of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
“We have this nearly insatiable belief that if we acquire a customer and give them enough love and attention, they will love us back. We see a customer buy a heavily discounted product with a promotional code, so we’ll add their information to our CRM and market the hell out of them until they buy more. But in reality, first impressions are highly indicative of customer behavior.”
- Neil Hoyne, Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Author of Converted
The scenario is all too familiar: You’ve purchased a big-ticket, high-consideration purchase—say, a new smart TV. It’s something you’ve spent a long time researching and (hopefully) you won’t need to buy another one for a few years. But days, weeks, even months after the fact, you continue to be bombarded with promotional emails offering post-purchase upsells or discounts on other TV models. You even start to receive targeted ads serving up other alternatives everywhere you go online, including social media.
“Overwhelming” and “annoying” are both understatements; just ask the 89% of consumers who unsubscribe due to repetitive offers.
Spray-and-pray communication is officially obsolete, with 65% of customers seeing targeted promotions as a top reason to make a purchase. As marketers strive to create digital experiences as nuanced and engaging as high-touch, in-person service, they need to go deeper and understand consumers on an intrinsic level. This is the only way they can ensure they’re engaging with people in the right way, right from the start, to form a strong long-term relationship, even as they venture across different commerce and media channels. After all, each consumer has a unique context that ultimately drives their needs, behaviors, and preferences, and brands need to tailor their campaigns and interactions accordingly.
To effectively serve customers in the moment across channels and deliver true personalization at scale, marketers need to evolve from order-takers to relationship builders. They need access to data and insights that help them gain more context into customer preferences and behaviors. Additionally, they need robust tools that empower them to make bold creative moves and rapidly launch and evolve campaigns when new opportunities strike across channels.
Leading-edge teams are circumventing the static and assembly-line marketing structures of the industrial era by using AI-powered technologies that empower them to achieve hyper-execution. They’re not just keeping pace and responding to new consumer behaviors and expectations. With flexibility and dynamism, they’re staying ahead of the curve and proactively anticipating customer needs to delight them in unexpected ways on their branded eCommerce sites, mobile apps, social media, and beyond.
Welcome to the era of Positionless Marketing, which is powered by speed and creative excellence. It’s a new philosophy and approach that empowers marketers to do anything and be everything.
This guide is a companion to our five-part podcast series: Decoded Season 4—Positionless Marketing. Listen to the full series on the Future Commerce site or on Apple and Spotify.
Rethinking Traditional Team Modes and Models
The goal of marketing, on its surface, seems simple: connect with consumers in a meaningful way. This premise has always been easier said than done, but it is especially true today as consumer behaviors are more fragmented, spanning different channels, apps, and touchpoints.
Because commerce is embedded into so many new interfaces and experiences, the traditional marketing funnel has collapsed and the once-linear shopping journey is now an endless cycle. Customers can go from inspiration to conversion in a snap, and they’re looking for brands to provide the best offer, message, and incentive in that moment. When you couple this with the fact that many organizations still operate marketing as siloed and regimented assembly lines, marketers simply are not empowered to move at the speed shoppers now expect.
Brands need to interact with customers in real-time and emulate a great salesperson—something that’s impossible to achieve when every step requires assistance or buy-in from another department.
With 77% of customers expecting to have a thoughtful interaction immediately when they contact a company, marketers can’t risk entering a never-ending loop of internal logistics that impedes response times. In many cases, a lack of swift action leaves brands missing out on new opportunities to reach, engage, and convert customers. After all, we’re living in a world where consumers’ minds change in a second, whether it’s because they saw a new influencer post or received a new recommendation from AI.
Waiting for layers of insights, inputs, and approvals from data engineers, creatives, campaign managers, merchandising teams, analysts, and other stakeholders, holds marketers back and leaves revenue up for grabs.
“It’s really hard to get a campaign or promotion out the door if you have to go through an assembly line of pulling a list, sending it to merchandising for a promo strategy, requesting creative from the design team, having a developer code your HTML templates, and then waiting for an analyst to set up an A/B test,” said Shai Frank, SVP of Product and GM of the Americas at Optimove, in a recent episode of the Decoded podcast. “If it’s that hard, you’ll take the path of least resistance and just offer a flat discount or standardized promotion that doesn’t move the needle.”
In traditional workflows, marketers need to wait for a green light from another department before moving forward. These static and linear workflows are not equipped to the new customer journey, which spans channels and has many starts and stops. Rigid procedures and assembly-line processes have their place in manufacturing, but they have no place in a creative, interactive, and continuously evolving field like marketing. Marketers need the power to understand and reach customers at critical moments in the experience, whether they’re researching products at a high level, comparing brands, or finally adding items to their cart. Along that path, marketing needs to meet customers with those right messages at the right time.
Just take notes from beauty giant Sephora: its omnichannel approach is structured so that when a consumer walks into a retail store, associates know exactly what the individual bought, browsed, or bookmarked on the Sephora mobile app or website, and can tailor the experience accordingly. When customers leave the store, they continue to receive hyper-tailored offers and messages that align with their favorite brands, past purchases, and key behaviors.
It’s that 360-degree view that helps deliver personalized experiences at scale: the new mandate for brand relevance and resonance. To replicate Sephora’s stellar experience and acquire equally loyal brand fans, marketers must be curious, fast-moving generalists who can take a moment of insight or inspiration, like a timely social media trend, and turn it into their next big campaign idea.
“If your entire team is made up of deep specialists rather than more adaptable generalists, or ‘Positionless’ workers, then flexibility and curiosity aren't baked into how they operate,” said Hoyne.
“This shift isn't new, but as the value of adaptability rises, companies that over-specialize are not only going to struggle with the transition but may resist it outright and miss opportunities. They’re trying to force the world to align with their view, instead of evolving to meet what customers actually want.”
Embracing the New Marketing Mandate
Enter the new marketing mandate: Positionless Marketing. Rather than being fixed in their roles and relying on other departments for approvals and permissions, Positionless Marketers use a combination of AI tools, technologies, and platforms to manage all aspects of campaign execution, from initial ideation to performance analysis. This enables them to deliver rich, personalized experiences at scale; a discipline that is equal parts art and science.
Enhanced by AI, marketers now have tools to engage and serve shoppers in real-time and deliver the right messages at key moments in the browsing and buying journey. These tools also help shape and optimize creative and campaigns based on how users respond. Sluggish processes that cause days, even weeks of delays, no longer have a place in business. Today, it’s all about speed, agility, and reading the context clues customers leave across branded and third-party platforms to craft hyper-relevant outreach and messaging.
A Positionless approach blends firm facts and data with creative thinking and problem-solving; it unites beautiful brand aesthetics with impactful calls-to-action and incentives like pricing, promotions, and even gamification—a powerful lever for driving customer engagement and even conversion.
Offering interactive, buzzy experiences is one of the most mutually beneficial strategies to deploy, as gamified strategies can boost customer engagement rates by 48%. The reward is twofold: Customers get deeper, more meaningful interactions with your brand, while your marketing team gets rich zero-party data about your core audience.
However, Positionless Marketing isn’t about acting on a whim and asking for forgiveness later; it’s about knowing the customer and anticipating their needs and demands so you can quickly react without creating additional burden for your colleagues.
