & Marn, M.V. (1997). "Setting Value, Not Price." McKinsey Quarterly. https://www.mckinsey.com

Almquist, E., Cleghorn, J. & Sherer, L. (2018). "The B2B Elements of Value." Harvard Business Review, March–April 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/03/the-b2b-elements-of-value

Bouty, L. (2025). Marketing Strategy, Programmed: The Marketing Canvas Method. — Step 1 (Strategic Context Mapping), Step 2 (Revenue Ambition & Goal Setting), Dimension 310 (Features), Dimension 320 (Emotions).

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Framework reference pages on marketingcanvas.net

Step 1: M8 (Perceived Price) · M9 (Perceived Benefits) · The Perceptual Map; Step 2: Revenue Lever Selection · The Archetype Unlock; Dimension 310: Features · Dimension 320: Emotions · Dimension 330: Prices; Archetypes: A2 (Efficiency Machine) · A3 (Brand Evangelist) · A6 (Value Harvester) · A8 (Niche Expert)

The Marketing Canvas Method

A Guide to Competitor Analysis

Mastering Market Definition and Key Benefits for Competitive Positioning

Where do you play, and what is your market situation? (focusing on M1 and M2)

Understanding your market is a critical first step in defining your business strategy. It involves answering two key questions:

1. What is your market? (Market Definition - M1)

2. What benefits matter most in your market? (Key Expected Benefits - M2)

This article explores these questions in detail and provides actionable insights to help you identify and leverage competitive positioning options.

What is your market? (market definition - M1)

Defining your market means understanding the boundaries of where you operate, who your customers are, and the nature of the competition. This is not just about naming an industry—it’s about identifying a specific space where your product or service plays a role.

Key Considerations:

• Who are your target customers? Define their demographics, behaviors, and preferences.

• What needs do you fulfill? Clearly articulate the problem your product or service solves.

• What is the scope of your market? Determine the geographical and category boundaries that frame your competition.

Example: Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products If you’re in the eco-friendly cleaning products market, your target customers might be environmentally conscious homeowners. The need you fulfill is effective, sustainable home cleaning. Your market scope might include regional markets with high environmental awareness and disposable income.

Example: Tesla Model S Consider the Tesla Model S. It belongs to the broad market of cars, but we can further narrow this down into sub-markets. A common mistake is to categorize the Tesla Model S under the market of electric cars. However, being electric is a feature, not a market. Although both a Toyota Prius and a Tesla Model S are electric cars (one being a hybrid), they do not belong to the same market. The Tesla Model S fits into the Luxury E automobile or Executive/Mid-size luxury market, which also includes vehicles like the Porsche Taycan or the BMW 5 series.

Watch More: Tesla Market Positioning

E-Segment Wikipedia Reference

As we delve deeper, we'll discover that once we have identified the market where our value proposition will compete, it's crucial to understand and follow a set of rules to shape our commercial strategy. After identifying your company's competitive market, we need to delve into the specifics. Just like a painter cannot create art without understanding their canvas, a marketer cannot formulate a strategy without understanding their market.

What benefits matter most in your market? (key expected benefits - M2)

Every market revolves around a set of benefits that customers prioritize. These benefits can be divided into two categories:

1. Functional Benefits: Practical and measurable advantages your product or service provides.

2. Emotional Benefits: Intangible, psychological rewards customers experience.

These benefits form the basis for competitive positioning, as each player in the market may emphasize different combinations of these elements.

Example: Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products Market

1. Effectiveness (Functional): Products that clean thoroughly without compromising on eco-friendliness.

2. Health and Safety (Functional): Non-toxic ingredients that are safe for families and pets.

3. Convenience (Functional): Easy-to-use packaging and availability in local stores or online.

4. Environmental Impact (Emotional): Customers feel good about reducing their carbon footprint and supporting sustainability.

5. Brand Trust (Emotional): A sense of confidence in the brand’s authenticity and values.

Example: Tesla Model S

1. Performance (Functional): Exceptional acceleration and range compared to competitors.

2. Innovation (Functional): Cutting-edge technology, including autonomous driving capabilities.

3. Sustainability (Emotional): Pride in contributing to reducing carbon emissions.

4. Prestige (Emotional): Association with a high-status, forward-thinking brand.

5. Ownership Experience (Emotional): Access to a seamless, premium experience from purchase to service.

Each of these benefits represents an opportunity for differentiation. For example, Tesla emphasizes performance and innovation as key functional benefits while simultaneously building strong emotional connections through sustainability and prestige.

Final thoughts

Defining your market (M1) and understanding its key benefits (M2) are foundational steps in building a competitive strategy. These insights not only clarify your market position but also inform how you can differentiate your offering in a way that resonates with your audience.

Take the time to explore these two critical dimensions of your market. Doing so will set the stage for deeper strategic decisions and ultimately, greater success in your chosen space.

Who Are Your Competitors, and How Do You Compare?

Understanding your competitive landscape is essential for positioning your product or service effectively. By evaluating your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you gain insights into where your brand stands and how to differentiate yourself. This post explores how to analyze competitors in terms of pricing and benefits, providing examples from Tesla and GreenClean to illustrate the process.

Step 1: Identify your competitors (M6)

Competitors in any market typically fall into one of several categories based on their positioning and market strategy, particularly in how they align with key benefits identified in your market. Understanding these roles provides a framework for evaluating competitors effectively:

• Leader: Excels across multiple key benefits, often setting industry standards. Leaders tend to dominate on aspects like performance, innovation, and brand trust.

• Challenger: Focuses on select benefits to compete directly with leaders, often balancing affordability with strong perceived benefits.

• Game Changer: Disrupts the market by emphasizing new or underserved benefits, redefining customer expectations (e.g., sustainability or traceability).

• Follower: Mimics the offerings of leaders or challengers without significant differentiation, usually relying on competitive pricing.

• Niche Player: Excels in one or two highly specific benefits, targeting a distinct audience or segment.

Begin by identifying your key competitors. For each, gather the following information:

• Price per unit (M7): The actual cost of their product or service. Identify their market role (e.g., leader, challenger, game changer).

• Perceived price (M8): How customers perceive their pricing relative to competitors.

• Perceived benefits (M9): How well competitors perform across key benefits that matter to customers.

• Comments (M10): Observations on competitors’ positioning, strengths, or weaknesses.

This forms the foundation for understanding how your offering compares.

Step 2: Analyze perceived price (M8)

Price isn’t just about numbers; it’s about perceived value. Customers may pay a premium for products they see as more valuable. Use the following formula to calculate perceived price:

Formula for perceived price (M8):

M8=24(E−C)×(M7−C)−12

• E: Maximum price per unit in the market.

• C: Lowest price per unit in the market.

• M7: Your product's price per unit.

This formula provides a score between -12 and +12, helping you understand how your pricing is perceived.

Example: Tesla model S (M7: Leader)

• Maximum price (E): €120,000

• Lowest price (C): €50,000

• Tesla model S price (M7): €100,000

M8 = (24)/{120,000 - 50,000} x (100,000 - 50,000) - 12 = +4.8

Tesla’s perceived price is higher than average, reflecting its luxury positioning.

