Mark Ritson’s top 10 from ADMA Global Forum 2023

Whether you agree or disagree with him, Mark Ritson is a powerful presence in the Australian marketing community. During this year’s ADMA Global Forum, the former marketing professor and founder of the Marketing Mini MBA challenged several modern marketing approaches the industry has been relying on for the last 40 years.  

He also had time to provide sage advice on everything from doing the basics of marketing better, to the need for a learning mindset across marketing teams. Here, we pull out some of Ritson’s most provocative as well as insightful comments from the session.  

1. Even Ritson sees our industry changing 

Proffering himself as the “last guy in the world to talk about change”, Ritson is nevertheless seeing significant change across the marketing and advertising industry. To understand what needs a rethink, he started his presentation by referencing then challenging Phil Kotler’s three steps to successful marketing: Segment, target, then position.  

“This is how we played the game, if we knew what we were doing, for the last 40 or more years,” said Ritson. “I think it’s changing. 

“Segmentation is changing. We have to get away from this theoretical, overcomplex, unmeaningful complexity by either targeting all potential buyers or making more simple choices. Targeting is changing – we can’t do this exclusive bullshit anymore. Build brands for everyone, targeting specific segments for activation. 

“And positioning has to change. It’s the biggest action item… Pick the two or three things you want to position on to relatively win, map and match them with your brand codes and distinctive assets in order to have a chance and opportunity to truly differentiate your brand.”  

2. Ritson has decidedly fallen out of love with most segmentation 

One of the biggest issues Ritson identified was segmentation practices, labelling many “fundamentally pointless”. 

“I hold my hand up, it’s what I’ve said to my clients to do,” he said. “But there are two underlying problems with 90 per cent of segmentations in this room. The first is many are simply not actionable. A lot of what we were told about personalisation, microtargeting is horseshit. It’s not even close to being easy or possible. We can’t reach these groups. Even if we can, they’re not meaningful. The groups may be different in characteristics, but there is no meaningful impact on their behaviour from a marketing point of view. 

“Digital has given us the capability to slice and dice our market into 20, 30, 50 segments. But it’s also given us the evidence that none of it matters.”  

As an example, Ritson highlighted the UK-based Money Dashboard app and its work with Ladder. Discovering Facebook was the best channel for cost per acquisition, the digital agency accordingly built an array of display ads and optimised.  

“Much to their concern and amusement, possibly the worst ad they created pulled the best,” Ritson explained. This creative featured a four-word call to action – ‘be good with money’ - and pictures of either an expensive iPhone or old phone available to those who either excelled or failed at money management. The ad led to a more than 100-fold increase in weekly app installs and 65 per cent decrease in cost of acquisition. What’s more, it worked across all of Money Dashboard’s sophisticated behavioural segments.  

“Ladder reached the overwhelming conclusion the one best ad for one audience is the best for all audiences. They discovered this was the case for other clients for the most part,” Ritson said. “I’m not saying segmentation is total useless. I’m saying most segmentations done by most in the room is totally pointless and we’re finding it out.”  

3. Marketers need simpler, prosaic segmentation 

Ritson instead advocated for “prosaic segmentation” that is practical, simple and straightforward. Suggestions included former customers your brand has lost, newly diagnosed patients, those who bought from your business in 2021 but not 2022, competitor’s customers, those who bought X and Y services from your company but not Z, and website visitors but didn’t convert.  

Ritson also discussed the concept of sophisticated mass marketing. “There are highly sophisticated markets, where only a tiny fraction of the total population can or would be a consumer”. As an example he pointed to Procter & Gamble’s Pampers diapers brand. “In America, 10 per cent of all households are diapering households. What Marc Pritchard [CMO, P&G] said was Pampers was only reaching 5 per cent of those 10 per cent of households even though they were going after everyone. There is still an enormous amount of data-based marketing that has to be done to do mass marketing,” Ritson said.  

In contrast, there are markets with zero sophistication, where the markets and populations are pretty much one and the same.  

“Washing clothes, brushing teeth and using toilet paper are done by pretty much close to everyone on a regular basis so there is no reason to settle for such low reach. What Pritchard said here was he’s resetting the bar to achieve 90 per cent audience reach. This is the other side of the fence - mass marketing really is mass marketing.”   

