How to Assess your Marketing Situation With the Marketing Canvas?

One objective of the Marketing Canvas is to facilitate debate and discussion around a clear strategic challenge question. Most of the specialists of the leadership topic agree that one of the key reason why strategy exercise fails is because the decision that has to be made is unclear! When you do the strategic marketing exercise, you need to be crystal clear about which question you are trying to answer.

A second reason why strategy exercise is failing is because there is no alignment neither consensus around the causes and the solutions.

The Marketing Canvas is before everything a framework for facilitating the debate, the co-creation and the alignment of the leadership team. To make it happen, the process for assessing the situation is as follow:

Start with one strategic question or ambition

Start the Marketing Canvas Process with a simple and crystal clear question structured as this:

How …. [Marketing Dimension] is helping us to …. [strategic question or challenge]?

The strategic question or challenge is the trigger for the strategic exercise. Example of strategic question could be:

• Growth our revenue by 5%?
• Become more competitive?
• Launch my startup, my new product or service?
• Increase my market share?
• Improve our ranking in the Meaningful Brand Index?

Having set your Strategic Question, you can systematically discuss each Marketing Dimension with the above question.

Example:

• How our Purpose is helping us to become more competitive?
• How the Job to be done of our customer is helping us to growth our revenue by 5%?
• How our Brand Experience is helping us to increase our Market Share?
• How our Brand identity is helping us to launch our startup?

Discuss with the team and qualify each dimension

For each question, you should assess the situation. Ideally, you have facts and analysis helping you to do this exercise however with a team of internal expert, the consensus and alignment provide usually a rather good qualitative assessment (we should only be careful about not being biased. This could be solved with an external facilitator challenging the obvious).

When asking the question (How …. [Marketing Dimension] is helping us to …. [strategic question or challenge]?), you can have 3 answers:

• RED: This dimension is definitely not helping you. It is a strong negative factor that you will certainly have to tackle in your potential solution. It is a negative factor and might play against your ambition. You will have also to mitigate it.
• GREEN: This dimension is helping you. It is a positive factor and you should leverage it more. This dimension is one of your core asset for this challenge. You should definitely leverage it and it is a key positive factor for your ambition.
• BLACK: You don't know. You have not enough information for answering this question.

Negative factors are referred as Brakes and positive factors are referred as Accelerators.

Visualise the results on the Marketing Canvas

Having answered all questions, you can visualise your results on the Marketing Canvas. The results on the Marketing Canvas will facilitate team debates around correlations, causalities and ideation.

Summary

Assessment methodology with the Marketing Canvas

Infographic on the Marketing Canvas Process

The tool has been designed for facilitating the discussion when designing your strategy.

High-level process is:

• You start from an ambition/question (like increase revenue by 5%, have more digital transactions, be more meaningful, ...) 
• You discuss using the 28 dimensions asking:
  • What's blocking you to achieve your ambition? (brakes)
  • What's helping you (Accelerator)?
  • You can support this rating using any information, knowledge you have but it works also if you only rely on qualitative information.
• Then you map your answer on the Canvas. Red are brakes; Green are accelerators.
• Then you try to analyse these brakes/accelerators and understands what cause them, what are the correlation.
• Then you start ideating (brain-writing, co-create, ...), find crazy or impossible ideas) on what you could do (magic diamond, do things better, do different things).
• Then you prioritise your ideas.
• If you can you test it.
• Then you have your action plan.

Infographic Marketing Canvas