“Brands can now analyze customer behavior at an unprecedented level, delivering messages, offers, and experiences tailored to individual preferences,” said Nikolas Badminton, a renowned futurist and consultant. “Machine learning is also transforming how campaigns are managed. Marketers can use it to adjust campaigns in real-time based on consumer behavior, making their efforts more relevant and impactful. Beyond that, predictive analytics helps businesses identify trends before they happen, automate repetitive tasks, and focus more on creativity and innovation. At this point, machine learning isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for staying competitive in a data-driven world.”
Optimove’s Frank also explained that embracing Positionless Marketing doesn’t make other departments redundant or obsolete. The goal is to alleviate minute or burdensome tasks that typically bog down other team members. For instance, “we’re not suggesting firing all designers, but there are mundane tasks that they hate to do,” he explained. “If I’m a marketer and I say, ‘I want to run an A/B test, so I need this product image to sit on four different backgrounds,’ that sort of task isn’t fun for designers. They’d much rather design a new banner or more creative experience.”
A Positionless approach cuts through red tape while empowering team members with the time and bandwidth they need to do their best work and capitalize on opportunities to engage and influence customers in the moment. Freed from manual and arduous tasks, empowers them to free their minds (and schedules) to develop innovative campaigns and strategies that will drive consumer attraction, engagement, and conversion.
Positionless Marketers bring the art and science of marketing together. They are strategists and creators. They drive big ideas but also execute to drive long-term optimization. They can do anything, and be everything. Because at the end of the day, your customers aren’t waiting–so neither should you.
“Let’s look at the Renaissance Man or Woman; those greater-than-life individuals like Leonardo da Vinci and the people who were mathematicians, philosophers, painters, and musicians. It’s a celebration of the wide gamut of human talent. That is what this could be. This could be a way to unlock our multipotentiality.”
- Pini Yakuel, Founder and CEO of Optimove
The Three Powers of Positionless Marketing
A core aspect of Positionless Marketing is using a suite of AI tools at marketers’ disposal today, such as generative AI ones like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Gemini, and more, to jumpstart campaign ideation, enable faster and more data analysis, and accelerate asset creation. But beyond generative tools, Positionless Marketers can also equip themselves with dynamic, foundational AI-powered customer data platforms that put data and rich customer insights at the heart of everything they do.
The best way to embrace AI is to use it to streamline existing processes and workflows, not completely overhaul them, according to Hoyne. Ideally, marketing teams would use AI to enhance core competencies and existing value props; not simply use ChatGPT better or more frequently than competitors.
With machine learning quickly becoming the foundation of modern marketing organizations, the primary powers of Positionless Marketing include:
1. Data Power
Data is the lifeblood of marketing strategies and essential for stellar campaign performance–and a critical factor in delivering personalized experiences at scale. However, in traditional team structures, marketers are stuck waiting on overburdened data engineers to extract and analyze the information and insights needed to guide campaign decision making.
Positionless Marketers can independently access and use dynamic customer insights to design and implement the hyper-personalized experiences customers are looking for. The right platform will also empower teams to precisely create and target specific segments while also enabling real-time pattern identification and responses, so they can dynamically build and adjust campaigns grounded in real insights.
2. Creative Power
Marketing is an inherently creative field where out-of-the-box thinkers and visionaries shine. They know how to craft messaging that will be a hit with customers at key moments in the shopping journey. And they know how to deliver the best messages and incentives to the most impactful formats and amplification channels.
In positioned-based structures, marketers need to pitch their ideas to a design team, wait for mock-ups, provide feedback on a proposed draft, and then run through the process a few more times until it’s ready for launch.
But when marketers can turn to generative AI platforms as their trusted partners in asset creation, they can rapidly iterate creative concepts and accelerate design processes. Beyond the sheer speed of these new workflows, AI platforms can help marketers ensure deliverables align with specific standards, maintain brand consistency, and fully deliver upon the initial vision they had in mind for a project—all while tailoring the content specifically to each prospect or customer.
3. Optimization Power
Another laborious part of modern marketing workflows is campaign analysis and optimization. Mining through data and KPIs to determine what’s resonating with the target audience and what’s falling short of expectations takes a lot of time. Time that would be better spent on iterating and bringing new concepts to market.
Historically, marketers have had to depend on analyst teams to communicate how campaigns are performing and offer suggested improvements. But by adopting AI-powered technology that self-optimizes campaigns through automated testing, marketers can quickly identify performance short-comings and receive suggested tweaks, and then quickly augment customer-facing campaigns to ensure relevance. This frees marketers to do what they do best: drive the strategic deployment of campaigns and strategies, while intelligent platforms handle tactical optimization.
“Machine learning is becoming the foundation of modern marketing, embedding intelligence into every step of the process,” said Badminton. “What excites me most is how it allows marketers to move from reactive to proactive strategies. Instead of guessing what works, machine learning helps brands predict trends, fine-tune campaigns in real-time, and personalize interactions at an incredible scale.”
By harnessing these three key levers, marketers can be more agile, strategic players in their organization and serve up the dynamic experiences customers crave. Rather than focusing on singular campaigns and tactics, they can become holistic thinkers and brand shepherds that design relevant, compelling campaigns at scale.
Accelerating the Campaign Execution From 6 Weeks to 24 Hours
“We had so many teams passing information from one to another, and that caused them to be dependent on clear documentation, strong briefs, and proper and strict planning sessions,” explained Georgi Pepelyankov, Head of Marketing at FDJ United, a gaming and sports betting operator with 33 million players worldwide. “With tight deadlines, it created bottlenecks. If one team missed their deadline, then everybody was late. We knew this waterflow approach was spurred by our internal technology limitations, as well as some external factors, but we knew we needed to transform from an assembly line-based team into empowering marketers with autonomous capabilities to self-execute.”
In other words, current marketing teams have too many cooks in the kitchen, and it’s burning the customer experience—not to mention burning out teams. There’s nothing worse than waiting for a simple request, such as a quick graphic from the design team, only to have to sit on your hands because your colleague is bogged down by a bigger, higher priority project. It’s these simple tasks that might be too complex to do at your desk that are easily simplified by adopting the right AI-powered tools and technologies.
In FDJ United’s circumstance, Pepelyankov realized that convoluted processes, massively overlapping tech stack, and slow, manual workflows severely delayed campaign execution. To accelerate strategies and deployment, he defined three main transformation principles that would set his team up for Positionless success:
- Standardize procedures and technologies
- Pare down the complex martech ecosystem
- Reimagine how teams actually work together and collaborate.
To move away from its traditionally complex processes, FDJ United adopted a new technology stack, composed of a solution built in-house alongside an AI-powered customer data provider, to streamline innovation and optimize workflows.
With these new technologies supporting Positionless Marketing initiatives and end-to-end campaign management, FDJ United was able to shorten its usual six-week campaign creation process to just 24 hours, driving a 600% ROI.
Turn Waste into Wins
Customers won’t wait for marketing teams to understand and respond to their needs. If content, campaigns, and experiences aren’t relevant to what they think, feel, and expect, they will seek alternatives faster than marketers can develop a new campaign brief.
Modern marketers need to transcend traditional roles and become hyper-execution powerhouses. Now more than ever, they need to eliminate the bottlenecks that impede creativity and block the idea-to-outcome pipeline. When teams become Positionless and embrace AI-powered technology and data platforms, they can accelerate innovation, optimize and automate key processes, and design relevant, immersive, and timely campaigns that effectively engage consumers in the moment, no matter where they are.
Consider the arrival of Positionless Marketing as your career independence day: When people are equipped to do anything, they can be everything. Your moment is now.
