The well-known marketing consultant and professor Mark Ritson delivered a raw, data-driven critique of the marketing industry at this week’s sold-out keynote for the Marketing Society of Ireland.
His presentation focused on five fundamental failures, stressing the need for marketers to return to “foundational principles.”
The Sin of Eternal Bias
Ritson slammed marketers for relying on their own feelings, suffering from an acute lack of “market orientation”, the focus on meeting customer needs. He insisted that marketers are the antithesis of the customer, making their own instincts “dangerously incorrect.”
The Problem Explained
According to Ritson, marketers live and breathe their brand but the customer barely notices it. “You have to do a 180-degree pivot – stop looking down at the market and start looking through the customers eyes at your brand,” he said.
The Strategic Vacuum – Tactics before Thought
Ritson also argued that most marketing budgets are wasted because teams jump straight into tactical execution without defining a clear strategy.
He said that success depends on a clear diagnosis (market research), strategy (who are we talking to?) and positioning (what do we stand for?)
He also advised attendees to stop creating “overcomplicated bullshit’” positioning and focus on simple distinctiveness, making the brand instantly recognisable and easy to choose.
The Sin of Impatience
According to Ritson, the drive for constant fresh creative and new campaigns is inancially ruinous. Ritson noted that marketers suffer from the ‘pornography of change’, tiring of an ad after several months when the customer actually needs years for memory and association to build. He said that brands could consider running a good ad for several years, rather than changing campaigns all the time. In doing so, brands need to use distinctive brand codes (colours, logos, music, taglines) seven times in a 30 second ad to ensure customers know who the ad is for instantly.
The short-term addiction: The Long and Short of it
Ritson said that marketers over-invest in immediate sales activations (the ‘short’) at the expense of brand building (the ‘long’), a failure to understand the proven law of effectiveness.
Brand building (the ‘long’), he said, uses emotional, top-of-funnel mass advertising to predispose future buyers to choose you. This is the source of long-term profit.
Sales Activation (the ‘short’) uses rational, targeted messaging to capture immediate demand, he said.
“Long delivers short; short does not deliver long,” he noted citing the LinkedIn B2B Institute’s 95/5 rule to challenge the inadequate budget split, arguing that brand-building investment is key to securing a long-term cash multiplier.
Bad Briefs – The Fixable Problem
The ultimate consequence of skipping the strategic steps is poor creative work. Ritson insisted the problem is solvable through discipline and training. He urged companies to focus on teaching the fundamental framework to fix the ‘extremely important and fixable problem of bad briefs’.