Example: GreenClean (M7: Challenger)

• Maximum price (E): €15

• Lowest price (C): €6

• GreenClean price (M7): €10

M8 = (24)/{15 - 6} x (10 - 6) - 12 = -1.33

GreenClean’s perceived price is lower, appealing to price-sensitive customers.

Step 3: Evaluate perceived benefits (M9)

To calculate perceived benefits, assess competitors across key benefits (identified earlier in your analysis). For each benefit, score competitors on a scale of -3 (completely disagree) to +3 (completely agree).

Competitor comments (M10) should play a critical role in interpreting perceived benefits. For example, understanding why a competitor excels in specific areas can highlight strategic opportunities or challenges for your brand. Comments might also identify potential collaboration opportunities or gaps to address in your own offering.

Example : Tesla vs. competitors (M9)

1. Performance

2. Innovation

3. Sustainability

4. Customer Trust

Example Table: GreenClean vs. Competitors (M9)

1. Effectiveness

2. Convenience

3. Sustainability

4. Customer Trust

Step 4: Compare and interpret results

With perceived price and perceived benefits calculated, create a summary table to identify where you excel or need improvement.

Example : Tesla vs. competitors (M10)

1. Tesla: Leader in EV innovation, leveraging superior battery performance and software integration.

2. Porsche: Luxury competitor, lacks EV focus.

3. BMW: Established brand, but less innovative.

Example: GreenClean vs. Competitors (M10)

1. Greenclean: Challenger with a sustainability focus, offering affordable alternatives to premium eco brands.

2. EcoPure: Leader in premium eco-friendly solutions.

3. NatureFresh: Budget competitor, lacks differentiation.

Final thoughts

Understanding your competitors goes beyond pricing and benefits. This process helps identify gaps in the market, refine your positioning, and strengthen your value proposition. By analyzing perceived price and benefits, you can develop strategies that resonate with your target audience while staying ahead of competitors.

As seen with Tesla, a high perceived price can align with high perceived benefits to justify a premium position. Similarly, GreenClean shows how affordability and sustainability can differentiate a product in a price-sensitive market. Use these methods to assess your landscape and uncover opportunities to lead.

What strategies have worked for you in understanding competitors? Share your experiences and insights in the comments!

What are the trends influencing your market?

This step focuses on identifying and evaluating the key trends shaping your market. By understanding these trends, you can determine their potential impact on your goals and define whether they act as accelerators or brakes.

Step 1: Identify five key trends

Trends can emerge from various domains, such as technology, society, the environment, economics, or politics. Begin by identifying the five most impactful trends relevant to your market.

Example categories of trends:

1. Technological Trends: Advancements in AI, automation, or digital transformation.

2. Social Trends: Changing consumer behaviors or demographic shifts.

3. Environmental Trends: Increasing focus on sustainability and green practices.

4. Economic Trends: Inflation, interest rates, or shifts in global trade.

5. Political/Regulatory Trends: New regulations or geopolitical events.

Step 2: Assess trend impact

For each trend, evaluate its influence on your market and goals. Trends can either:

• Accelerate Ambitions (Accelerators): Trends that create opportunities and align with your goals.

• Block Ambitions (Brakes): Trends that present challenges or barriers to achieving your objectives.

Example table: trends and their Impact

Step 3: connect trends to context and goals

Integrate the identified trends with the insights from Question 1 (Market Definition) and Question 2 (Competitor Analysis) to form a comprehensive market context.

1. Align Trends with Key Benefits:

   • Map trends to the benefits you identified earlier (e.g., performance, sustainability, trust) to see how trends influence your competitive positioning.

   • Example: Consumer Sustainability Focus supports brands with strong sustainability credentials like GreenClean but may hinder competitors with less sustainable practices.

2. Trend Impact on Goal Setting:

   • Accelerators: Set ambitious goals leveraging these trends (e.g., digital transformation to enhance efficiency).

   • Brakes: Adjust goals or create mitigation strategies to overcome barriers (e.g., adapting pricing strategies to inflation).

Step 4: visualize trends and their Influence

Create a summary visualization to help decision-makers clearly see the trend dynamics.

Example application: Tesla

Trends Influencing Tesla:

1. Electric Vehicle Adoption (Accelerator): Rapid adoption globally, driving demand for Tesla's products.

2. Raw Material Costs (Brake): Rising lithium costs impacting battery production expenses.

3. Autonomous Driving Innovation (Accelerator): Advances in AI bolster Tesla’s self-driving features.

4. Sustainability Regulations (Accelerator): Policies favoring EV adoption enhance Tesla’s market opportunities.

5. Geopolitical Tensions (Brake): Supply chain disruptions due to global conflicts.

Impact on Tesla's Goals:

• Leverage accelerators like EV adoption to set ambitious revenue growth targets.

• Address brakes like raw material costs through cost optimization or partnerships.

Final Thoughts

Identifying and assessing trends helps businesses future-proof their strategies. By understanding whether trends act as accelerators or brakes, you can:

• Align your goals with external opportunities.

• Mitigate risks to ensure sustainability.

• Create a clear, actionable path toward achieving your objectives.

What trends are shaping your market? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

Defining Your Goals: Turning Insights into Actionable Revenue Targets

"Grow revenue." "Increase market share." "Improve brand awareness."

These sentences feel strategic. They mean nothing. They cannot be scored, they cannot drive a prioritisation decision, and they cannot tell you whether your marketing is working or failing. The first version of the Marketing Canvas had a box that said "Goals" and a prompt that said "Write your ambition here." You can imagine what people wrote.

That experience produced the Step 2 architecture: a revenue equation, three mutually exclusive levers, a SMART goal discipline, and — most importantly — an Archetype that the goal unlocks. This post explains exactly how it works and what most marketing teams get wrong when they try to build revenue goals without it.

Revenue Is Not One Number. It Is a Machine with Four Moving Parts.

The first correction most teams need to make is to stop treating revenue as a single metric and start treating it as a formula.

The Marketing Canvas Method decomposes revenue into one equation:

Revenue = AOP × NT × ATV × 12

Here is what each variable means:

AOP is the Average of Period — the average number of active customers during the year, calculated as (BOP + EOP) ÷ 2. BOP is Beginning of Period: your customer count on January 1. EOP is End of Period: your count on December 31. EOP is itself a calculation: EOP = BOP + GA − CHURN. GA is Gross Adds — new customers acquired during the year. CHURN is customers lost.

NT is the Number of Transactions per customer per month — how often a single customer buys from you in a given month.

ATV is the Average Transaction Value — how much a customer spends each time they transact.

12 annualises the equation.

Why does this matter? Because it forces precision. "Grow revenue by 30%" is a wish. "Grow revenue from €1M to €1.3M by acquiring 150 new customers (GA), reducing churn from 20% to 15%, and holding ATV steady" is a goal — one you can score, track, and act on.

