Mark Ritson

Mark Ritson (born 1971) is the discipline's contemporary integrator: the former professor and Marketing Week columnist who forces Kotler's theory and Sharp's empirics into one workable whole. His triad of diagnosis, strategy, tactics restores order to marketing plans, and his bothism, the position that apparent opposites like brand and activation or mass and niche are usually both true, is a methodical brake on fashionable one-sidedness. Ritson stands for market orientation over marketers' opinions: research first, judgement after. His strength is didactic and polemical; reading his columns teaches the discipline through other people's mistakes.

Key work Mini MBA in Marketing (Melbourne Business School); Marketing Week-columns

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