“We have this nearly insatiable belief that if we acquire a customer and give them enough love and attention, they will love us back. We see a customer buy a heavily discounted product with a promotional code, so we’ll add their information to our CRM and market the hell out of them until they buy more. But in reality, first impressions are highly indicative of customer behavior.”
- Neil Hoyne, Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Author of Converted
The scenario is all too familiar: You’ve purchased a big-ticket, high-consideration purchase—say, a new smart TV. It’s something you’ve spent a long time researching and (hopefully) you won’t need to buy another one for a few years. But days, weeks, even months after the fact, you continue to be bombarded with promotional emails offering post-purchase upsells or discounts on other TV models. You even start to receive targeted ads serving up other alternatives everywhere you go online, including social media.
“Overwhelming” and “annoying” are both understatements; just ask the 89% of consumers who unsubscribe due to repetitive offers.
Spray-and-pray communication is officially obsolete, with 65% of customers seeing targeted promotions as a top reason to make a purchase. As marketers strive to create digital experiences as nuanced and engaging as high-touch, in-person service, they need to go deeper and understand consumers on an intrinsic level. This is the only way they can ensure they’re engaging with people in the right way, right from the start, to form a strong long-term relationship, even as they venture across different commerce and media channels. After all, each consumer has a unique context that ultimately drives their needs, behaviors, and preferences, and brands need to tailor their campaigns and interactions accordingly.
To effectively serve customers in the moment across channels and deliver true personalization at scale, marketers need to evolve from order-takers to relationship builders. They need access to data and insights that help them gain more context into customer preferences and behaviors. Additionally, they need robust tools that empower them to make bold creative moves and rapidly launch and evolve campaigns when new opportunities strike across channels.
Leading-edge teams are circumventing the static and assembly-line marketing structures of the industrial era by using AI-powered technologies that empower them to achieve hyper-execution. They’re not just keeping pace and responding to new consumer behaviors and expectations. With flexibility and dynamism, they’re staying ahead of the curve and proactively anticipating customer needs to delight them in unexpected ways on their branded eCommerce sites, mobile apps, social media, and beyond.
Welcome to the era of Positionless Marketing, which is powered by speed and creative excellence. It’s a new philosophy and approach that empowers marketers to do anything and be everything.
This guide is a companion to our five-part podcast series: Decoded Season 4—Positionless Marketing. Listen to the full series on the Future Commerce site or on Apple and Spotify.
Rethinking Traditional Team Modes and Models
The goal of marketing, on its surface, seems simple: connect with consumers in a meaningful way. This premise has always been easier said than done, but it is especially true today as consumer behaviors are more fragmented, spanning different channels, apps, and touchpoints.
Because commerce is embedded into so many new interfaces and experiences, the traditional marketing funnel has collapsed and the once-linear shopping journey is now an endless cycle. Customers can go from inspiration to conversion in a snap, and they’re looking for brands to provide the best offer, message, and incentive in that moment. When you couple this with the fact that many organizations still operate marketing as siloed and regimented assembly lines, marketers simply are not empowered to move at the speed shoppers now expect.
Brands need to interact with customers in real-time and emulate a great salesperson—something that’s impossible to achieve when every step requires assistance or buy-in from another department.
With 77% of customers expecting to have a thoughtful interaction immediately when they contact a company, marketers can’t risk entering a never-ending loop of internal logistics that impedes response times. In many cases, a lack of swift action leaves brands missing out on new opportunities to reach, engage, and convert customers. After all, we’re living in a world where consumers’ minds change in a second, whether it’s because they saw a new influencer post or received a new recommendation from AI.
Waiting for layers of insights, inputs, and approvals from data engineers, creatives, campaign managers, merchandising teams, analysts, and other stakeholders, holds marketers back and leaves revenue up for grabs.
“It’s really hard to get a campaign or promotion out the door if you have to go through an assembly line of pulling a list, sending it to merchandising for a promo strategy, requesting creative from the design team, having a developer code your HTML templates, and then waiting for an analyst to set up an A/B test,” said Shai Frank, SVP of Product and GM of the Americas at Optimove, in a recent episode of the Decoded podcast. “If it’s that hard, you’ll take the path of least resistance and just offer a flat discount or standardized promotion that doesn’t move the needle.”
In traditional workflows, marketers need to wait for a green light from another department before moving forward. These static and linear workflows are not equipped to the new customer journey, which spans channels and has many starts and stops. Rigid procedures and assembly-line processes have their place in manufacturing, but they have no place in a creative, interactive, and continuously evolving field like marketing. Marketers need the power to understand and reach customers at critical moments in the experience, whether they’re researching products at a high level, comparing brands, or finally adding items to their cart. Along that path, marketing needs to meet customers with those right messages at the right time.
Just take notes from beauty giant Sephora: its omnichannel approach is structured so that when a consumer walks into a retail store, associates know exactly what the individual bought, browsed, or bookmarked on the Sephora mobile app or website, and can tailor the experience accordingly. When customers leave the store, they continue to receive hyper-tailored offers and messages that align with their favorite brands, past purchases, and key behaviors.
It’s that 360-degree view that helps deliver personalized experiences at scale: the new mandate for brand relevance and resonance. To replicate Sephora’s stellar experience and acquire equally loyal brand fans, marketers must be curious, fast-moving generalists who can take a moment of insight or inspiration, like a timely social media trend, and turn it into their next big campaign idea.
“If your entire team is made up of deep specialists rather than more adaptable generalists, or ‘Positionless’ workers, then flexibility and curiosity aren't baked into how they operate,” said Hoyne.
“This shift isn't new, but as the value of adaptability rises, companies that over-specialize are not only going to struggle with the transition but may resist it outright and miss opportunities. They’re trying to force the world to align with their view, instead of evolving to meet what customers actually want.”
Embracing the New Marketing Mandate
Enter the new marketing mandate: Positionless Marketing. Rather than being fixed in their roles and relying on other departments for approvals and permissions, Positionless Marketers use a combination of AI tools, technologies, and platforms to manage all aspects of campaign execution, from initial ideation to performance analysis. This enables them to deliver rich, personalized experiences at scale; a discipline that is equal parts art and science.
Enhanced by AI, marketers now have tools to engage and serve shoppers in real-time and deliver the right messages at key moments in the browsing and buying journey. These tools also help shape and optimize creative and campaigns based on how users respond. Sluggish processes that cause days, even weeks of delays, no longer have a place in business. Today, it’s all about speed, agility, and reading the context clues customers leave across branded and third-party platforms to craft hyper-relevant outreach and messaging.
A Positionless approach blends firm facts and data with creative thinking and problem-solving; it unites beautiful brand aesthetics with impactful calls-to-action and incentives like pricing, promotions, and even gamification—a powerful lever for driving customer engagement and even conversion.
Offering interactive, buzzy experiences is one of the most mutually beneficial strategies to deploy, as gamified strategies can boost customer engagement rates by 48%. The reward is twofold: Customers get deeper, more meaningful interactions with your brand, while your marketing team gets rich zero-party data about your core audience.
However, Positionless Marketing isn’t about acting on a whim and asking for forgiveness later; it’s about knowing the customer and anticipating their needs and demands so you can quickly react without creating additional burden for your colleagues.