The most common mistake: combining all three variables simultaneously. "We'll grow customers by 15% AND increase transaction frequency by 10% AND raise prices by 8%." That is not a strategy. It is three strategies competing for the same budget, the same team, and the same quarter.

You should build your revenue equation for the current year first. Fill in: BOP, your best estimate of GA and CHURN, NT and ATV. Calculate EOP, AOP, and Revenue. Check: does the number match your actual revenue? If not, one of your variables is wrong. Fix it before setting targets.

Choose One Primary Lever. Not Three.

The revenue equation has exactly three ways to grow. The Marketing Canvas Method calls them revenue options — and the discipline of Step 2 is choosing ONE.

Acquisition (GET) moves revenue by growing AOP upward — specifically by increasing GA. New customers enter. The primary metric is Gross Adds. This is the right lever when your Lead Segment contains Underserved Switchers or Early Believers, when your market is in Introduction or Growth stage, and when your SAM has genuine headroom. It is the wrong lever when your churn rate is high — you will be pouring water into a leaking bucket.

Retention (KEEP) moves revenue by growing AOP differently — by reducing CHURN. The primary metric is churn rate. The arithmetic is powerful and underappreciated: reducing annual churn from 20% to 15% can increase customer lifetime value by 25% without acquiring a single new customer. This is the right lever when your Lead Segment contains Legacy Anchors at risk of quiet departure, when your market is in Maturity, and when churn is the most consequential variable in the equation. It is the wrong lever in an Introduction market — you cannot retain a customer base that does not yet exist.

Stimulation (GROW) moves revenue by increasing NT (transaction frequency) or ATV (average transaction value) — what each existing customer spends. The primary metrics are NT and ATV. This is the right lever when your Lead Segment contains Under-Optimised Power Users spending far below their potential. It is the wrong lever when your customer base is shrinking — you cannot increase spend from customers who have already left.

The connection to your Lead Segment from Step 0 is direct. The Customer Type you identified in Step 0 pre-selects your lever:

The temptation is to hedge — "we'll do a bit of all three." Resist it. A strategy that tries to acquire, retain, and stimulate simultaneously is a strategy that does none of them well. The MCM forces one primary lever per cycle. The other two operate at maintenance level in the background. Choosing means something will not be fully optimised. That is the point.

You should identify your primary lever this week. Look at your current BOP, GA, CHURN, NT, and ATV. Which variable, if improved by 10%, would have the largest impact on revenue? That is almost certainly your primary lever — and it almost certainly matches the Customer Type you defined in Step 0.

Customer Type	Revenue Option	Primary Metric
Underserved Switcher	Acquisition (GET)	GA — Gross Adds
Early Believer	Acquisition (GET)	GA — Gross Adds
Legacy Anchor	Retention (KEEP)	CHURN
Under-Optimised Power User	Stimulation (GROW)	NT / ATV

Avoid Suicidal Combinations.

Not every lever works in every market context. Some combinations are not just suboptimal — they are capital-destructive. The Marketing Canvas Method flags these explicitly.

Acquisition in a Declining market is the clearest example. Investing in new customer acquisition when the category is shrinking means spending to replace customers who are leaving faster than you can recruit them. The revenue equation confirms this: if CHURN is accelerating, growing GA is a losing race.

Stimulation in an Introduction market makes no strategic sense either. You cannot extract more value from customers who don't yet exist in volume.

Before finalising your lever choice, check it against your M3 (Growth Curve) from Step 1. A lever that contradicts market reality is not an ambitious goal. It is a strategic error — one that the revenue equation will expose within two quarters.

Turn Your Lever into a SMART Goal.

A revenue option without a number is a direction without a destination. The SMART goal calibration is what turns "we will focus on acquisition" into something you can score your strategy against in Step 3.

Start with your current baseline. Use the revenue equation to calculate what you have now:

• BOP: current customer count

• Expected GA and CHURN: based on last year's actuals

• NT and ATV: current averages

• Calculate EOP, AOP, Revenue

Then project your targets. Your revenue option choice tells you which variable to move. Acquisition: set a GA target. Retention: set a CHURN rate target. Stimulation: set an NT or ATV target. Hold the other variables at current levels unless you have strong evidence they will change.

A SMART goal looks like this: "Acquire 180 new customers by 31 December, growing end-of-period customers from 208 to 550 and increasing annual revenue from €480K to €1.2M." Specific (180 customers, named segment). Measurable (you will know on 31 December). Achievable (validated against SAM). Relevant (connected to the primary lever). Time-bound (31 December).

Before finalising, run three validation tests:

SAM test: Is your GA target realistic given the size of your addressable market from M5? Projecting 60% market capture in one cycle is not ambitious — it is fantasy. A capture rate below 5% of SAM is a reasonable benchmark for a single cycle.

CHURN test: Does your revenue model include realistic attrition, even if Retention is not your primary lever? Every business loses customers. A model that ignores churn systematically overstates growth.

Capability test: Can your operations actually deliver at the projected volume? A goal that breaks your delivery system is not a SMART goal. It is an expensive lesson.

You should write your SMART goal in one sentence. If it takes more than one sentence, it is not specific enough. Pin it on the wall. It stays there for the rest of the strategic cycle.

The Most Important Output of Step 2: The Archetype Unlock.

Here is what most marketing teams miss entirely about Step 2. The revenue goal is not the end of the step. It is the input to the most consequential decision in the entire method: the Archetype Unlock.

The Marketing Canvas Method uses three inputs — your M3 (Growth Curve) from Step 1, your M4 (Economic Value) from Step 1, and your Revenue Option from Step 2 — to deterministically route you to one of nine Strategic Archetypes. Not a personality quiz. A rule-based selection matrix.

M3 Growth Curve	M4 Economic Value	Revenue Option	Archetype
Growth	Services	Acquisition	A9 — Category Creator
Maturity	Experience	Retention	A3 — Brand Evangelist
Growth	Experience	Retention	A7 — Scale-Up Guardian
Maturity	Commodity	Acquisition	A2 — Efficiency Machine
Decline	Any	Retention	A5 — Pivot Pioneer

Each Archetype is a pre-built strategic operating system. It tells you which eight dimensions are most critical for your specific context (the Vital 8), which two are Fatal Brakes (the ones that will kill your strategy if neglected), and which two are Growth Drivers (the parallel revenue engine). Without the Archetype, Step 3 — the Vital Audit — has no filtering logic. You would be scoring all 24 dimensions equally. The Archetype is what reduces 24 to 8, and makes the method operational rather than comprehensive.

This cascade matters enormously:

Step 2 Revenue Goal
        ↓
Archetype (M3 + M4 + Revenue Option)
        ↓
Vital 8 — the 8 dimensions scored in Step 3
        ↓
15 initiatives in Step 4
        ↓
3-cycle roadmap in Step 5

Everything downstream of Step 2 is determined by these three inputs. If Step 2 is vague — if the revenue option is hedged and the goal is a range — the entire cascade loses precision. The method cannot tell you where to focus, which gaps are fatal, or which initiatives should execute first.

