Guest · Brand building
Mark Ritson
Founder, MiniMBA
A quarter of a century teaching and skewering marketing, from London Business School and MIT to MiniMBA, in defence of the fundamentals.
About
Mark Ritson is the founder of MiniMBA, the online marketing course he built from 25 years of teaching MBAs, and one of marketing's most recognisable voices as an academic, an operator and an unsparing critic. He is known for defending the fundamentals of marketing and puncturing the industry's appetite for hype.
Ritson taught for 25 years on the leafy campuses, at London Business School, MIT and Melbourne, winning teaching prizes along the way. He built his commercial reputation in luxury, working for Christian Dior and the Moët Hennessy houses, carrying the fashion idea of brand codes into names like Dom Perignon, Moët and Tag Heuer, and landing a large LVMH gig in Paris on the back, by his account, of his open lack of interest in luxury branding. For several years he trained McKinsey consultants through the marketing syllabus in cities from Madrid to Miami.
He then founded MiniMBA to bring high-level teaching to working marketers without the two years and six-figure cost of a campus. By his account the course now trains roughly 7,000 to 8,000 marketers a year, with time abolished, most material moved to audio, and AI used to reanimate long-dead experts to discuss their papers. Ritson also runs research with Ipsos across multiple markets which, he says, shows most marketers lack the fundamentals, and he is candid about coming from a working-class town in West Cumbria where the idea of depending on a job for identity strikes him as hilarious.
Career30 years
- 2016 to now MiniMBA Founder
- 2006 to 2019 Melbourne Business School Associate Professor
- 2009 to 2011 MIT Sloan School of Management Visiting Professor
- 1999 to 2005 London Business School Assistant Professor
Show earlier roles: University of Minnesota
- 1996 to 1999 University of Minnesota Assistant Professor
How Mark thinks3 convictions
-
The fundamentals still win
Ritson insists the basics need defending because most marketers were never taught them. He cites his own research suggesting a majority cannot define the four Ps, distinctive brand assets, positioning or a quantitative research method. Before anyone critiques a model, he argues, they should know what it is.
-
Play the brand codes
Ritson learned brand codes from the fashion houses and carried them into luxury spirits and watches. He argues that customers barely notice marketing, so the job is to build a palette of distinctive identifiers and repeat them relentlessly. Consistency, however boring, is the discipline other sectors miss.
-
Change is not accelerating
Ritson rejects the claim that marketing is changing faster than ever, pointing to the internet as an equally seismic moment. He argues that untrained marketers use the language of constant revolution to excuse never learning the discipline. Tactics move, he accepts, but they always have.