“Brands can now analyze customer behavior at an unprecedented level, delivering messages, offers, and experiences tailored to individual preferences,” said Nikolas Badminton, a renowned futurist and consultant. “Machine learning is also transforming how campaigns are managed. Marketers can use it to adjust campaigns in real-time based on consumer behavior, making their efforts more relevant and impactful. Beyond that, predictive analytics helps businesses identify trends before they happen, automate repetitive tasks, and focus more on creativity and innovation. At this point, machine learning isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for staying competitive in a data-driven world.”
Optimove’s Frank also explained that embracing Positionless Marketing doesn’t make other departments redundant or obsolete. The goal is to alleviate minute or burdensome tasks that typically bog down other team members. For instance, “we’re not suggesting firing all designers, but there are mundane tasks that they hate to do,” he explained. “If I’m a marketer and I say, ‘I want to run an A/B test, so I need this product image to sit on four different backgrounds,’ that sort of task isn’t fun for designers. They’d much rather design a new banner or more creative experience.”
A Positionless approach cuts through red tape while empowering team members with the time and bandwidth they need to do their best work and capitalize on opportunities to engage and influence customers in the moment. Freed from manual and arduous tasks, empowers them to free their minds (and schedules) to develop innovative campaigns and strategies that will drive consumer attraction, engagement, and conversion.
Positionless Marketers bring the art and science of marketing together. They are strategists and creators. They drive big ideas but also execute to drive long-term optimization. They can do anything, and be everything. Because at the end of the day, your customers aren’t waiting–so neither should you.
“Let’s look at the Renaissance Man or Woman; those greater-than-life individuals like Leonardo da Vinci and the people who were mathematicians, philosophers, painters, and musicians. It’s a celebration of the wide gamut of human talent. That is what this could be. This could be a way to unlock our multipotentiality.”
- Pini Yakuel, Founder and CEO of Optimove
The Three Powers of Positionless Marketing
A core aspect of Positionless Marketing is using a suite of AI tools at marketers’ disposal today, such as generative AI ones like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Gemini, and more, to jumpstart campaign ideation, enable faster and more data analysis, and accelerate asset creation. But beyond generative tools, Positionless Marketers can also equip themselves with dynamic, foundational AI-powered customer data platforms that put data and rich customer insights at the heart of everything they do.
The best way to embrace AI is to use it to streamline existing processes and workflows, not completely overhaul them, according to Hoyne. Ideally, marketing teams would use AI to enhance core competencies and existing value props; not simply use ChatGPT better or more frequently than competitors.
With machine learning quickly becoming the foundation of modern marketing organizations, the primary powers of Positionless Marketing include:
1. Data Power
Data is the lifeblood of marketing strategies and essential for stellar campaign performance–and a critical factor in delivering personalized experiences at scale. However, in traditional team structures, marketers are stuck waiting on overburdened data engineers to extract and analyze the information and insights needed to guide campaign decision making.
Positionless Marketers can independently access and use dynamic customer insights to design and implement the hyper-personalized experiences customers are looking for. The right platform will also empower teams to precisely create and target specific segments while also enabling real-time pattern identification and responses, so they can dynamically build and adjust campaigns grounded in real insights.
2. Creative Power
Marketing is an inherently creative field where out-of-the-box thinkers and visionaries shine. They know how to craft messaging that will be a hit with customers at key moments in the shopping journey. And they know how to deliver the best messages and incentives to the most impactful formats and amplification channels.
In positioned-based structures, marketers need to pitch their ideas to a design team, wait for mock-ups, provide feedback on a proposed draft, and then run through the process a few more times until it’s ready for launch.
But when marketers can turn to generative AI platforms as their trusted partners in asset creation, they can rapidly iterate creative concepts and accelerate design processes. Beyond the sheer speed of these new workflows, AI platforms can help marketers ensure deliverables align with specific standards, maintain brand consistency, and fully deliver upon the initial vision they had in mind for a project—all while tailoring the content specifically to each prospect or customer.
3. Optimization Power
Another laborious part of modern marketing workflows is campaign analysis and optimization. Mining through data and KPIs to determine what’s resonating with the target audience and what’s falling short of expectations takes a lot of time. Time that would be better spent on iterating and bringing new concepts to market.
Historically, marketers have had to depend on analyst teams to communicate how campaigns are performing and offer suggested improvements. But by adopting AI-powered technology that self-optimizes campaigns through automated testing, marketers can quickly identify performance short-comings and receive suggested tweaks, and then quickly augment customer-facing campaigns to ensure relevance. This frees marketers to do what they do best: drive the strategic deployment of campaigns and strategies, while intelligent platforms handle tactical optimization.
“Machine learning is becoming the foundation of modern marketing, embedding intelligence into every step of the process,” said Badminton. “What excites me most is how it allows marketers to move from reactive to proactive strategies. Instead of guessing what works, machine learning helps brands predict trends, fine-tune campaigns in real-time, and personalize interactions at an incredible scale.”
By harnessing these three key levers, marketers can be more agile, strategic players in their organization and serve up the dynamic experiences customers crave. Rather than focusing on singular campaigns and tactics, they can become holistic thinkers and brand shepherds that design relevant, compelling campaigns at scale.
Accelerating the Campaign Execution From 6 Weeks to 24 Hours
“We had so many teams passing information from one to another, and that caused them to be dependent on clear documentation, strong briefs, and proper and strict planning sessions,” explained Georgi Pepelyankov, Head of Marketing at FDJ United, a gaming and sports betting operator with 33 million players worldwide. “With tight deadlines, it created bottlenecks. If one team missed their deadline, then everybody was late. We knew this waterflow approach was spurred by our internal technology limitations, as well as some external factors, but we knew we needed to transform from an assembly line-based team into empowering marketers with autonomous capabilities to self-execute.”
In other words, current marketing teams have too many cooks in the kitchen, and it’s burning the customer experience—not to mention burning out teams. There’s nothing worse than waiting for a simple request, such as a quick graphic from the design team, only to have to sit on your hands because your colleague is bogged down by a bigger, higher priority project. It’s these simple tasks that might be too complex to do at your desk that are easily simplified by adopting the right AI-powered tools and technologies.
In FDJ United’s circumstance, Pepelyankov realized that convoluted processes, massively overlapping tech stack, and slow, manual workflows severely delayed campaign execution. To accelerate strategies and deployment, he defined three main transformation principles that would set his team up for Positionless success:
- Standardize procedures and technologies
- Pare down the complex martech ecosystem
- Reimagine how teams actually work together and collaborate.
To move away from its traditionally complex processes, FDJ United adopted a new technology stack, composed of a solution built in-house alongside an AI-powered customer data provider, to streamline innovation and optimize workflows.
With these new technologies supporting Positionless Marketing initiatives and end-to-end campaign management, FDJ United was able to shorten its usual six-week campaign creation process to just 24 hours, driving a 600% ROI.
Turn Waste into Wins
Customers won’t wait for marketing teams to understand and respond to their needs. If content, campaigns, and experiences aren’t relevant to what they think, feel, and expect, they will seek alternatives faster than marketers can develop a new campaign brief.
Modern marketers need to transcend traditional roles and become hyper-execution powerhouses. Now more than ever, they need to eliminate the bottlenecks that impede creativity and block the idea-to-outcome pipeline. When teams become Positionless and embrace AI-powered technology and data platforms, they can accelerate innovation, optimize and automate key processes, and design relevant, immersive, and timely campaigns that effectively engage consumers in the moment, no matter where they are.
Consider the arrival of Positionless Marketing as your career independence day: When people are equipped to do anything, they can be everything. Your moment is now.