You should check your Archetype against the selection matrix before moving to Step 3. If your combination produces a "Suicidal" flag in the matrix, revisit your revenue option or reassess your M3 and M4. The matrix is not telling you that your ambition is wrong — it is telling you that your goal and your market context are in conflict, and that conflict needs to be resolved before you invest in execution.

Putting It Together: The Green Clean Example

Green Clean starts Step 2 with a clear Step 1 foundation: M3 = Growth, M4 = Services, SAM = 7,500 eco-conscious households. Their Lead Segment is Early Believers. Their Customer Type pre-selects Acquisition.

Revenue equation (2021 baseline):

• BOP: 160 customers

• GA: 80 new customers

• CHURN: 32 customers (20% churn rate)

• EOP: 208 customers

• AOP: 184 customers

• NT: 1.0 (monthly service), ATV: €200

• Revenue: 184 × 1.0 × €200 × 12 = ~€441,600

SMART goal (target year): Acquire 180 new customers by 31 December, growing EOP from 208 to 550 and annual revenue from ~€480K to ~€1.2M — proving the commercial viability of health-first home care before larger players enter.

SAM test: 180 new customers / 7,500 addressable households = 2.4% capture rate. Passes.

Archetype Unlock: M3 (Growth) + M4 (Services) + Acquisition = A9 Category Creator.

The A9's Fatal Brakes are JTBD (110) and Features (310). In Step 3, every dimension will be scored against the question: "Is our JTBD clear enough to acquire new customers?" and "Are our Features strong enough to prove the category is real?" The Vital 8 has already been set. The initiatives in Step 4 will follow from the gaps the audit reveals.

One Test You Can Run This Week

Take your current marketing goal — whatever your team agreed to in the last planning cycle. For each component of the goal, answer two questions:

Question 1: Which variable in the revenue equation does this component move — GA, CHURN, NT, or ATV? If the answer is "all of them," you have not yet chosen a primary lever.

Question 2: Is this target based on the revenue equation, with current BOP, current GA, current CHURN, current NT, and current ATV as your starting point — or is it based on a percentage uplift applied to last year's revenue number?

If you cannot answer both questions with specific numbers, your Step 2 is incomplete. The strategy that follows will be structurally vague, the Step 3 audit will be impossible to score against, and the initiatives in Step 4 will be disconnected from the goal.

The revenue equation is not a reporting tool. It is the operating system that connects your ambition to your strategy, your strategy to your audit, and your audit to your actions. Start there.

Laurent Bouty is a marketing strategist and the creator of the Marketing Canvas Method, a 6-step strategic marketing framework for entrepreneurs and marketing leaders who need to turn strategy into action. Learn more at laurentbouty.com.

M3 × M4: How Two Data Points Determine Your Entire Marketing Strategy

MCM FRAMEWORK NOTICE This article explains two parameters from the Marketing Canvas Method (MCM): M3 (Growth Curve) and M4 (Economic Value). Both are part of Step 1: Strategic Context Mapping — the first data-collection step of a structured 6-step marketing strategy process. You can explore the full method at marketingcanvas.net or in the book Marketing Strategy, Programmed.

Most marketing strategy mistakes are not execution problems. They are positioning problems — and positioning problems are usually caused by one thing: you applied the wrong strategic logic to your market context.

Two data points in the Marketing Canvas Method catch this error before it costs you. M3 (Growth Curve) tells you where your market sits on its lifecycle. M4 (Economic Value) tells you what your customers are actually buying. Together with your revenue goal, they determine which of the 9 MCM Strategic Archetypes applies to your situation — and therefore which actions are worth funding.

This article explains what each parameter measures, how to score them honestly, and exactly what happens when you combine them.

M3: Growth Curve — The Market's Clock

M3 measures the lifecycle stage of your market category, not your company. The underlying model is Theodore Levitt's Product Life Cycle, first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1965. Four stages survive because they describe something mechanically real about how categories evolve.

Introduction — the category is new. Customers need education before they evaluate features. First-mover advantage is possible, but awareness is the bottleneck, not conversion.

Growth — demand is expanding. New entrants arrive weekly. Speed and differentiation drive outcomes. The strategic question is "How do we land as many customers as possible before the window closes?"

Maturity — demand is stable. Established players compete for share in a flat pool. Efficiency and retention often outperform acquisition investment at this stage.

Decline — demand is shrinking. Alternatives are replacing the category. The question shifts from "How do we grow?" to "Do we harvest this, pivot, or exit?"

Critical point: M3 is a market-level measurement, not a company-level one. A startup entering a mature market is still in a mature market. A dominant player in a growing market still operates under growth-market rules. Confusing your company's lifecycle with your market's lifecycle is one of the most common strategic errors I see in workshops.

M4: Economic Value — The Depth of the Exchange

M4 classifies what your Lead Segment is actually buying from you. The model draws from Pine & Gilmore's "Welcome to the Experience Economy" (Harvard Business Review, 1998), adapted in the Marketing Canvas Method as a four-level strategic classifier.

Commodity — the offering is interchangeable. Customers buy on price because they see no meaningful difference between providers.

Products — the offering is differentiated by features. Customers compare specifications, reliability, or performance.

Services — the offering is differentiated by delivery, expertise, and the human interaction surrounding it.

Experience — the offering is differentiated by how it makes people feel. The emotional and sensory impact of the entire journey is the primary value.

The most important warning in this parameter: M4 is determined by how your Lead Segment perceives the value exchange — not by how you classify yourself internally. A restaurant that believes it sells "an experience" but whose customers are there for consistent food quality at a fair price is competing on Product terms, regardless of its interior design. A B2B software company that delivers implementation support, training, and a dedicated success manager is operating at the Service level even if it calls itself a "product company."

Overestimating M4 is the most common mistake. Most companies believe they operate one level higher than their customers perceive. Be honest.

Why These Two Parameters Matter More Than Any Single KPI

M3 and M4 are not analytical tools for their own sake. In the Marketing Canvas Method, they are two of three inputs that trigger Archetype Selection — the step where your specific strategic context gets matched to one of 9 tested strategic patterns.

The third input is your Step 2 Revenue Goal: Acquisition (grow the customer base), Retention (protect and deepen existing relationships), or Stimulation (increase revenue per existing customer).

The combination of M3 + M4 + Goal is deterministic. It does not produce a list of options to debate. It produces a single archetype — or flags a strategic mismatch before you spend anything.

From Data Points to Strategic Archetypes: Real Examples

Here is how M3 × M4 × Goal maps to archetypes in practice.

Acquisition Retention Stimulation

M3 · Growth Curve

Introduction

Growth

Maturity

Decline

M4 · Economic ValueCommodity

 Products

 Services

 Experience

← M4 · Economic Value →

Marketing Canvas Method · marketingcanvas.net

Each archetype carries a "Vital 8" — eight specific MCM dimensions that are either Fatal Brakes (must reach ≥ +2 or they block everything else) or Primary Accelerators (the capabilities that compound your advantage). The archetypes are described in full in Marketing Strategy, Programmed and in the MCM Archetype Reference on marketingcanvas.net.