4. Targeting is best suited to bottom of funnel 

Hand-in-hand with segmentation is the concept of targeting. Ritson’s recent research with Melbourne-based agency, Better Briefs, found 62 per cent of agencies receiving briefs from clients with targeted groups unclear. The research was done across almost 2000 agencies and brands in Australia.  

Adding complication in Ritson’s eyes is the concept of long and short introduced by Les Binet and Peter Field.  

“If you look at the short of it – sales activation – what you discover is targeting. The long is mass – if you’re going to build you brand and you can afford to do it, you should go after everyone in the category. The end,” he said. “But when it comes to bottom-of-funnel and selling product, I still believe heavily in targeting and segmentation at the prosaic level. It’s two-speed.”  

5. Differentiation is all relative 

Moving on to positioning, Ritson highlighted the debate between differentiation and distinctiveness as a key stumbling block for marketers.  

“Let me reassure you: There is nothing unique about your brand and even if there was, it would be copied,” he said.  “What is there? There is a lot of similarity and there’s also brand size effects. The big brands have stronger associations than the weak brands and you can control for that. There are relative differences nestling in the data if you have asked the right questions. 

“My brother-in-law is 5 foot 8, I’m 6 foot 2. I’m relatively taller than him. I haven’t invented height and he doesn’t lack height, I just have more of it than he has. That’s the concept to focus on.  

“There is nuance and things your customers want that you have relatively more of you can focus upon. This is the genesis of true, complex, advanced differentiation. And there are lower but interesting correlations with consideration or repurchase, or preference, that can be teased out of data. It’ll tell you where to focus and importantly, where not to, and how your positioning journey can begin.” 

That doesn’t mean differentiating on as many things as possible, however, Ritson warned. “Choose, one, two, three things and focus on them for a long time,” he said.   

6. It’s differentiation + distinctiveness  

The pendulum swinging more towards distinctiveness hasn’t helped the situation either, Ritson continued. “Look at the nutty stuff being written: Be distinctive, not different. Differentiation versus distinctiveness having a fight. You can be greedy – have both. You need both,” he said.   

“Distinctiveness is well laid out by Ehrenberg-Bass: Making your brand easily come to mind. A brand that looks like itself, coming to mind in buying situations, is a brilliant concept and we should all be aiming for it. It’s even more important than differentiation in most cases. But don’t give us up on differentiation.  

“This about two sidekicks working together to build your brand and your market.”   

7. Stop being impatient to change your messaging 

As well as saying less in communications, Ritson advocated for saying what you are positioning on more often, with more media.  

“Say them with 60 per cent of your budget to build your brands. Say them with better creative and across more than advertising, which is a relatively big touchpoint. Say it through service, product and everything else. Say it for much longer – years. We now know there is no such thing as wear out. If you have a good campaign and a good strategy there’s no reason it shouldn’t be running for five years other than your impatience and desire to make more useless shit.”  

8. Strategy and execution are equally important 

As to whether it’s strategy or execution that’s most important thing to get right, Ritson stressed the need for both.  

“Great execution won’t rescue a dumb strategy and a great strategy will not rescue bad execution. Unfortunately, both have to be pretty good. But what I’d say to marketers is you don’t have to be perfect. The problem with scientific marketing is it makes a lot of marketers worry if they have it right.  

“Do a good job of strategy. Do a good job of execution. You don’t have to be perfect. And you’ll do well. Then learn and get it better next time.”   

9. Brand and product are interdependent 

Just as strategy and execution depend on the strength of each other, Ritson said product and brand are equally immutable.  

“The brand changes perceptions of the product and vice versa,” he said. “What I would tell you is product is the most important touchpoint to brand.  

“At the end of the day, the product is 90 per cent of the game. You can’t get away from that if the product isn’t there. Are marketers involved in those product discussions is another question.”  

10. Imperfection and constant learning is key for young marketers  

With so many transformative shifts to navigate, it’s no wonder younger marketers feel apprehensive about what lies ahead. As a final point, Ritson advocates more marketers embrace a growth mindset.  

“Let’s assume Georgina is 25. She’s probably got 40 years or 40 marketing seasons in her. If she starts learning each year what worked and what didn’t, she’s going to be really good by the time she’s in that 45-50-year-old CMO territory. It’s not about intelligence, training or university. It’s the marketer that learns each year,” Ritson said.   

“The brand plan that starts with ‘here are my objectives from last year, whether I hit them or not, and what I learnt’ – that’s the marketer that’s going to make it.”