“We have this nearly insatiable belief that if we acquire a customer and give them enough love and attention, they will love us back. We see a customer buy a heavily discounted product with a promotional code, so we’ll add their information to our CRM and market the hell out of them until they buy more. But in reality, first impressions are highly indicative of customer behavior.”
- Neil Hoyne, Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Author of Converted
The scenario is all too familiar: You’ve purchased a big-ticket, high-consideration purchase—say, a new smart TV. It’s something you’ve spent a long time researching and (hopefully) you won’t need to buy another one for a few years. But days, weeks, even months after the fact, you continue to be bombarded with promotional emails offering post-purchase upsells or discounts on other TV models. You even start to receive targeted ads serving up other alternatives everywhere you go online, including social media.
“Overwhelming” and “annoying” are both understatements; just ask the 89% of consumers who unsubscribe due to repetitive offers.
Spray-and-pray communication is officially obsolete, with 65% of customers seeing targeted promotions as a top reason to make a purchase. As marketers strive to create digital experiences as nuanced and engaging as high-touch, in-person service, they need to go deeper and understand consumers on an intrinsic level. This is the only way they can ensure they’re engaging with people in the right way, right from the start, to form a strong long-term relationship, even as they venture across different commerce and media channels. After all, each consumer has a unique context that ultimately drives their needs, behaviors, and preferences, and brands need to tailor their campaigns and interactions accordingly.
To effectively serve customers in the moment across channels and deliver true personalization at scale, marketers need to evolve from order-takers to relationship builders. They need access to data and insights that help them gain more context into customer preferences and behaviors. Additionally, they need robust tools that empower them to make bold creative moves and rapidly launch and evolve campaigns when new opportunities strike across channels.
Leading-edge teams are circumventing the static and assembly-line marketing structures of the industrial era by using AI-powered technologies that empower them to achieve hyper-execution. They’re not just keeping pace and responding to new consumer behaviors and expectations. With flexibility and dynamism, they’re staying ahead of the curve and proactively anticipating customer needs to delight them in unexpected ways on their branded eCommerce sites, mobile apps, social media, and beyond.
Welcome to the era of Positionless Marketing, which is powered by speed and creative excellence. It’s a new philosophy and approach that empowers marketers to do anything and be everything.
This guide is a companion to our five-part podcast series: Decoded Season 4—Positionless Marketing. Listen to the full series on the Future Commerce site or on Apple and Spotify.
Rethinking Traditional Team Modes and Models
The goal of marketing, on its surface, seems simple: connect with consumers in a meaningful way. This premise has always been easier said than done, but it is especially true today as consumer behaviors are more fragmented, spanning different channels, apps, and touchpoints.
Because commerce is embedded into so many new interfaces and experiences, the traditional marketing funnel has collapsed and the once-linear shopping journey is now an endless cycle. Customers can go from inspiration to conversion in a snap, and they’re looking for brands to provide the best offer, message, and incentive in that moment. When you couple this with the fact that many organizations still operate marketing as siloed and regimented assembly lines, marketers simply are not empowered to move at the speed shoppers now expect.
Brands need to interact with customers in real-time and emulate a great salesperson—something that’s impossible to achieve when every step requires assistance or buy-in from another department.
With 77% of customers expecting to have a thoughtful interaction immediately when they contact a company, marketers can’t risk entering a never-ending loop of internal logistics that impedes response times. In many cases, a lack of swift action leaves brands missing out on new opportunities to reach, engage, and convert customers. After all, we’re living in a world where consumers’ minds change in a second, whether it’s because they saw a new influencer post or received a new recommendation from AI.
Waiting for layers of insights, inputs, and approvals from data engineers, creatives, campaign managers, merchandising teams, analysts, and other stakeholders, holds marketers back and leaves revenue up for grabs.
“It’s really hard to get a campaign or promotion out the door if you have to go through an assembly line of pulling a list, sending it to merchandising for a promo strategy, requesting creative from the design team, having a developer code your HTML templates, and then waiting for an analyst to set up an A/B test,” said Shai Frank, SVP of Product and GM of the Americas at Optimove, in a recent episode of the Decoded podcast. “If it’s that hard, you’ll take the path of least resistance and just offer a flat discount or standardized promotion that doesn’t move the needle.”
In traditional workflows, marketers need to wait for a green light from another department before moving forward. These static and linear workflows are not equipped to the new customer journey, which spans channels and has many starts and stops. Rigid procedures and assembly-line processes have their place in manufacturing, but they have no place in a creative, interactive, and continuously evolving field like marketing. Marketers need the power to understand and reach customers at critical moments in the experience, whether they’re researching products at a high level, comparing brands, or finally adding items to their cart. Along that path, marketing needs to meet customers with those right messages at the right time.
Just take notes from beauty giant Sephora: its omnichannel approach is structured so that when a consumer walks into a retail store, associates know exactly what the individual bought, browsed, or bookmarked on the Sephora mobile app or website, and can tailor the experience accordingly. When customers leave the store, they continue to receive hyper-tailored offers and messages that align with their favorite brands, past purchases, and key behaviors.
It’s that 360-degree view that helps deliver personalized experiences at scale: the new mandate for brand relevance and resonance. To replicate Sephora’s stellar experience and acquire equally loyal brand fans, marketers must be curious, fast-moving generalists who can take a moment of insight or inspiration, like a timely social media trend, and turn it into their next big campaign idea.
“If your entire team is made up of deep specialists rather than more adaptable generalists, or ‘Positionless’ workers, then flexibility and curiosity aren't baked into how they operate,” said Hoyne.
“This shift isn't new, but as the value of adaptability rises, companies that over-specialize are not only going to struggle with the transition but may resist it outright and miss opportunities. They’re trying to force the world to align with their view, instead of evolving to meet what customers actually want.”
Embracing the New Marketing Mandate
Enter the new marketing mandate: Positionless Marketing. Rather than being fixed in their roles and relying on other departments for approvals and permissions, Positionless Marketers use a combination of AI tools, technologies, and platforms to manage all aspects of campaign execution, from initial ideation to performance analysis. This enables them to deliver rich, personalized experiences at scale; a discipline that is equal parts art and science.
Enhanced by AI, marketers now have tools to engage and serve shoppers in real-time and deliver the right messages at key moments in the browsing and buying journey. These tools also help shape and optimize creative and campaigns based on how users respond. Sluggish processes that cause days, even weeks of delays, no longer have a place in business. Today, it’s all about speed, agility, and reading the context clues customers leave across branded and third-party platforms to craft hyper-relevant outreach and messaging.
A Positionless approach blends firm facts and data with creative thinking and problem-solving; it unites beautiful brand aesthetics with impactful calls-to-action and incentives like pricing, promotions, and even gamification—a powerful lever for driving customer engagement and even conversion.
Offering interactive, buzzy experiences is one of the most mutually beneficial strategies to deploy, as gamified strategies can boost customer engagement rates by 48%. The reward is twofold: Customers get deeper, more meaningful interactions with your brand, while your marketing team gets rich zero-party data about your core audience.
However, Positionless Marketing isn’t about acting on a whim and asking for forgiveness later; it’s about knowing the customer and anticipating their needs and demands so you can quickly react without creating additional burden for your colleagues.