Applied: The Coffee Industry Through MCM Lenses

The coffee market is a clean illustration because multiple M3 × M4 combinations exist simultaneously across different players.

A commodity coffee distributor supplying unbranded beans to bulk buyers operates at Maturity × Commodity. Their Goal is typically Retention (holding contracts) or Stimulation (margin extraction). The MCM match: A2 (Efficiency Machine) or A6 (Value Harvester). Their strategic focus belongs on operational cost, pricing structure, and volume contracts — not brand storytelling.

A packaged ground coffee brand competing on organic certification and origin differentiation operates at Maturity × Products with an Acquisition goal. The MCM match: A8 (Niche Expert). Their mission is to carve and own a specialized slice of a flat market through technical credibility and benefit lock-in.

A café chain like Starbucks — where customers are buying consistency, convenience, and identity — operates at Maturity × Experience with a Retention goal. The MCM match: A3 (Brand Evangelist). Their mission is not to serve the best coffee. It is to make leaving feel like a loss of identity.

A specialty coffee roaster entering a regional growth market — education-led, subscription-based, farm-to-cup storytelling — may operate at Growth × Services with an Acquisition goal. The MCM match: A9 (Category Creator). Their mission is to define what "serious coffee" means before the major chains copy the format.

Each of these businesses needs a completely different strategy. Four businesses in the "coffee industry." Four different archetypes. Four different sets of priorities. That is exactly what M3 × M4 × Goal is built to surface.

Three Questions to Score Your M3 and M4 Right Now

Question 1 — M3: When you look at your category's total revenue over the last 3 years, is it growing rapidly, growing slowly, flat, or declining? Do not look at your company's revenue — look at the category. That answer is your M3.

Question 2 — M4: Ask your 5 most recent customers why they chose you over the next best option. If the answers cluster around price or availability: Commodity. Around specific features or specs: Products. Around expertise, support, or relationship: Services. Around identity, values, or emotional fit: Experience. Their words determine M4, not yours.

Question 3 — The Honest Check: Now place yourself on the M3 × M4 grid. Does your current marketing budget, messaging, and team structure match the strategic archetype that combination suggests? If not, that gap is likely where your marketing spend is leaking.

What to Do With Your Answers

If you have scored M3 and M4 honestly, you are two-thirds of the way to archetype selection. The third input — your Step 2 Revenue Goal — is explained in this article on setting revenue targets.

Once you have all three inputs, the Marketing Canvas Method gives you a precise strategic archetype with a defined Vital 8 priority set: the 8 dimensions you should fix, protect, or accelerate before anything else. That is the structure of Steps 3 through 5.

The full 6-step process is detailed in Marketing Strategy, Programmed — the practical field guide to the Marketing Canvas Method. If you want to run this process with your team in a structured workshop, the Work With Us page shows what that looks like.

Laurent Bouty is the creator of the Marketing Canvas Method and author of Marketing Strategy, Programmed (2026). He teaches strategic marketing at Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and has applied the MCM framework with teams across Europe and beyond.

Why Sustainability should be at the heart of every Marketing Strategy?

In today’s business landscape, sustainability is no longer optional—it’s essential. Companies like Patagonia and Unilever have embedded sustainability into their core strategies, responding to consumer demand for ethical practices and building lasting loyalty. By using frameworks like the Marketing Canvas, brands can seamlessly integrate sustainability into every aspect of their marketing strategies, balancing profit with environmental stewardship.

1. The Rise of conscious consumers

Today’s consumers are more informed about sustainability and expect brands to align with ethical and environmental values. Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign exemplifies how a brand can promote conscious consumption while strengthening its relationship with consumers. The Marketing Canvas helps examine customer bases to identify how sustainability can drive brand loyalty. Through its structured approach, the Marketing Canvas refines customer segmentation, better targeting sustainability-conscious audiences.

2. Sustainability as a differentiator

Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan shows that sustainability can be a competitive advantage. Brands that integrate sustainability differentiate themselves in markets where competitors often focus on price or short-term gains. The Marketing Canvas allows brands to assess their Value Proposition, highlighting sustainability as a unique selling point. With its 24 dimensions, the Canvas explores how sustainability impacts not only products but also the brand journey and customer experience.

3. Long-Term business resilience

Companies focused on sustainability are more resilient in the long term. For example, Unilever’s sustainable brands grew 69% faster than the rest of its business, demonstrating how sustainable practices protect both profitability and future growth. The Marketing Canvas helps businesses integrate sustainability into key success metrics. By evaluating sustainability’s long-term impact on revenue, customer retention, and brand perception, companies can future-proof their strategies.

4. Building authentic brand stories

Brands like Tesla, which authentically communicate their sustainability efforts, build deeper connections with their customers. The Marketing Canvas highlights the importance of storytelling through the Conversation dimension, helping brands craft compelling narratives around sustainability. By aligning brand purpose with sustainability goals, businesses create consistent, credible messages that foster consumer trust and loyalty. The Marketing Canvas ensures sustainability is embedded in every touchpoint, from media strategy to influencer partnerships.

5. Future-proofing your business

Sustainability isn’t just a trend; it’s the future of business. Brands like IKEA, with their circular economy model, are setting new standards for future readiness. Using the Marketing Canvas, brands can map long-term sustainability goals alongside financial objectives and measure progress with tools like the Total Sustainability Score. This score, as highlighted in recent research, provides a clear metric to track how effectively sustainability is embedded in a marketing strategy, helping brands stay ahead of trends and regulatory requirements.

6. Complementing the Marketing Canvas with sustainability-focused evaluation statements

To fully integrate sustainability, we will complement existing Marketing Canvas evaluation questions with new sustainability-focused statements. These new questions will address product lifecycle, sustainable customer engagement, and environmental impact. In some dimensions, such as Environmental Trends and Social Factors, the existing questions already cover sustainability, so further additions may not be necessary.

By placing sustainability at the heart of your marketing strategy and using comprehensive frameworks like the Marketing Canvas, your brand can meet the demands of today’s conscious consumers while creating a resilient, future-proof business model that benefits both your bottom line and the planet.

Sources:

• IKEA Circular Agenda: https://www.ikea.com/global/en/our-business/sustainability/our-circular-agenda/

• Eccles, Robert G., Ioannis Ioannou, and George Serafeim. "The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance." Management Science 60, no. 11 (November 2014): 2835–2857.

• The sustainability imperative, https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/analysis/2015/the-sustainability-imperative-2/

Podcast on the Marketing Canvas Method (generated by NotebookLM)

Above, you’ll find a podcast generated by NotebookLM on the Marketing Canvas Method, based on the content of this website. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the result. It closely aligns with what I aim to propose with this method.

Beyond the 4Ps: The Marketing Canvas Approach and the Power of Understanding Customer Aspirations

E. Jerome McCarthy's 4Ps — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — gave marketing its first operational language in 1960. That was not a small thing. Before the 4Ps, marketing was an imprecise collection of instincts and habits. The 4Ps turned it into a manageable, teachable framework that structured decisions and gave practitioners a common vocabulary.

