Laurent Bouty

The thinking behind the method

Laurent Bouty created the Marketing Canvas Method while directing the marketing programme at Solvay Brussels School, one of Belgium's leading business schools. The recurring problem he observed was not a lack of marketing knowledge: it was the lack of a shared language and of a structured process for turning that knowledge into decisions.

Every other core business function, from finance to operations, HR and IT, had established frameworks and operating systems. Marketing ran on intuition, precedent and tribal knowledge. The method was built to close that gap: a rigorous, repeatable method that any team can run, whatever its marketing maturity.

It has been refined through more than a decade of workshops, executive programmes, consulting mandates and academic courses. Version 5 (2026) added Step 3.5 (why each gap exists), the Operating Baseline and the Maturity Ladder; version 5.1 (October 2026) is the practitioner edition, closed by the Strategy on a Page.