“Brands can now analyze customer behavior at an unprecedented level, delivering messages, offers, and experiences tailored to individual preferences,” said Nikolas Badminton, a renowned futurist and consultant. “Machine learning is also transforming how campaigns are managed. Marketers can use it to adjust campaigns in real-time based on consumer behavior, making their efforts more relevant and impactful. Beyond that, predictive analytics helps businesses identify trends before they happen, automate repetitive tasks, and focus more on creativity and innovation. At this point, machine learning isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for staying competitive in a data-driven world.”
Optimove’s Frank also explained that embracing Positionless Marketing doesn’t make other departments redundant or obsolete. The goal is to alleviate minute or burdensome tasks that typically bog down other team members. For instance, “we’re not suggesting firing all designers, but there are mundane tasks that they hate to do,” he explained. “If I’m a marketer and I say, ‘I want to run an A/B test, so I need this product image to sit on four different backgrounds,’ that sort of task isn’t fun for designers. They’d much rather design a new banner or more creative experience.”
A Positionless approach cuts through red tape while empowering team members with the time and bandwidth they need to do their best work and capitalize on opportunities to engage and influence customers in the moment. Freed from manual and arduous tasks, empowers them to free their minds (and schedules) to develop innovative campaigns and strategies that will drive consumer attraction, engagement, and conversion.
Positionless Marketers bring the art and science of marketing together. They are strategists and creators. They drive big ideas but also execute to drive long-term optimization. They can do anything, and be everything. Because at the end of the day, your customers aren’t waiting–so neither should you.
“Let’s look at the Renaissance Man or Woman; those greater-than-life individuals like Leonardo da Vinci and the people who were mathematicians, philosophers, painters, and musicians. It’s a celebration of the wide gamut of human talent. That is what this could be. This could be a way to unlock our multipotentiality.”
- Pini Yakuel, Founder and CEO of Optimove
The Three Powers of Positionless Marketing
A core aspect of Positionless Marketing is using a suite of AI tools at marketers’ disposal today, such as generative AI ones like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Gemini, and more, to jumpstart campaign ideation, enable faster and more data analysis, and accelerate asset creation. But beyond generative tools, Positionless Marketers can also equip themselves with dynamic, foundational AI-powered customer data platforms that put data and rich customer insights at the heart of everything they do.
The best way to embrace AI is to use it to streamline existing processes and workflows, not completely overhaul them, according to Hoyne. Ideally, marketing teams would use AI to enhance core competencies and existing value props; not simply use ChatGPT better or more frequently than competitors.
With machine learning quickly becoming the foundation of modern marketing organizations, the primary powers of Positionless Marketing include:
1. Data Power
Data is the lifeblood of marketing strategies and essential for stellar campaign performance–and a critical factor in delivering personalized experiences at scale. However, in traditional team structures, marketers are stuck waiting on overburdened data engineers to extract and analyze the information and insights needed to guide campaign decision making.
Positionless Marketers can independently access and use dynamic customer insights to design and implement the hyper-personalized experiences customers are looking for. The right platform will also empower teams to precisely create and target specific segments while also enabling real-time pattern identification and responses, so they can dynamically build and adjust campaigns grounded in real insights.
2. Creative Power
Marketing is an inherently creative field where out-of-the-box thinkers and visionaries shine. They know how to craft messaging that will be a hit with customers at key moments in the shopping journey. And they know how to deliver the best messages and incentives to the most impactful formats and amplification channels.
In positioned-based structures, marketers need to pitch their ideas to a design team, wait for mock-ups, provide feedback on a proposed draft, and then run through the process a few more times until it’s ready for launch.
But when marketers can turn to generative AI platforms as their trusted partners in asset creation, they can rapidly iterate creative concepts and accelerate design processes. Beyond the sheer speed of these new workflows, AI platforms can help marketers ensure deliverables align with specific standards, maintain brand consistency, and fully deliver upon the initial vision they had in mind for a project—all while tailoring the content specifically to each prospect or customer.
3. Optimization Power
Another laborious part of modern marketing workflows is campaign analysis and optimization. Mining through data and KPIs to determine what’s resonating with the target audience and what’s falling short of expectations takes a lot of time. Time that would be better spent on iterating and bringing new concepts to market.
Historically, marketers have had to depend on analyst teams to communicate how campaigns are performing and offer suggested improvements. But by adopting AI-powered technology that self-optimizes campaigns through automated testing, marketers can quickly identify performance short-comings and receive suggested tweaks, and then quickly augment customer-facing campaigns to ensure relevance. This frees marketers to do what they do best: drive the strategic deployment of campaigns and strategies, while intelligent platforms handle tactical optimization.
“Machine learning is becoming the foundation of modern marketing, embedding intelligence into every step of the process,” said Badminton. “What excites me most is how it allows marketers to move from reactive to proactive strategies. Instead of guessing what works, machine learning helps brands predict trends, fine-tune campaigns in real-time, and personalize interactions at an incredible scale.”
By harnessing these three key levers, marketers can be more agile, strategic players in their organization and serve up the dynamic experiences customers crave. Rather than focusing on singular campaigns and tactics, they can become holistic thinkers and brand shepherds that design relevant, compelling campaigns at scale.
Accelerating the Campaign Execution From 6 Weeks to 24 Hours
“We had so many teams passing information from one to another, and that caused them to be dependent on clear documentation, strong briefs, and proper and strict planning sessions,” explained Georgi Pepelyankov, Head of Marketing at FDJ United, a gaming and sports betting operator with 33 million players worldwide. “With tight deadlines, it created bottlenecks. If one team missed their deadline, then everybody was late. We knew this waterflow approach was spurred by our internal technology limitations, as well as some external factors, but we knew we needed to transform from an assembly line-based team into empowering marketers with autonomous capabilities to self-execute.”
In other words, current marketing teams have too many cooks in the kitchen, and it’s burning the customer experience—not to mention burning out teams. There’s nothing worse than waiting for a simple request, such as a quick graphic from the design team, only to have to sit on your hands because your colleague is bogged down by a bigger, higher priority project. It’s these simple tasks that might be too complex to do at your desk that are easily simplified by adopting the right AI-powered tools and technologies.
In FDJ United’s circumstance, Pepelyankov realized that convoluted processes, massively overlapping tech stack, and slow, manual workflows severely delayed campaign execution. To accelerate strategies and deployment, he defined three main transformation principles that would set his team up for Positionless success:
- Standardize procedures and technologies
- Pare down the complex martech ecosystem
- Reimagine how teams actually work together and collaborate.
To move away from its traditionally complex processes, FDJ United adopted a new technology stack, composed of a solution built in-house alongside an AI-powered customer data provider, to streamline innovation and optimize workflows.
With these new technologies supporting Positionless Marketing initiatives and end-to-end campaign management, FDJ United was able to shorten its usual six-week campaign creation process to just 24 hours, driving a 600% ROI.
Turn Waste into Wins
Customers won’t wait for marketing teams to understand and respond to their needs. If content, campaigns, and experiences aren’t relevant to what they think, feel, and expect, they will seek alternatives faster than marketers can develop a new campaign brief.
Modern marketers need to transcend traditional roles and become hyper-execution powerhouses. Now more than ever, they need to eliminate the bottlenecks that impede creativity and block the idea-to-outcome pipeline. When teams become Positionless and embrace AI-powered technology and data platforms, they can accelerate innovation, optimize and automate key processes, and design relevant, immersive, and timely campaigns that effectively engage consumers in the moment, no matter where they are.
Consider the arrival of Positionless Marketing as your career independence day: When people are equipped to do anything, they can be everything. Your moment is now.
