MAPS for agencies: more quality work, with the same people
Pitches, clients, different markets: how an agency uses MAPS to get the time-consuming work done first, keep every client separate, and put senior people where they really count.
In-house marketing teams: decide where to invest, and be able to justify it
How a marketing team reads the market, puts its own customer and spend data to work, tests ideas, and brings decisions to leadership with the reasoning behind them.
Consultants: get to grips with a new market in a few days, and show up with a thesis
A method for stepping into a category or a country you don’t know, building a defensible thesis and presenting it to the client, without ever mixing one client with another.
Startups: test your pitch against the market before you spend
How to treat your pitch deck as a hypothesis, check the arena and your potential customers, explore pivots and prepare for investors’ questions.
B2B: preparing a complex deal, from the account to the buying committee
Understand the business customer, map who decides, build the business case and rehearse the meeting before you walk into the room.
Retail: reading the catchment area, competing banners and store customers
For retailers: how to read a market made of stores, assortment and perceived price, and why your competitors are the other banners in your catchment area.
Hospitality: reputation, the competitive set and the seasons to fill
For hotels, restaurants and venues: how to read your real competitive set, your reviews, the mix of direct and intermediated bookings, and the occasions worth owning.
Many countries, kept apart: how to work across international markets
Research in each market’s own language, areas built the way you need them, cross-country comparisons, and content adapted to the local culture.
From research to strategy: a complete path, with an example
A brand that wants to grow online: how you move from market facts to choices, to testing, to content — and how you keep the reason behind every decision.
Your first MAPS project: a step-by-step guide
From the brand name to the first picture of the market, then strategy, testing and content: what to do on day one, and what to look at first.
Brand identity: mission, values, personality and archetypes
What makes up a brand’s identity, how archetypes help give it a consistent voice, and how to evolve it without losing who you are.
Positioning map: how to build it and read it
The brand and its competitors on two perceived axes: how to choose the right axes, find the white spaces and tell whether they’re worth it.
Value Proposition Canvas: how to find fit with the customer
The customer profile — jobs, pains, expected gains — next to what you offer: how to build it on evidence and tell whether your proposition really answers.
The semiotic square in marketing: what it is and how to use it
Greimas’s tool, brought into marketing by Floch: how to build it from an underlying tension, read the four positions and find the open spaces in a category.
Customer Journey Map: how to build it channel by channel
Stages, touchpoints, emotions and critical moments of the buying journey: why a journey per channel is worth more than a generic one, and how to use it to decide where to act.
Business Model Canvas: what it is and how to use it
The nine blocks that describe how a company creates, delivers and captures value: how to fill them in, in what order, and how to use the canvas to imagine different models.
SWOT analysis and the TOWS matrix: how to do it right
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats: how to gather them with evidence, tell internal from external, and turn the SWOT into action with the TOWS matrix.
Empathy Map: what it is and how to use it to understand the customer
What your customer says, thinks, does and feels, what they see and hear, what holds them back and what they want: how to fill it in without making things up, and how to turn it into decisions.
Account-based marketing (ABM): what it is and how to do it
Treating a client company as a market of one: how to choose accounts, decide the level of personalization (1:1, 1:few, 1:many) and align marketing and sales.
The B2B buying committee: who really decides, and how to prepare
In complex sales, a group decides, not a person. How to map roles, goals and resistance, and how to rehearse the meeting before you walk into the room.
MEDDIC and MEDDPICC: how to qualify a B2B deal
Metrics, economic buyer, criteria, process, pain, champion — and in the extended version, paper process and competition: how to use the method without inflating the pipeline.
Strategic Selling and the account map: who influences the decision
Economic buyer, technical buyer, user buyer, coach: how to map influence inside an account, what each person wants for the company and for themselves, and where you’re exposed.
The Challenger Sale: teaching the customer something they don’t know
The method that shifts selling from relationship to insight: how to build an insight on the cost of the status quo, tailor it to each decision-maker and take control of the conversation.
B2B business case and value selling: value in numbers, without making them up
How to build a business case the CFO takes seriously: cost of the problem, value levers, investment, payback, stated assumptions.
Battlecards: what they are and how to build one that actually works
One page per competitor — including “staying as we are”: strengths, weaknesses, traps, ready answers and proof. How to build it and keep it current.
SPIN Selling: the questions that move a complex sale forward
Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff: the method born from observing thousands of sales calls, and how to prepare the questions for each role.
