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.