“We have this nearly insatiable belief that if we acquire a customer and give them enough love and attention, they will love us back. We see a customer buy a heavily discounted product with a promotional code, so we’ll add their information to our CRM and market the hell out of them until they buy more. But in reality, first impressions are highly indicative of customer behavior.”
- Neil Hoyne, Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Author of Converted
The scenario is all too familiar: You’ve purchased a big-ticket, high-consideration purchase—say, a new smart TV. It’s something you’ve spent a long time researching and (hopefully) you won’t need to buy another one for a few years. But days, weeks, even months after the fact, you continue to be bombarded with promotional emails offering post-purchase upsells or discounts on other TV models. You even start to receive targeted ads serving up other alternatives everywhere you go online, including social media.
“Overwhelming” and “annoying” are both understatements; just ask the 89% of consumers who unsubscribe due to repetitive offers.
Spray-and-pray communication is officially obsolete, with 65% of customers seeing targeted promotions as a top reason to make a purchase. As marketers strive to create digital experiences as nuanced and engaging as high-touch, in-person service, they need to go deeper and understand consumers on an intrinsic level. This is the only way they can ensure they’re engaging with people in the right way, right from the start, to form a strong long-term relationship, even as they venture across different commerce and media channels. After all, each consumer has a unique context that ultimately drives their needs, behaviors, and preferences, and brands need to tailor their campaigns and interactions accordingly.
To effectively serve customers in the moment across channels and deliver true personalization at scale, marketers need to evolve from order-takers to relationship builders. They need access to data and insights that help them gain more context into customer preferences and behaviors. Additionally, they need robust tools that empower them to make bold creative moves and rapidly launch and evolve campaigns when new opportunities strike across channels.
Leading-edge teams are circumventing the static and assembly-line marketing structures of the industrial era by using AI-powered technologies that empower them to achieve hyper-execution. They’re not just keeping pace and responding to new consumer behaviors and expectations. With flexibility and dynamism, they’re staying ahead of the curve and proactively anticipating customer needs to delight them in unexpected ways on their branded eCommerce sites, mobile apps, social media, and beyond.
Welcome to the era of Positionless Marketing, which is powered by speed and creative excellence. It’s a new philosophy and approach that empowers marketers to do anything and be everything.
This guide is a companion to our five-part podcast series: Decoded Season 4—Positionless Marketing. Listen to the full series on the Future Commerce site or on Apple and Spotify.
Rethinking Traditional Team Modes and Models
The goal of marketing, on its surface, seems simple: connect with consumers in a meaningful way. This premise has always been easier said than done, but it is especially true today as consumer behaviors are more fragmented, spanning different channels, apps, and touchpoints.
Because commerce is embedded into so many new interfaces and experiences, the traditional marketing funnel has collapsed and the once-linear shopping journey is now an endless cycle. Customers can go from inspiration to conversion in a snap, and they’re looking for brands to provide the best offer, message, and incentive in that moment. When you couple this with the fact that many organizations still operate marketing as siloed and regimented assembly lines, marketers simply are not empowered to move at the speed shoppers now expect.
Brands need to interact with customers in real-time and emulate a great salesperson—something that’s impossible to achieve when every step requires assistance or buy-in from another department.
With 77% of customers expecting to have a thoughtful interaction immediately when they contact a company, marketers can’t risk entering a never-ending loop of internal logistics that impedes response times. In many cases, a lack of swift action leaves brands missing out on new opportunities to reach, engage, and convert customers. After all, we’re living in a world where consumers’ minds change in a second, whether it’s because they saw a new influencer post or received a new recommendation from AI.
Waiting for layers of insights, inputs, and approvals from data engineers, creatives, campaign managers, merchandising teams, analysts, and other stakeholders, holds marketers back and leaves revenue up for grabs.
“It’s really hard to get a campaign or promotion out the door if you have to go through an assembly line of pulling a list, sending it to merchandising for a promo strategy, requesting creative from the design team, having a developer code your HTML templates, and then waiting for an analyst to set up an A/B test,” said Shai Frank, SVP of Product and GM of the Americas at Optimove, in a recent episode of the Decoded podcast. “If it’s that hard, you’ll take the path of least resistance and just offer a flat discount or standardized promotion that doesn’t move the needle.”
In traditional workflows, marketers need to wait for a green light from another department before moving forward. These static and linear workflows are not equipped to the new customer journey, which spans channels and has many starts and stops. Rigid procedures and assembly-line processes have their place in manufacturing, but they have no place in a creative, interactive, and continuously evolving field like marketing. Marketers need the power to understand and reach customers at critical moments in the experience, whether they’re researching products at a high level, comparing brands, or finally adding items to their cart. Along that path, marketing needs to meet customers with those right messages at the right time.
Just take notes from beauty giant Sephora: its omnichannel approach is structured so that when a consumer walks into a retail store, associates know exactly what the individual bought, browsed, or bookmarked on the Sephora mobile app or website, and can tailor the experience accordingly. When customers leave the store, they continue to receive hyper-tailored offers and messages that align with their favorite brands, past purchases, and key behaviors.
It’s that 360-degree view that helps deliver personalized experiences at scale: the new mandate for brand relevance and resonance. To replicate Sephora’s stellar experience and acquire equally loyal brand fans, marketers must be curious, fast-moving generalists who can take a moment of insight or inspiration, like a timely social media trend, and turn it into their next big campaign idea.
“If your entire team is made up of deep specialists rather than more adaptable generalists, or ‘Positionless’ workers, then flexibility and curiosity aren't baked into how they operate,” said Hoyne.
“This shift isn't new, but as the value of adaptability rises, companies that over-specialize are not only going to struggle with the transition but may resist it outright and miss opportunities. They’re trying to force the world to align with their view, instead of evolving to meet what customers actually want.”
Embracing the New Marketing Mandate
Enter the new marketing mandate: Positionless Marketing. Rather than being fixed in their roles and relying on other departments for approvals and permissions, Positionless Marketers use a combination of AI tools, technologies, and platforms to manage all aspects of campaign execution, from initial ideation to performance analysis. This enables them to deliver rich, personalized experiences at scale; a discipline that is equal parts art and science.
Enhanced by AI, marketers now have tools to engage and serve shoppers in real-time and deliver the right messages at key moments in the browsing and buying journey. These tools also help shape and optimize creative and campaigns based on how users respond. Sluggish processes that cause days, even weeks of delays, no longer have a place in business. Today, it’s all about speed, agility, and reading the context clues customers leave across branded and third-party platforms to craft hyper-relevant outreach and messaging.
A Positionless approach blends firm facts and data with creative thinking and problem-solving; it unites beautiful brand aesthetics with impactful calls-to-action and incentives like pricing, promotions, and even gamification—a powerful lever for driving customer engagement and even conversion.
Offering interactive, buzzy experiences is one of the most mutually beneficial strategies to deploy, as gamified strategies can boost customer engagement rates by 48%. The reward is twofold: Customers get deeper, more meaningful interactions with your brand, while your marketing team gets rich zero-party data about your core audience.
However, Positionless Marketing isn’t about acting on a whim and asking for forgiveness later; it’s about knowing the customer and anticipating their needs and demands so you can quickly react without creating additional burden for your colleagues.
