Mark Ritson – Marketing Strategy

Mark Ritson: Marketers have forgotten the meaning of marketing’s most basic principles

Mark Ritson

There is no consensus around when the formal discipline of marketing actually began. For British marketers it is common to cite 18th Century businessman and potter Josiah Wedgwood as the inventor of modern marketing. More accurately, most scholars point to America where the first marketing courses were offered back in 1905 and where the first marketing textbook was published a year later.

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Mark Ritson: Before falling over backwards to use virtual reality, get the basic tenets of marketing right

Mark Ritson

There is a hugely depressing article this month in The Marketer, the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s magazine. The article describes the latest advances in augmented reality and virtual reality and concludes, rather breathlessly, that both technologies ‘offer promising results for marketers’ looking to ‘bridge the gap between consumer and product and close the online-offline divide’.

Mark Ritson: Yoga pants fury shows one brand doesn’t fit all

Mark Ritson

The latest big branding crisis has erupted in the US and this time the culprit is a surprising one. Yoga brand Lululemon might seem an unlikely target for criticisms of body fascism but that’s exactly what happened last week when co-founder Chip Wilson appeared on Bloomberg TV’s Street Smart programme with wife and fellow co-founder Shannon.