CONVERSATION ONE

Mark Ritson and Darren chat about the importance of mastering marketing principles

Professor Mark Ritson¹ is opinionated, entertaining and outspoken on the issues facing marketing, advertising and media. Here, Mark talks to me about the challenges facing marketing, and the importance of mastering the principles of marketing in order to deal with these challenges, which is why he developed his Mini MBA in Marketing.

I met up with Mark at a television industry event he was speaking at, one of the many keynotes he does every month. Public speaking, regular contributions to The Australian newspaper and Marketing Week in the UK – you have to wonder how Mark finds the time to do consulting work for the many brands he helps around the world. I asked him if he was interested in coming into the TrinityP3 office one day to record a conversation. He immediately accepted the offer, but it was a couple of months before he found a gap in his schedule. The conversation focused on an article he had written for Marketing Week in which he observed that a recent published list of marketing experts included only a handful who actually had recognised marketing qualifications. So that was the topic of our chat – the importance of mastering marketing principles if you want to call yourself a marketer.

The conversation

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing. Today I’m chatting with the opinionated, passionate and always entertaining Professor Mark Ritson. Welcome Mark.

Mark:

Gidday mate, how are you?

Darren:

I’m very well. Now were you born in Lancaster?

Mark:

No, I’m a Lake District boy. I was born in a town called White Haven which is in West Cumbria.

Darren:

Okay, so how do you end up doing a BSc [Bachelor of Science] in marketing at Lancaster University?

Mark:

Well, I always wanted to do marketing. I can’t explain why, I just knew that when I left school. Lancaster was quite close in Pommy terms.

Darren:

Just down the road.

Mark:

A hundred miles away, which is a long way when you are a working-class boy from Cumbria, but it was the first marketing department set up in the UK. There were like 25 electives on my degree in 1989, which you just don’t get, even today, in marketing departments. So I did that and really enjoyed it and went to work in London for NCR marketing cash machines, which wasn’t that interesting.

I then got a scholarship to go to Wharton to do an MBA [Master of Business Administration] when I was 23. But Wharton were quite correctly concerned that I was about six years too young to do an MBA and so they said, ‘Look, you’ll just have to wait and get a bit older’.

Darren:

Get more experience.

Mark:

They basically said, ‘Work a bit more and we will squeeze you in when we can’. It was decimating to me because I was ready to go to Philadelphia. Then Lancaster said, ‘Well, if you want to do postgraduate stuff, there is a PhD [Doctor of Philosophy] scholarship’. So I started a PhD at 23, finished at 27, then Wharton said, ‘You’ve still got two years of full funding. Would you like to do part of your PhD at Wharton?’ Which, at the time, was the number-one business school in the world. So I finished my PhD there, got a couple of good offers from very good schools in America, and found myself working as a professor in marketing at the University of Minnesota.

The science of marketing?

Darren:

I did a Bachelor of Science, but mine was to do medical research. Everyone talks about marketing being an art and a science, but so many people who come to marketing through a tertiary course are often focused on commerce, on business, not the science aspect. I’m just wondering, do you distinguish a difference there or not?

Mark:

Well, it’s here you begin to see how clever Lancaster was. You actually got to choose. You could have a BA [Bachelor of Arts] or a BSc when you finished. Frankly, I picked BSc because it sounds more impressive than BA.

Darren:

What’s the joke? BA qualifies you to do …

Mark:

Bugger all.

Darren:

Fry chips at McDonald’s.

Mark:

That’s basically it, and if it’s a choice, I’ll have a BSc. But I do believe the science stuff and the creative stuff are overstated and the answer is somewhere between the two. The vision of marketing science expounded by those like Professor Byron Sharp and so on is a childish view of science. Natural sciences, the study of rocks and gravity, is not the same as social sciences, the study of people. There are scientific elements that we can certainly borrow, but it is oversimplistic to try and create numerological laws of marketing.

I forgot now who wrote it, but the singular best paper on this had the title ‘Is marketing science? Is science marketing?’, and the point they made is that the whole scientific approach in social sciences is about winning people over and convincing them of your point of view. As Byron Sharp has done very well, convincing people that you are science and therefore they are wrong, which is a rhetorical non-scientific argument.

Darren:

As you say, there are aspects of science that can inform marketing, but marketing itself can’t be a pure science, and there is no unifying theory of marketing, is there.