“Brands can now analyze customer behavior at an unprecedented level, delivering messages, offers, and experiences tailored to individual preferences,” said Nikolas Badminton, a renowned futurist and consultant. “Machine learning is also transforming how campaigns are managed. Marketers can use it to adjust campaigns in real-time based on consumer behavior, making their efforts more relevant and impactful. Beyond that, predictive analytics helps businesses identify trends before they happen, automate repetitive tasks, and focus more on creativity and innovation. At this point, machine learning isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for staying competitive in a data-driven world.”
Optimove’s Frank also explained that embracing Positionless Marketing doesn’t make other departments redundant or obsolete. The goal is to alleviate minute or burdensome tasks that typically bog down other team members. For instance, “we’re not suggesting firing all designers, but there are mundane tasks that they hate to do,” he explained. “If I’m a marketer and I say, ‘I want to run an A/B test, so I need this product image to sit on four different backgrounds,’ that sort of task isn’t fun for designers. They’d much rather design a new banner or more creative experience.”
A Positionless approach cuts through red tape while empowering team members with the time and bandwidth they need to do their best work and capitalize on opportunities to engage and influence customers in the moment. Freed from manual and arduous tasks, empowers them to free their minds (and schedules) to develop innovative campaigns and strategies that will drive consumer attraction, engagement, and conversion.
Positionless Marketers bring the art and science of marketing together. They are strategists and creators. They drive big ideas but also execute to drive long-term optimization. They can do anything, and be everything. Because at the end of the day, your customers aren’t waiting–so neither should you.
“Let’s look at the Renaissance Man or Woman; those greater-than-life individuals like Leonardo da Vinci and the people who were mathematicians, philosophers, painters, and musicians. It’s a celebration of the wide gamut of human talent. That is what this could be. This could be a way to unlock our multipotentiality.”
- Pini Yakuel, Founder and CEO of Optimove
The Three Powers of Positionless Marketing
A core aspect of Positionless Marketing is using a suite of AI tools at marketers’ disposal today, such as generative AI ones like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Gemini, and more, to jumpstart campaign ideation, enable faster and more data analysis, and accelerate asset creation. But beyond generative tools, Positionless Marketers can also equip themselves with dynamic, foundational AI-powered customer data platforms that put data and rich customer insights at the heart of everything they do.
The best way to embrace AI is to use it to streamline existing processes and workflows, not completely overhaul them, according to Hoyne. Ideally, marketing teams would use AI to enhance core competencies and existing value props; not simply use ChatGPT better or more frequently than competitors.
With machine learning quickly becoming the foundation of modern marketing organizations, the primary powers of Positionless Marketing include:
1. Data Power
Data is the lifeblood of marketing strategies and essential for stellar campaign performance–and a critical factor in delivering personalized experiences at scale. However, in traditional team structures, marketers are stuck waiting on overburdened data engineers to extract and analyze the information and insights needed to guide campaign decision making.
Positionless Marketers can independently access and use dynamic customer insights to design and implement the hyper-personalized experiences customers are looking for. The right platform will also empower teams to precisely create and target specific segments while also enabling real-time pattern identification and responses, so they can dynamically build and adjust campaigns grounded in real insights.
2. Creative Power
Marketing is an inherently creative field where out-of-the-box thinkers and visionaries shine. They know how to craft messaging that will be a hit with customers at key moments in the shopping journey. And they know how to deliver the best messages and incentives to the most impactful formats and amplification channels.
In positioned-based structures, marketers need to pitch their ideas to a design team, wait for mock-ups, provide feedback on a proposed draft, and then run through the process a few more times until it’s ready for launch.
But when marketers can turn to generative AI platforms as their trusted partners in asset creation, they can rapidly iterate creative concepts and accelerate design processes. Beyond the sheer speed of these new workflows, AI platforms can help marketers ensure deliverables align with specific standards, maintain brand consistency, and fully deliver upon the initial vision they had in mind for a project—all while tailoring the content specifically to each prospect or customer.
3. Optimization Power
Another laborious part of modern marketing workflows is campaign analysis and optimization. Mining through data and KPIs to determine what’s resonating with the target audience and what’s falling short of expectations takes a lot of time. Time that would be better spent on iterating and bringing new concepts to market.
Historically, marketers have had to depend on analyst teams to communicate how campaigns are performing and offer suggested improvements. But by adopting AI-powered technology that self-optimizes campaigns through automated testing, marketers can quickly identify performance short-comings and receive suggested tweaks, and then quickly augment customer-facing campaigns to ensure relevance. This frees marketers to do what they do best: drive the strategic deployment of campaigns and strategies, while intelligent platforms handle tactical optimization.
“Machine learning is becoming the foundation of modern marketing, embedding intelligence into every step of the process,” said Badminton. “What excites me most is how it allows marketers to move from reactive to proactive strategies. Instead of guessing what works, machine learning helps brands predict trends, fine-tune campaigns in real-time, and personalize interactions at an incredible scale.”
By harnessing these three key levers, marketers can be more agile, strategic players in their organization and serve up the dynamic experiences customers crave. Rather than focusing on singular campaigns and tactics, they can become holistic thinkers and brand shepherds that design relevant, compelling campaigns at scale.
Accelerating the Campaign Execution From 6 Weeks to 24 Hours
“We had so many teams passing information from one to another, and that caused them to be dependent on clear documentation, strong briefs, and proper and strict planning sessions,” explained Georgi Pepelyankov, Head of Marketing at FDJ United, a gaming and sports betting operator with 33 million players worldwide. “With tight deadlines, it created bottlenecks. If one team missed their deadline, then everybody was late. We knew this waterflow approach was spurred by our internal technology limitations, as well as some external factors, but we knew we needed to transform from an assembly line-based team into empowering marketers with autonomous capabilities to self-execute.”
In other words, current marketing teams have too many cooks in the kitchen, and it’s burning the customer experience—not to mention burning out teams. There’s nothing worse than waiting for a simple request, such as a quick graphic from the design team, only to have to sit on your hands because your colleague is bogged down by a bigger, higher priority project. It’s these simple tasks that might be too complex to do at your desk that are easily simplified by adopting the right AI-powered tools and technologies.
In FDJ United’s circumstance, Pepelyankov realized that convoluted processes, massively overlapping tech stack, and slow, manual workflows severely delayed campaign execution. To accelerate strategies and deployment, he defined three main transformation principles that would set his team up for Positionless success:
- Standardize procedures and technologies
- Pare down the complex martech ecosystem
- Reimagine how teams actually work together and collaborate.
To move away from its traditionally complex processes, FDJ United adopted a new technology stack, composed of a solution built in-house alongside an AI-powered customer data provider, to streamline innovation and optimize workflows.
With these new technologies supporting Positionless Marketing initiatives and end-to-end campaign management, FDJ United was able to shorten its usual six-week campaign creation process to just 24 hours, driving a 600% ROI.
Turn Waste into Wins
Customers won’t wait for marketing teams to understand and respond to their needs. If content, campaigns, and experiences aren’t relevant to what they think, feel, and expect, they will seek alternatives faster than marketers can develop a new campaign brief.
Modern marketers need to transcend traditional roles and become hyper-execution powerhouses. Now more than ever, they need to eliminate the bottlenecks that impede creativity and block the idea-to-outcome pipeline. When teams become Positionless and embrace AI-powered technology and data platforms, they can accelerate innovation, optimize and automate key processes, and design relevant, immersive, and timely campaigns that effectively engage consumers in the moment, no matter where they are.
Consider the arrival of Positionless Marketing as your career independence day: When people are equipped to do anything, they can be everything. Your moment is now.
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