For decades, that was enough.

It isn't anymore. Not because the 4Ps were wrong — they were right about everything they covered. But what they covered was always a partial picture. They described the offer. They never described the customer. They defined the tools. They never defined the purpose behind the tools. And they produced strategies that were disciplined, internally consistent, and frequently irrelevant to the people they were supposed to serve.

The Marketing Canvas Method was built to complete the picture. What follows is a precise account of what the 4Ps left out — and what the method adds in its place.

The 4Ps Start With Product. Strategy Should Start With Who.

The first P is Product. The entire 4Ps framework assumes you already know what you are selling, to whom, and why. None of those assumptions are examined. They are given.

The Marketing Canvas Method begins differently. Before any other question is asked, it forces a choice that the 4Ps never required: who, specifically, are you building this strategy for?

Not "our customers." One company. One market category. One geography. One customer segment — the Lead Segment, the group whose decisions matter most to your current revenue goal. The method calls this Step 0: The Lead Segment Junction. It is not a preliminary. It is the foundational decision that every subsequent choice rests on.

Within the Lead Segment, the method then asks four questions the 4Ps never posed:

What job is the customer hiring you to do? Not a feature description — the functional, emotional, and social progress they seek. This is Dimension 110 (JTBD). Theodore Levitt's drill-and-hole metaphor is the starting point: people don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. But the method goes further: they want to hang a picture to feel proud of their home, to be seen as someone with good taste. Jobs change slowly. Solutions change constantly. Define the job in product terms and you will always miss the real competition.

Who does the customer want to become? Not what they want to buy — who they want to be twelve months from now. This is Dimension 120 (Aspirations). The brands that earn loyalty that feature parity cannot touch are the ones that connect to this identity layer. Green Clean customers don't just want a clean house. They want to be the kind of person who lives sustainably. That aspiration outlasts any single service transaction.

What frustrates them and what delights them? Pains and gains mapped to specific moments in the journey — not listed as abstract attributes. Dimension 130 (Pains & Gains).

How deeply connected are they to your brand? Satisfaction is not engagement. A customer can be satisfied and completely disengaged — renewing out of inertia, leaving the moment a competitor makes switching easy. Dimension 140 (Engagement) scores the gap between the two.

You should audit your current strategy against this test: take your positioning statement and ask whether it describes who your customer wants to become, or only what you sell. If the answer is the latter, you are operating a 4Ps strategy with customer language on top. The two are not the same.

The 4Ps Include "Promotion." The Marketing Canvas Method Starts With Listening.

The fourth P — Promotion — describes the act of broadcasting. It assumes you have a message and need to transmit it. What it does not ask is whether the message is correct, whether it reflects what customers actually say when they describe their experience with you, or whether the market has already moved in a direction your messaging has not yet acknowledged.

The Marketing Canvas Method replaces Promotion with an entire meta-dimension: 500 Conversation. And critically, the first dimension in that meta-dimension is not Stories or Media or Influencers. It is Dimension 510 (Listening/VOC).

The logic is deliberate. You cannot tell a coherent story until you know what the market is saying. You cannot choose the right media until you know where your customers are having the conversations that matter. You cannot select influencers until you know whose voice already carries credibility in your category.

The method scores Listening on four properties: capture scope (do you hear everything?), data discipline (is the process evidence-driven rather than assumption-driven?), journey integration (does listening map to the customer lifecycle?), and methodological breadth (are multiple channels feeding a single structured process?). Score negative if your customer understanding rests on assumptions. Score positive when multiple listening channels visibly change decisions.

Only after Listening is strong do Dimension 520 (Stories), Dimension 530 (Media), and Dimension 540 (Influencers) matter. Broadcasting a story the market hasn't confirmed is advertising. Communicating a story the market helped you discover is strategy.

You should check your content calendar for the last quarter. What percentage of your published content was informed by something a customer said, wrote, or demonstrated? If the honest answer is less than half, your Listening (510) score is negative — and everything you publish is a bet, not an informed decision.

The 4Ps Include "Price." The Marketing Canvas Method Includes the Whole Value Architecture.

Price in the 4Ps is a tactical variable — set it high, set it low, match the competition, offer a discount. It describes what you charge without asking why customers pay what they pay, or what the price says about the kind of value you provide.

The Marketing Canvas Method begins the value question much earlier, at M4 (Economic Value) in Step 1. M4 classifies where your brand sits on a progression from Commodity (compete on cost) to Products (compete on features) to Services (compete on outcomes) to Experience (compete on transformation). This classification is not about what you think you offer. It is about what your Lead Segment perceives they are buying. Many companies believe they sell experiences when their customers perceive products. That gap is not a marketing problem. It is a strategic misalignment that no promotional campaign can fix.

M4 is a direct archetype-selection input — it determines which of the nine strategic archetypes is correct for your situation, and therefore which eight dimensions are most critical to your strategy. Dimension 330 (Pricing) then scores whether your pricing actively supports the strategic position M4 identifies, or whether it contradicts it.

You should classify your brand honestly on the M4 value spectrum. Not aspirationally — based on what customers say when they explain why they pay what they pay. Then ask: does your pricing signal the level of value M4 claims? A commoditised pricing model on a Services or Experience brand suppresses the margins that level of value should command.

The 4Ps Have No Brand. The Marketing Canvas Method Has Four Brand Dimensions.

The word "brand" does not appear in the original 4Ps framework. McCarthy's model addressed the product and how to sell it. The brand — the reason someone would choose you over a functionally identical alternative — was simply not part of the question.

The Marketing Canvas Method dedicates an entire meta-dimension to brand: 200 Brand, with four scored dimensions.

Purpose (210) is the company's reason for existing beyond making money — not a mission statement, but a genuine answer to the question: what would your customers lose if you ceased to exist tomorrow? Patagonia's purpose is not "make outdoor clothing." It is "save our home planet." That purpose constrains decisions: it made Patagonia run "Don't Buy This Jacket" — a campaign that would have been strategically impossible without an authentic purpose to anchor it.

Positioning (220) is the mental real estate your brand owns in the customer's mind. Not what you say about yourself — what customers say about you when you're not in the room. The most common positioning failure is not being wrong. It is being vague. "We provide innovative solutions for modern businesses" occupies no mental real estate because it describes everyone.

Values (230) are the principles that govern how the brand behaves. The test: if a value does not change at least one decision per quarter, it is aspirational, not operational.

Visual Identity (240) is the signal system that makes you recognisable before a word is read.

You should test your Purpose (210) against this standard: can you name one decision your company made in the last 12 months that was harder or less profitable because you stayed true to your stated purpose? If you cannot, your purpose is decoration. A +2 on Purpose requires that evidence.

The 4Ps Have No Metrics. The Marketing Canvas Method Closes the Loop.

The 4Ps describe inputs: what to sell, what to charge, where to distribute, how to promote. They do not describe how to know whether any of it is working, nor do they provide a framework for connecting marketing activity to financial outcomes.