Mark:

If there was, we would have been getting towards it by now.

Darren:

I think complexity theory as an understanding of marketing or the market is really interesting. Part of behavioural economics is the economics but there’s also the psychology of human beings, which is a little bit of a bridge between the two. It’s not pretending to be science.

Mark:

Yeah, you’re right, and I love that stuff from Rory Sutherland at Ogilvie and Richard Shot and those boys, but it’s trick photography for me. It’s little flicks of counterintuitive knowledge, it’s not that important.

I had a big discussion with Rory over social media this week about some ridiculous article in Campaign which looks really good because it’s a guy who’s the COO [Chief Operating Officer] of McCain’s talking about what we really need from a pitching process. It’s the biggest pile of wank I’ve ever read in my life. It includes things like, ‘It’s nice when clients give us book tokens and stuff as part of the process because it shows their appreciation’. And I’m like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ Rory’s point is, ‘But it’s some kind of behavioural economics thing to give a gift’, and I’m, ‘Yeah, it’s still fucking pathetic’.

Darren:

Isn’t that one of the issues, that the whole discipline has been overcome by opinion, and I’ll put my hand up because a lot of what I’m writing is opinion. But there’s actually not a lot that is supported by evidence.

Mark:

You do yourself a discredit. I think you are opinionated, but it’s founded on your firm and your experience and you’re not a dumb guy. You’re in a nice position not dissimilar to me in the sense that you are a humming bird that visits many flowers and from that comes not empiricism but a lot of experience and fact.

Darren:

I see trends.

Mark:

I say to my clients, ‘I’m Yoda’. I’m not smarter than the average person in the room. It’s just that I’ve worked for 10 multinationals that average 20 countries that each have 10 brands. And I’ve worked for them for a long time in some cases, so I’ve seen plans get developed, executed, learned, changed. You add that up and it comes to about 2500 years, which makes me Yoda.

I think that’s the thing that’s missing from a lot of our friends who are speculators and armchair experts. They are just talking shit, and it happens all the time.

The culture of opinion

Darren:

I think it’s actually much more sinister than that.

Mark:

Ah fuck, I thought I was being pretty bad.

Darren:

In that a lot of the opinion that’s getting out there is actually being driven by the desire for sales. I see it on LinkedIn every day, people saying to me, ‘Well you’ve got to build your business through this platform’, and sure enough if you dig down even in the most superficial manner, what have they got? They’ve got something they’re wanting to sell you in that particular platform.

Mark:

It’s true, it happens so much you almost don’t notice it. When we were fighting the battles of social media, it clearly wasn’t. I see social media as a marketing tool very different from digital media. It’s all semantics, but about seven or eight years ago we started to think it was going to change the world. And when you started arguing with these people I kept sensing it was a load of bullshit. I don’t make any money from it being or not being true but everyone that was replying to me, and ripping into me, worked for a social media company.

I’ve an even darker view. I just think a lot of people don’t know what they are talking about. My stock belief is that lots of people that work in marketing don’t know that much about marketing. I think the majority of them have never studied it, which doesn’t help.

Darren:

They don’t have the basic understanding.

Mark:

They don’t know anything. We keep having the same conversations.

I met some guy this year who’s desperate to do some course on marketing and to create a new model of marketing, and I’m like, ‘Look, my model’s from like 1986 from a bunch of professors who I think are really respected and they built it. You don’t even know or have ever been taught marketing or studied it. Why don’t you start there before you start creating a model of it. I think I’ve got 25 years to go before I’d even attempt that. What makes you think you can turn up and move things around?’

Darren:

Or even worse, not move things around, just imagine a whole new way of the world working. I think they are called flat-earthers in science and something else in medicine.

Mark:

Like the content marketing world. Content marketing is fundamentally nothing new, but because they don’t know anything about marketing originally, they’ve just reinvented names for everything that we already knew existed.

Darren:

Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack is one of the earliest examples of content marketing.

Mark:

Sure, it is.

Darren:

But there is a difference in that technology has made it possible for almost anyone to become a publisher, or anyone can become a broadcaster. The trouble is, should they?

Mark:

Podcasting is a great example, right? I could fill my life with podcast interviews. I’m only doing this one with you because you are a good dude and I would hope you’ll pull a good audience. There must be about 9000 podcasts on marketing, 8000 of which have asked me to talk to them at some point.