Mutual Action Plan: the shared plan all the way to signature
The milestones to a decision, with an owner on both sides: how to build an action plan with the customer, and why it shortens deals.
Market analysis: size, growth, segments
How much a market is worth, how it grows, how it breaks down and where the opportunities are: the method, TAM, SAM and SOM reasoning, and how not to be fooled by the numbers.
Competitive map: competitors split into arenas
You don’t compete with everyone the same way: how to divide the market into arenas, see who leads and who follows in each, and find the needs nobody serves well.
Trend forecasting: scenarios and early-warning signals
You can’t predict the future; you can prepare for several. How to build three scenarios, read weak signals and choose the indicators that tell you which one is arriving.
Brand Identity Matrix: the brand identity grid
Nine elements, from the outside of the company to the inside, with the brand core at the center: how to fill it in and how to use it to spot where the identity isn’t consistent.
Product Canvas: from an idea to a product concept
Problem, customer, value proposition, features, business model, roadmap and kill criteria: how to turn an idea into a concept you can discuss and put to the test.
Feature matrix: your features against the competition
Feature by feature, a score for you and for each competitor: how to build the matrix without cheating, and how to read defensible advantages, critical gaps and parity from it.
Pricing strategy: how to decide what to charge
Costs, perceived value, competitors and objective: the methods for setting price, the architecture of offer tiers, the break-even point and what to do if a competitor responds.
Go-to-market: how to bring a product to market
The first segment to win, the ideal customer, the channels, demand generation and a phased launch with go/no-go criteria: the strategy for not launching blind.
Marketing mix: the 4Ps, the 7Ps and why they have to agree
Product, price, place and promotion — and, for services, people, process and physical evidence: what each lever decides and how to check that they don’t contradict each other.
Planning a marketing campaign: the plan, step by step
Objective, audience, message, channels, budget, KPIs, creative brief and timeline: how to write a campaign plan that the creative team and the media team can actually use.
Customer segmentation from the CRM: RFM analysis and clusters
How recently, how often, how much: how RFM analysis and clustering find the customer groups that really exist, who you’re losing, and what to do with each.
Scanner data: reading sell-out, share, distribution and rate of sale
Retail panel exports explained: value and volume sales, share, weighted and numeric distribution, rate of sale, price and promotion — and how to understand why share moves.
Media planning: media mix, seasonality and category benchmarks
How to spread an advertising budget across media and months, starting from what your category does: competitor spend, open windows, objectives and scenarios.
From click to customer: measuring the return on digital spend
Cost per click, cost per lead, cost per customer: why the cheapest lead isn’t the cheapest customer, what happens after the click, and how to read attribution without fooling yourself.
SCAMPER: seven questions to transform an idea
Substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to other uses, eliminate, reverse: how to use SCAMPER to spark new ideas from a product, service or campaign that already exists.
Six Thinking Hats: one problem, six points of view
Facts, feelings, risks, benefits, new ideas and process control: how to use the Six Thinking Hats to discuss a problem without the loudest voice winning.
5 Whys: asking “why” until you reach the cause
The 5 Whys applied to marketing: how to get from the symptom to the root cause of a problem — and when the method leads you astray.
Benefit laddering: from product attribute to identity
The benefit ladder — attribute, functional benefit, emotion, identity — and the means-end chain it comes from: how to build it and how to choose the rung to communicate on.
Cultural tension: campaigns that take a stand
What a cultural tension is, how to find and weigh it — relevance, risk, the brand’s right to talk about it — and how to decide how strongly to take sides.
Jobs to be done for creative work: campaigns built on the customer’s job
From the job to the campaign: the moment that triggers the need, the before/after transformation, how the customer wants to feel and be seen. How to use JTBD to find ideas, not just to design the offer.
Insight-led campaigns: from insight to idea
What an insight is (and isn’t), how to find one in the data, how to put it to the test, and the three ways to turn it into a campaign: say it, show it, provoke.
Cross-industry thinking: borrowing ideas from other sectors
When the whole category talks the same way, the answer lies outside it: how to frame the problem, find distant industries that have solved it and transfer their logic.
Scenario planning for campaigns: communicating for more than one future
Drivers of change, plausible scenarios, weak signals: how to build campaigns for different futures, and one that holds up in all of them.
Communication archetypes: how the brand speaks, and to whom
Nine communication archetypes in three families — voice, value, receiver — each with six tactical variants: what they are, how they differ from Jung’s archetypes, how to build a mix.
From brief to concept: how a campaign concept is developed
The brief, the analysis, the concepts, the development, the test: the path from a communication objective to a campaign idea ready for production.