The Marketing Canvas Method's sixth meta-dimension, 600 Metrics, closes this loop with four dimensions that translate marketing strategy directly into the language of the P&L.

Dimension 610 (Acquisition) scores whether your cost of acquiring new customers is sustainable — measured as the ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost. A ratio below 3:1 means you are acquiring customers you cannot afford.

Dimension 620 (ARPU) scores whether you are maximising the revenue each customer relationship generates — through frequency, transaction value, and pricing optimisation.

Dimension 630 (User Lifetime) scores how long customers stay — expressed as 1/churn rate. A 10% annual churn rate means an average customer lifetime of 10 years. A 30% churn rate means 3.3 years. The revenue mathematics are significant: reducing churn by 5 percentage points can increase lifetime value by 25–95%, depending on the business model.

Dimension 640 (Budget/ROI) scores whether the marketing budget is allocated by strategic logic or by inertia — and whether the team can demonstrate a causal relationship between spend and outcomes.

You should calculate your Dimension 630 score this week. Take your annual churn rate. Calculate what a 5 percentage point improvement would mean for your total customer lifetime value. If that number is larger than your entire current marketing budget, you are underinvesting in retention and overinvesting in acquisition. That is not a 4Ps insight. It is a Marketing Canvas Method diagnosis.

The Principle That Ties It All Together

The 4Ps gave marketing a language. The Marketing Canvas Method gives it a complete operating system — 24 dimensions across six meta-categories, scored against evidence, connected into a sequenced process that tells you which eight dimensions matter most for your specific competitive context, and in what order to address them.

What the 4Ps left out was not one thing. It was the customer's identity, the brand's purpose, the strategic meaning of price, the primacy of listening over broadcasting, and the financial accountability that connects marketing activity to business outcomes.

The Marketing Canvas Method addresses each of these gaps with a scored dimension, a target, and a gap analysis that drives specific initiatives. A strategy built on the 4Ps alone will always be internally consistent and externally incomplete. A strategy built on the Marketing Canvas Method starts with who the customer wants to become — and works outward from there.

One Test You Can Run This Week

Take your current marketing plan — whatever document describes what your team is working on this quarter. For each initiative on the list, ask: which of the 24 dimensions does this initiative directly improve?

If fewer than 80% of your initiatives can be traced to a specific dimension, you are running a tactical plan without a strategic foundation. The initiatives may all be sensible. They are not connected to each other in a way that tells you which order matters, which gaps are most urgent, or whether the sum of the parts adds up to a coherent competitive position.

That connection — from customer understanding through brand to value proposition to experience to conversation to metrics — is what the Marketing Canvas Method provides. The 4Ps built the foundation. The method builds the house.

Laurent Bouty is a marketing strategist and the creator of the Marketing Canvas Method, a 6-step strategic marketing framework for entrepreneurs and marketing leaders who need to turn strategy into action. Learn more at laurentbouty.com.

Quick Assessment Guide

Happy to announce that a one-pager quick assessment guide is now available for download. Sometimes before doing a full assessment which is really what the method is all about, some persons or companies might appreciate a first quick assessment for opening the discussion. Even though we are missing the nuances provided by the full version, it can be a nice conversation starter.

Quick Assessment Guide

€0.00

A quick assessment guide (one pager) allowing you to do a first assessment of your marketing strategy (one target group, one line of product). In case of interest, you can deep dive in one or multiple dimensions using the scoring grid that can be downloaded.

Add to cart

Thank you - Marketing Canvas Method

These last months, Marketing Canvas Method has seen an increase of traffic and downloaded of the method. This initiative I started few years ago has grown up and is now more and more appreciated by startups and marketing enthusiasts.

The community is growing months after months! I see also some citations or references in books. I was not thinking it could go so far.

A new milestone has been reached today with the delivery of a new production batch of the Marketing Canvas Cards.

I am currently working on improving the templates and also working on an online training offer.

All the material (except the cards) can be freely downloaded on the website under creative common licence.

Thank you!!!!

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Marketing Canvas - Step 1 - Market Assessment

Last update: 12/05/2023

Introduction

Understanding the concept of a 'market' is fundamental to crafting a successful marketing plan. But what does 'market' truly mean in a marketing context?

When you introduce products or services to fulfill specific needs, there's a high probability that alternatives already exist. These alternatives set a frame of reference for customers, leading them to compare your offerings against what they know:

• Is it more expensive or cheaper?

• Does it offer more or less perceived benefits?

• Why should they switch to your product?

Three Crucial Questions for Your Market

Question 1: What is your playing field, and how would you describe your market dynamics?

In marketing, we often segment territories into groups exhibiting similar characteristics, referred to as 'market segments' or 'markets'. This segmentation streamlines sales efforts, as your primary goal becomes convincing customers within your targeted market to choose and retain your value proposition.

I rely on Bill Aulet's definition (Excerpt From: Bill Aulet. "Disciplined Entrepreneurship") to clarify what constitutes a market:

• Customers within the market purchase similar products.

• Customers within the market exhibit similar buying behaviors and anticipate similar value from the products.

• There's "word of mouth" among customers in the market, meaning they serve as high-value references for each other in making purchases.

To illustrate, consider these examples:

• Buying a car or a computer places you in the Car market and Computer market respectively. These markets align with Aulet's definition.

• If you're a strategic consulting firm or a law firm, there likely exists a market for strategic consulting services and a market for legal services, respectively. Again, these markets align with Aulet's definition.

This concept of a market applies to both consumer and business services. Moreover, markets can be subdivided into sub-markets, providing a finer granularity to develop a marketing strategy. For instance, the Car market can be split into SUV and Sedan sub-markets, and the Computer market into Laptop and Desktop markets.

This subdivision forms a crucial step in devising a marketing strategy as it allows for an improved understanding of the context. The silver lining is that this work is often already accomplished, and markets are defined by the existing players. A wealth of data and statistics on different markets can be found on the internet, available free or for purchase.

Remark: you can compete in different markets, however the marketing canvas method has been designed for one market as competitors and conditions might change between markets. In case you would like to analyse multiple markets, you should do it one by one and then consolidate all the assessments in one strategy.

Case Study: Green Clean

Consider the eco-friendly cleaning products market. Companies like Method, Ecover, Seventh Generation, Mrs. Meyer's, and Green Clean offer alternatives to traditional cleaning products. They all compete within the eco-friendly cleaning products market, defined by customers' preference for environmentally conscious choices, similar buying behaviors, and the potential for word-of-mouth recommendations. These companies have different pricing strategies and perceived benefits, which customers will compare before making a decision.

CASE STUDY: Tesla Model S

Consider the Tesla Model S. It belongs to the broad market of cars, but we can further narrow this down into sub-markets. A common mistake is to categorize the Tesla Model S under the market of electric cars. However, being electric is a feature, not a market. Although both a Toyota Prius and a Tesla Model S are electric cars (one being a hybrid), they do not belong to the same market. The Tesla Model S fits into the Luxury E automobile or Executive/Mid-size luxury market, which also includes vehicles like the Porsche Taycan or the BMW 5 series.

https://youtu.be/2QrUkjKcIAg

E-segment Wikipedia

As we delve deeper, we'll discover that once we have identified the market where our value proposition will compete, it's crucial to understand and follow a set of rules to shape our commercial strategy.