That’s a great lesson: there’s only room for two or three and the rest of them will go on till people realise, ‘Well, there’s not really any point in doing this’. Just because we can have a newspaper or social media following our podcast doesn’t mean we should. But then again, it’s great that it allows new channels to emerge outside of the traditional system.

Darren:

And gives new voice to different perspectives. But ultimately, if they have any value then they’ll succeed, and if they don’t, they will just wither on the vine.

Mark:

They will. The hyper-competition means our media universe is more saturated, but it’s more interesting. I always talk about when we were young men, you would measure the share of pie, how much has gone to newspaper and how much has gone to TV.

Darren:

Share of voice.

Mark:

But you knew you’d end up getting your media share and it was presented as a pie chart, right? And we stopped doing that for the simple reason that it’s all in line charts now because it’s moving. If you shared a pie for 25 years up until 2007, it was the same pie. Now we have to show it as a line chart because it’s fucking moving up, digital is going up, news is going down, and TV’s doing that.

Darren:

Well, a pie now comes in a thousand different sizes or flavours.

Mark:

You can break it up into all those horrible charts that say, ‘Here’s the digital media universe’, and it’s like, what is the point of that? Consumers and viewers aren’t going, ‘Oh, I’m going to watch digital media today rather than whatever we think is non-digital’. There isn’t any non-digital media anyway. There’s this uncomfortable point that we have to accept.

I start my classes with my students by saying, ‘Give me the main forms of traditional’, and they say, ‘Newspapers’. Well, they are more digital now than traditional. Radio? Well, radio in the UK is now more digitally delivered than broadcast. For me, it’s the triumph of the moment when digital became everything and therefore became nothing. It’s a fascinating time.

Darren:

It’s interesting from our perspective because we still see a lot of marketing departments where there is a digital stream or a digital group. It’s almost like so many marketing departments have ended up siloed either because the organisation has siloed or because they’ve aligned themselves by channel or product, and then they bolt on digital. In actual fact, digital has become almost irrelevant because almost everything they are doing in marketing communications has digital.

Mark:

And I’m seeing it first-hand. Without naming names, a number of big marketing departments with big digital departments are in the process, comfortably or not, of merging together. And what it means is that half of these digital strategists will become the heads of strategy generally and half of them will lose their jobs.

Darren:

That’s great because there are so many different strategists. You know, the idea of having a marketing strategy and then there used to be a comms strategy or a channel strategy, but now you’ve got a social media strategy and a digital strategy. And of course, all those strategies are not really strategies because it’s like, if you’re a hammer, then every problem’s a nail.

Strategy versus tactics

Mark:

That’s it. I have a very fundamentalist belief, which is that the minute we cross the threshold into communications, it’s a tactical realm – you can use the word ‘strategy’, but the reality is that strategy has been done. We are into execution and thinking and using our brain. The idea of a digital strategy or even for that matter an advertising strategy is to some degree a contradiction in terms.

Darren:

It’s really a plan, isn’t it, because planning and strategy seem to be interchangeable in the comms area.

Mark:

It’s something lower-level, and the problem with that is we don’t have any strategy in about 90% of Australian companies. No, I’ve said that wrong. I’ll be honest: I don’t work at the level where corporate strategy is set. I work at the level where marketing and brand strategy is set. So I can tell you with absolute certainty that more than 90% of large Australian companies above 50 million dollars of revenue, all the way to the top, have no actual marketing or brand strategy.

Darren:

It’s just a series of tactics.

Mark:

It’s a series of tactics, it’s a bunch of bullshit. It’s people who don’t know what they are doing, people who are distracted, and there aren’t plans in place. Talk to the agencies about what they get briefed on – not just the quality of the brief but the strategy, which is fundamentally the skeleton of the brief – and they will tell you that nine times out of 10, there isn’t a strategy there.

Literally, we have to create something, because these guys don’t actually have anything. And the last person you want doing a strategy is an advertising agency, but it is better than nothing.

Darren:

Well, what they are trying to do is bring sense to all the tactics: a post-rationalised structural framework that actually makes all these tactics look cohesive.

