McKinsey’s ‘Organize for Value’ blueprint for transitioning to positionless marketing

Buying AI skills to drive marketing is easy. Enabling sales teams to use it independently, proactively, and at scale is very difficult.

The biggest crime? People.

Marketing teams have always had the same elusive goal: to move at the speed of the consumer. Responding to each customer’s needs in real time, delivering the right message at the right time, and improving customer lifetime value to drive loyalty and ROI. The goal is not new.

What’s new is the AI ​​technology available to analyze consumer data and generate instant, personalized messages at scale. But while technology is advancing rapidly, the ability of marketing teams to use it independently and proactively has not kept pace. The biggest hurdle is planning: many sales teams haven’t planned to extract full value from the technology they already have.

This does not mean that there is no progress. Here it is. Marketing teams that have crossed that chasm are seeing amazing results.

Another example is Caesars Entertainment which reduced the time to create a campaign from five days to five minutes. Asadul Shah, Strategy’s vice president of player revenue, called it “a huge game changer.”

Before that change, Caesar’s marketers built themselves by creating a list of all the disconnected programs, connected to all the many tools and waited for developers, analysts and creative teams before anything went out. The result was a very slow process to identify players with the accuracy and time the market wanted.

Caesars worked with Optimove to integrate data, orchestration and operations in one place. Shah noted that the changes made to advertising “are not only efficient; they are very responsive to what our players need right now.”

It wasn’t technology alone that made it work. Caesars used Positionless Marketing, a framework that frees marketing teams from fixed tasks, giving every marketer the ability to do any job quickly and independently. Optimove provided the platform. Caesars built a team building to be a reality. Technology and human ingenuity work together to make Positionless Marketing possible.

Any organization that achieves this kind of transformation is doing what McKinsey calls “information planning,” a fundamental rethinking of structure, decision-making and accountability that transforms the marketing team into a function designed to drive value continuously. In marketing, that means being a positionless team that improves customer lifetime value, drives loyalty and delivers measurable ROI. Below, we use McKinsey’s Plan for Value framework to reveal the pitfalls of Positionless Marketing and a blueprint for building teams that can do any marketing job, quickly and independently.

Six pitfalls preventing the transition to Positionless Marketing

McKinsey identified six key issues preventing sales teams from successfully transitioning to a Positionless model. Of these, only one is about technology. All the others are about how leaders and groups get in their way.

• Ambiguous goals push teams to performance metrics instead of results. When marketing goals are unclear, automation plays a role and offers can have an impact.
• Bad governance it creates layers of approval that add days to decisions that must be expedited. In marketing, excessive controls directly conflict with the speed required to deliver customer value.
• Uncommitted leaders managing through silos rather than allowing autonomy, preventing sales teams from changing past role-based dependencies.
• A static marketing culture it resists testing even when the right tools are in place, reducing performance no matter how the technology is deployed.
• Marketing mix, with unclear process ownership, it leaves no one person accountable for results, and performance deteriorates accordingly.
• Discontinued technology it reinforces the separation of data and the division of tasks between small teams, making strategic alignment and rapid responses almost impossible.

These are the realities of assembly-line marketing — not Positionless. The details stay with the analysts. Art lives with designers. Activation remains with the developer. The value disappears in the spaces between them. The assembly line is designed to control. It was never designed to deliver value.

Assembly Line Marketing is the opposite of what Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, said: “The purpose of business is to build and maintain a customer.”

How McKinsey’s Blueprint helps build passive sales teams (and why the effort pays off)

McKinsey’s “Plan for Value” blueprint suggests a fundamental change: organizations design for value creation, clear results, impact on job titles and minimal collaboration. It provides the basis for not being Positionless and creates the conditions for sales teams to retain customers for life.

To make Positionless Marketing a reality, marketing leaders must focus on the pragmatic uses and factors that most influence marketing execution.

1. Start with intention and discipline. Clarify why the action is being taken, and what the deliverables are. A shared sense of purpose allows teams to make quick decisions without waiting for approval from each other.
2. Reframe work around results and accountability. Map current processes and identify where authorization is ineffective without adding value. Build flexibility over time rather than reorganizing overnight.
3. Leadership and processes. Establish a clear flow of decision making and set clear expectations for how quickly each part of the marketing process should move. Processes should enable flow, not control.
4. Governance, technology and talent. Effective governance ensures consistency without limiting performance. Technology and AI should unlock new value, not just automate existing processes. And talent should be used based on what the job requires, not what the title suggests.
5. Empower marketers to go above and beyond their role. Once purpose, accountability, process and technology are aligned, marketers should be free to skip traditional tasks and act independently as Unconventional Marketers. The measure of success is not following a role; it is the delivery of value.

These changes require ongoing commitment. But the alternative (an assembly line structure that was never designed to deliver customer value) is more expensive than the transformation itself.

The results speak for themselves. Above Caesar:

• FDJ United used Positionless Marketing to eliminate overlapping platforms, eliminate reliance on third parties where possible and enable continuous improvement with real-time measurement. Campaign time has been reduced from six weeks to hours, with year-end campaigns now handled by a single marketer from concept to analysis.
• A large retailer achieved a 16.1x increase in purchase prices while saving 300 man-hours per year with the same team size. The switch to Positionless Marketing allowed the team to increase personalization and impact without adding much value… showing that the value of the framework is not just speed of execution, but the ability to do much more with what you already have.

The action window is shrinking

AI technologies and tools exist and are constantly evolving. Today, AI produces endless creative variants. Data platforms reveal real-time behavioral signals. Decision engines link channels quickly.

But technology superimposed on an assembly line structure creates the illusion of progress. Similar handoffs occur. The same permissions add the same delay. Speed ​​comes last; the bottle stays inside.

External pressures are increasing rapidly. Customers expect the best personalization and experience across all channels. The competition is getting bigger and tougher.

Marketing leaders who anticipate change will find their competitors already doing it. The best move forward.

McKinsey confirms what the best marketing teams already know: the right structure and technology frees up human power – and vice versa. Smart people stuck in the wrong system will still perform below expectations. The best AI tools in the world will not deliver results if they are pressured by the wrong organization.

McKinsey’s blueprint points the way. Positionless Marketing is the destination.