Making Marketers Better in 2019

Mark Ritson is tired of the mystical brand-strategy talk he hears on conference stages, which he says helps no one. He has developed strategy for more than 20 brands turning over a billion a year, Sephora and Veuve Clicquot among them, and taught marketing at London Business School and MIT. In this MF 2019 talk he argues that a good brand strategy comes down to answering five questions.

You'll learn why big companies are killing brands rather than launching new ones, how to combine segment targeting with mass marketing in a 40:60 split, and why Ritson thinks brand purpose is a dead end. He explains how to build a realistic positioning from two or three associations, why you should use your distinctive codes until you are sick of them, and how to write one or two strategic objectives. In the Q&A he covers how an agency can lead a client and what to measure over the long term.