Mark:

And I have sympathy for these Australian agencies because they’ve had to do that. And one of the things you do with a client where they have finally got a strategy together is politely and firmly explain to the agency, ‘Listen pal, you don’t need to do your usual stuff; they know what the fuck they are doing this time’. And it’s not the agency’s fault that they are trying to swim upstream. It’s just that they are used to doing everything, right?

Darren:

Now I just want to go back to your Yoda comment, which I actually like just to visualise. Do you think, when you have that level of experience and exposure to such a diverse array of businesses and circumstances, the fact that you’ve got such a solid grounding in the principles and understandings of marketing makes the insights more insightful?

Mark:

I think it’s a good question. I have a big problem, and I think many clients have it, and let me give you an example to explain it.

This will be my 25th year of teaching MBA students, and one of the things you learn about teaching is that you never know how well or badly it’s going because you’re teaching the class. From the front, it always seems to be going really well. And my point is that when I first started teaching in America, I was absolutely fucking terrible. I used to go out with the students in the evenings and say to them, ‘How can I be less shit, literally?’, and they would tell me and I would pay attention and I’d improve. Twenty-five years later and I’ve won teaching prizes and yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s much harder for me to look at the feedback now. My reaction now is, ‘Fuck you. You think I should do this and I’m a fucking famous professor, and what do you know, you’re 28’.

And that’s my point. I think it’s great to have experience, but then the danger of it is you start to get arrogant and you start to think you know what you are seeing. And the great humility of marketing is the ability to know you know nothing. You have to always start from that point. That great physicist [Richard Feynman] said the easiest person to fool is yourself. I think the challenge of doing proper marketing diagnosis at the start is not jumping.

Aussies do this all the time. Senior Aussie marketers go, ‘Oh look mate, I’ve come from Coca-Cola and I haven’t really looked at the research too much but I know what’s going on. What we need to do is what we did at Coca-Cola, this and this and this’. Each brand is always literally different and each market is different, so the humility of marketing is really getting back to zero and going, ‘Right, I know nothing’.

Marketing orientation for me is fundamentally the starting point, and market orientation is that you are not the customer, and the fact that you are being paid to work for this company means you are now completely blind.

I work for a bank at the moment, a royal commissioner, and I have a particular take on it and I’m pretty certain it’s completely tainted by the fact that I work for that bank. As long as I know that, I will be alright – I am not the consumer.

Darren:

It’s the bias, isn’t it? That’s one of the things I love about science, that you are so self-obsessed that you are looking for everything that you actually do to influence the outcome of the experiment. It’s also the part that I loved about and attracted me to marketing – taking that type of awareness into an area which is totally unpredictable. I love chaotic, but you can’t operate in chaos; you can only operate in complexity.

Mark:

That’s a great point. Marketing orientation starts my process. I get tonnes of data then with the client, and you are right, there’s a chaotic sense particularly at the beginning with the data. But great analysis and insight is building a structure organically from the data which ends with segmentation. Segmentation is the end of the diagnosis point because it produces order out of that chaos.

No-one understands segmentation. It’s got nothing to do with the company. If I’m working for Woolworths, I should build exactly the same segmentation that Coles does. Market segmentation is about the market. It’s the end of the understanding, and that’s the point where the chaos has been made sensible.

Darren:

What you are describing there is really the starting point of the scientific method: observe, make a hypothesis based on the observation, and find ways of testing it. The trouble is, when you come to experimentation, it’s very hard to have a null set when human beings are human beings. You can’t have a separate market over here that you don’t influence.

Mark:

Max Planck is the guy to read on this. The stuff on nutrition, how an American, I forget his name, basically pushed the idea that low fat, high sugar was the way to lose weight. And there was an English guy who died penniless who argued that that was not true, that actually, high-fat food counterintuitively didn’t necessarily make you fat or unhealthy, but he lost out because the scientists using apparently the scientific method in America were all trained by each other; they were all part of a little happy group. And Max Planck makes the point that it’s only when these guys literally die that you have a chance to replace them 35 or 40 years later in schools of nutrition with an alternative point of view.

The scientific method by and large is a load of wank. The rationality of it is entirely post-hoc even in the natural sciences, never mind in the sciences we work in today. You look at how things have been developed in science. People have an inherent bias.

Darren:

The peer-review component is what you are talking about.

Mark:

Totally.