Message house: how to build your messaging architecture
One core message, three pillars, the proof points that hold them up: how to build a message house, and why it keeps everything a brand says in one piece.
Brand essence pyramid: from the customer to the essence
From the target insight to attributes, benefits and values, up to a few words that say what the brand is: how to build the pyramid without stuffing it with adjectives.
Strategic choice cascade: the five choices of Playing to Win
Winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, capabilities, management systems: strategy as a sequence of linked choices, and how to find the weak link.
Campaign brief: how to write a brief that works
Challenge, insight, idea, role of the brand, role of media, KPIs: the skeleton of a creative brief and the questions each section has to settle.
Value ladder: climbing from features to essence
From product features to functional benefits, to emotional ones, up to the essence: how to climb the ladder and find the rung that won’t hold.
Content pillars: how to choose your editorial territories
A few content territories, each with a role in the customer journey, a tone and a metric: how to choose them and how to tell when the plan is lopsided.
Kill matrix: how to drop ideas (and which ones to keep)
Fit with the strategy and supporting evidence: two criteria to decide what to scale, what to strengthen, what to challenge and what to kill.
Strategic tensions: finding the conflict behind the signals
An observed truth, the contradiction it hides, what it means for the brand: how to write tension cards that open paths instead of summarizing.
Simulating a competitor’s move before you launch
Before you move, ask how the others will respond: a lightweight wargaming method to anticipate reactions, prepare countermoves and decide whether to go.
Signal clustering: from scattered signals to themes
Comments, data, reviews, observations: how to group them by affinity, name the themes, and tell the dominant ones from the ones still emerging.
Strategic lenses: critiquing an idea from six points of view
Innovation, competition, consumer, culture, execution, future: six critical perspectives to stress-test an idea before you invest in it, and the questions each one asks.
Multi-agent systems: when a single AI model isn’t enough
Several agents with different roles — experts, moderator, judge — debating a problem: when they improve reasoning, and how to design them.
RAG and Graph RAG in marketing: what they are and why they matter
How an AI answers from your documents instead of “from memory”, why classic RAG falls short when the answer lies in the connections, and what a graph adds.
Synthetic users: what they are and how to use them to test an idea
Simulated people built on a market’s data: what they can tell you, what they can’t, how to interview them without fooling yourself, and when you still need the real customer.
AI models that reason: what changes for strategy
Models that “think” before they answer: where they really help in strategic work, when fast models are enough, and why judgment stays human.
Marketing knowledge base: the memory that doesn’t get lost
Research, analyses, materials and decisions in one place, searchable in plain language: how to build it so it stays useful, and what changes when an AI reads it.
Vector embeddings: search by meaning, explained simply
What embeddings are, why they let you find information even without the right words, and where they reach their limits.
The MAPS protocol: Monitor, Analyze, Prove, Scale
Four phases, in the order the work actually happens: understand the market, decide the strategy, put it to the test, turn it into work. Why the order matters.
Competitive Intelligence: a method for gathering data that matters
From questions to decisions: how to plan, gather, verify and interpret information on competitors and the market — ethically, with sources and dates.
Strategic validation: putting an idea to the test before you invest
Find the riskiest assumptions, choose the right test, decide up front what counts as evidence: a method for failing small instead of failing big.
Market research with AI: speed without losing depth
What AI does well in market research, where it goes wrong, and the rules for using it without being fooled: sources, dates, the market’s language, estimates flagged as estimates.
Social Listening: how to listen to the market and turn it into insight
Don’t count mentions: understand what the market is saying, in which language, on which platforms. How to set up your searches, read themes and sentiment, and put what you find to use.
Brand positioning: a four-phase process
Understand, choose, test, activate: how to arrive at a defensible positioning, capture it in one sentence and turn it into concrete choices.
Glossary of strategic marketing
The vocabulary of strategy, explained in a few lines: from competitive advantage to go-to-market, with links to the articles that go deeper.
Glossary of digital and performance marketing
Digital metrics, channels and concepts — from CPM to ROAS, from SEO to GEO — explained simply.
Glossary of brand and positioning
Identity, image, archetypes, points of parity and points of difference: the vocabulary of brand, with links to the tools for working on it.
Glossary of consumer insight and research
From the buyer persona to jobs to be done, from the journey to the focus group: the words for understanding who buys and why.
Glossary of AI for marketing
Language models, RAG, embeddings, agents, hallucinations: the AI concepts marketing people need, without the jargon.