How to WIN

I still love an occasional LinkedIn spat.

The latest one was prompted by a presentation by Mark Ritson in New York, where he again bemoaned how marketing people don’t know enough about marketing.

He’s often found doing this in the weeks before his next Mini MBA course (£1,949 + VAT).

The focus was a recent four-country survey that said, among other findings of ignorance, that 36% of marketeers can’t list the 4 P’s.

It was a summary of this speech by Tom Morton that prompted a storm of comments, including one from Zoe Scaman who, as they say, pushed back.

So who won? Now there’s a question.

Zoe’s argument was essentially that marketing has moved on. It isn’t what it was, which she referred to as classical marketing. As she said, “being unable to name the 4 Ps doesn’t mean you can’t build a brand people actually love”.

I thought that might even be enough to draw Byron Sharp into the fight. That Lovemarks book has always been his bête noir.

Instead, Mark Ritson rode into town. He fired off that Zoe was part of a “philistine approach” that thinks not having a marketing training can actually be an advantage.

Not sure that was what she said, but Zoe quietly withdrew to Substack, stocked up on ammunition and replied with a spectacular post of nearly 4,000 words called ‘The Calcified Canon’.

It was everything we’ve come to expect from someone working out at the wild frontiers of the industry.

Drawing a line from McCarthy to Ries & Trout to Kotler to Ehrenberg-Bass to the Long and the Short, she freely acknowledged this is where any marketing education should begin.

But the core of her argument was that marketing doesn’t just face an education problem. The main issue is the age-old one of having to constantly justify our existence. We stand on shaky ground.

And it’s all very well being able to recite the 4 P’s, but the battle for control of all four was lost long ago.

She then reeled off a bewildering list of topics that she felt should be in a training course - complexity science, cultural economics, information environment literacy, the impact of geopolitical ideologies.

Her conclusion was that marketing has outgrown its education. It’s time to move on, Mark.

Expect a column in The Drum shortly.

My conclusion was it’s all about context. They both see marketing as they want to see it.

I’ve read and watched a huge amount of Mark’s output. You can’t help but notice how often he mentions P&G or LVMH, whether it’s his admiration for A.G. Lafley or his preference for ‘brand codes’ over ‘distinctive brand assets’.

His great skill is to dominate the current central ground in marketing. He’s an apex synthesizer.

Zoe’s gift is to be out at the front end, looking to the future to tell us all what’s coming. How she does it is beyond me, but I suppose that’s the point.

So there’s no winner. There never is.

If anything, it’s an example of Bothism, another one of Mark’s concepts, although I seem to remember he nicked it.

But what it does show is the importance of positioning, which is where Bothism falls down.

Maybe that’s the point. Marketeers might rue the loss of three of the P’s but they never really owned them anyway.

To use A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin’s classic Playing To Win model - and as Mark himself concluded - where marketing should play has always been the consumer.

And how it should win is by understanding their needs.

My own view is this should particularly be at a deeper level. That’s my position.

Deeper needs make stronger brands.