After identifying your company's competitive market, we need to delve into the specifics. Just like a painter cannot create art without understanding their canvas, a marketer cannot formulate a strategy without understanding their market.

1.1 Market Definition (M1)

To define your market, you must understand what product or service you are selling and who will likely buy it. For example, if you're selling eco-friendly cleaning products, your market might be environmentally conscious homeowners.

1.2 Key Expected Benefits (M2)

This involves identifying what the players in the market hope to gain. This includes both functional benefits (e.g., eco-friendly cleaning products that effectively clean the house) and emotional benefits (e.g., feeling good about contributing to environmental conservation).

1.3 Market's Position on Growth Curve (M3)

Every market undergoes stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Understanding where your market is on this curve helps you strategize accordingly. For instance, an emerging market might require more education and awareness efforts.

1.4 Experience Economy Curve of the Market (M4)

This refers to how the market evolves from selling simple commodities to providing sophisticated experiences. For instance, coffee can be sold as a commodity (beans), a product (packaged coffee), a service (brewed coffee in a cafe), or an experience (gourmet coffee tasting).

1.5 Total Available Market (TAM) and Serviceable Available Market (SAM) (M5)

TAM is the total market demand for a product or service, while SAM is the segment of TAM targeted by your company's products and services within your geographical reach. These metrics help assess the market size and opportunity.

Question 2: who is your main important competitors?

Identifying and analyzing your competitors is just as crucial as understanding your market.

2.1 Competitors' Identification (M6-M10)

Identify up to five main competitors in your market. For each, identify the product price per unit (M7), perceived price (M8), perceived benefits (M9), and any additional remarks (M10).

2.2 Perceived Price (M8)

Perceived price is a metric that reflects how customers perceive your price relative to the competition. It is not always about the actual cost but rather the perceived value for money. The perceived price is calculated using a formula: M8 = 24/(E-C) * (M7-C) - 12.

Here, E is the maximum price per unit in the market, C is the lowest price per unit, and M7 is your product's price per unit. The calculation generates a score on a scale of -12 to +12, helping you understand your product's perceived price positioning in comparison to competitors.

Let's consider an example in the eco-friendly cleaning products market. We'll analyze five companies: GreenClean (our company), EcoPure, NatureFresh, Clean&Green, and BioWash.

Here's the calculation for GreenClean's perceived price:

M8 = 24/($15-$6) * ($10-$6) - 12 = 24/9 * 4 - 12 = 10.67 - 12 = -1.33

The same calculation is applied to find the perceived prices for the rest of the companies. This table helps you understand how your product's price is perceived relative to the competitors in the market.  

In this case, GreenClean's price is perceived to be lower than most of its competitors, which can be an advantage if customers are price sensitive. However, you also need to ensure that the lower price doesn't lead customers to perceive it as lower quality.

2.3 Perceived Benefits (M9)

This is a measure of the benefits a customer perceives when interacting with a company. The perceived benefit score is calculated by summing up the scores of four questions related to the Brand, Value Proposition, Customer Journey, and Conversations offered by the company in the chosen market.

Here's how to handle each question:

1. Brand Perception: Ask yourself, "Is the company's brand the highest perceived amongst all the alternatives in the market?" This isn't just about brand recognition; it's about the positive associations customers make with your brand. It could be related to quality, trust, innovation, or social responsibility.

2. Value Proposition: Consider, "Is the company's value proposition the highest perceived amongst all the alternatives in the market?" The value proposition is the unique mix of product, price, placement, and promotion that the company offers. It answers why a customer should buy from you rather than your competitors.

3. Customer Journey: Query, "Is the company's customer journey the highest perceived amongst all the alternatives in the market?" The customer journey comprises all interactions between the customer and the company. It can include the ease of navigating your website, the clarity of product information, the efficiency of the checkout process, after-sales service, and more.

4. Conversation: Reflect on, "Is the company's conversation the highest perceived amongst all the alternatives in the market?" Conversations refer to the communication between the company and its customers. This could include advertising messages, social media interactions, customer service interactions, and more.

For each of the four questions, rate your agreement on a scale of -3 (completely disagree) to +3 (completely agree). Sum up these ratings to derive the Perceived Benefits score (M9).

This score gives you an understanding of your company's strengths and areas of improvement from the customer's perspective. It provides insights into how you can enhance your customers' experience, strengthen your value proposition, and ultimately, increase your market share.

These perceived benefits scores indicate how each company's offerings are viewed in the market. GreenClean, for instance, scores fairly well, suggesting its customers appreciate its brand, value proposition, customer journey, and conversations. However, there's room for improvement, especially when compared to competitors like EcoPure and BioWash. This analysis can help guide strategic decisions to improve these areas and enhance customer perception.

question 3: what are the trends influencing your market?

This stage involves compiling all the information gathered above and creating a comprehensive view of your market.

1. Describe your chosen market, ensuring it aligns with the market definition of Bill Aulet.

2. Fill in a template (template #2) with information on your company and a maximum of 4 other companies.

3. Identify the average unit price for the company value proposition in the market (M7).

4. Map this average price for all companies using the formula: M8= 24/(E-C)*(M7-C)-12.

5. Calculate for each company the Perceived Benefits M9 by summing up the results of the 4 questions.

6. Map these results on a graph with perceived benefits (M9) on the horizontal axis (scale -12 to + 12) and perceived prices (M8) on the vertical axis (scale -12 to +12). This visualization (template #4) gives a clear picture of where each competitor stands in terms of value for money in the eyes of customers.

In conclusion, the market you're operating in, or planning to penetrate, defines the rules of the game. Understanding these rules, and how to play within them, will significantly influence your chances of success.

Whether it's the luxury electric car market or the eco-friendly cleaning products market, your marketing strategy should be rooted in a deep understanding of the market dynamics. This includes not only identifying your competitors but also comprehending the perceived price and benefits that your product or service brings to the table.

Marketing Canvas Method - Market Assesment Process

Tips for non-marketers and entrepreneurs

1.     Stay Curious: Regularly research and keep up with trends in your market. It's not a one-time activity but a continuous process.

2.     Talk to Customers: They can provide valuable insights that even the most sophisticated analysis might miss. Regular feedback from customers is a goldmine of information.

3.     Keep an Eye on Competitors: Competitors can provide valuable lessons. Their successes and failures can provide insights for your own strategy.

4.     Iterate: A marketing strategy is not set in stone. It evolves with your business, market trends, and customer preferences. Regularly revisit and update your strategy based on new data and insights.

Remember, understanding the context is just the first step in the marketing canvas method. It sets the foundation for the other steps in the process, guiding the direction of your marketing strategy.

Marketing Canvas Master Class Introduction

Please find below the slide ware I use when starting my Marketing Master Class.

Download the pdf here