Darren:

When everyone gets on board, and we’ve seen that throughout history. Take Copernicus. He was the one that told us the sun didn’t revolve around the earth, that the earth actually revolved around the sun. But because it wasn’t the prevailing belief at the time, no-one gave it any attention.

Mark:

And we do get there eventually, but not in a smooth way. When I was a younger professor, getting work published, some of my best reviews for very big journals in America resulted in rejection and there was no explanation. They just said, ‘It’s a great paper, very interesting, we are not going to publish that’.

We got close with the Quality Journal of Economics, which is God’s journal of economics, and I was doing work on pricing, maybe the best set of reviews I’ve ever had. I said to my co-author, Mark Burger, ‘Holy shit, these guys love it’. And he went, ‘No, they’ve rejected the paper’. It’s like, ‘Why?’

Darren:

Ah yes, people are people aren’t they. Human beings will always be flawed.

Mark:

Unfortunately, and their flaws are interesting.

The Mini MBA – making marketing great

Darren:

You mentioned the MBA students because you were mainly lecturing in marketing to MBA and EMBA [Executive MBA] at Melbourne Business School.

Mark:

That’s right.

Darren:

But you are also running this Mini MBA which I’ve heard a lot of positive things about.

Mark:

Well that’s good, thanks for mentioning it.

Darren:

The reason I ask is that, first of all from a personal perspective, I’m fascinated because I love the idea of giving people at least a framework of marketing that they can apply.

Mark:

That’s why we started it.

Darren:

What are you seeing from that? Because it must be amazing seeing people who have worked in industry, worked in marketing, worked in media, coming through that course. How long does it run for, how many weeks do you have?

Mark:

It’s a total of 12 weeks. It’s the course I’ve taught at London Business School, at MIT. I’ve never taught it in Melbourne before because I’ve always taught the Brand elective. And it’s just such a great course with such a good structure. It’s not my course – it’s the course that any very good marketing professor would teach at a world-class school.

I’ll be honest with you: I did it partly because the textbooks of today are hopeless. I think, as we’ve already said, that most marketers don’t have good marketing knowledge. And frankly I started having babies with my wife and I couldn’t keep travelling overseas and I thought this would be a good way of creating a revenue stream where I don’t have to fly to America and so forth.

All of that has worked out. It’s a very successful program. We’ve a NPS [Net Promoter Score] right now and it’s more than plus 78.

Darren:

That’s amazing. Especially the bank you are working for, they will be happy with anything in the positive.

Mark:

Yes, they really would – anyone would take that score. We are very happy with that. We’ve had 3500 marketers who have gone through it so far, and we are picking up more and more through advocacy. And what’s really interesting is that the intimacy of the learning online means it’s better than being taught in a classroom. That’s the bit I wasn’t anticipating.

So you basically watch it all on apps and then you do an exam and stuff, but it’s me on green screen and things. The relationship you develop with the student and the impact on them is quite clearly now, and almost upsettingly, superior to the one you have with them in the classroom – than when you pull them into an amphitheatre and so on, as you would have in the 15th century, and shout at them for six days.

Marketing Management

Darren:

That’s $600 now.

Mark:

Yeah, and I recently re-read it, and it’s now written partly by Kotler who’s in semi-retirement and also by Kevin Keller who sort of replaced it. I love both of those men; I think they are fantastic thinkers and scholars and we owe so much to them. But their book is a pile of shit. It’s just been added to and amended, like a house that has just been expanded and expanded. It’s unreadable.

Darren:

Too many extensions.

Mark:

Too many, and even if it was still an era of books, asking a 28-year-old marketer to read a fucking giant 800-page textbook, that is not going to be our source of knowledge. So I really want Mini MBA – in my own little ambitious way, we have to have dreams – to get to America. America is the home of marketing and my activities would be largely a digital player, and if Americans learn it this way and I learn from Americans, that would be a complete circle for me. I would retire a happy man in 10 years’ time.

Darren:

Well, you’ve changed the world, haven’t you.

Mark:

I could have changed the world.

Darren:

Or at least changed the marketing world.

Mark:

I haven’t done anything yet but that would be a great thing to aim for. Not that I think it’s going to happen, but I’ll have a go.

Darren:

And a damn good shot. Mark, thanks very much. We’ve run out of time, but one final question. Where is the best place for anyone to start their marketing career?

Reference

1linkedin.com/in/markritson