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10th June, 2026 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Mark Ritson - practical marketing lessons from a 21st-century marketing genius

Phil Bray

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to another Yardstick webinar. We’ve got two fabulous guests for you lined up in June. We’ll reveal the second guest later on today. We’re joined by Mark Ritson. Mark, thank you for making the time, especially as it’s what, 7pm with you in Australia.

Mark Ritson   

Yeah, yeah. G’day, mate. How are you? Hello from Sydney. Yeah, it’s not too late. That’s all right. 7 o’clock is okay. I often do these things at 2am in my underpants, so this seems fine, fine.

Phil Bray  

Well, I won’t ask you to reveal what you’ve got on below the screen line, but for those of you who don’t know, for those of you don’t know Mark, Mark was founder of The MiniMBA, more of that later on, and he’s been named by as one of The Power 50 most important people in media by Adnews and brand consultant, marketing professor, prominent columnist. As I was doing my research, though, Mark, I noticed no podcast and no book, and so amazing how you can raise your profile without those two things, despite what everybody says.

Mark Ritson  

Too much, too much like hard work, Phil, too much like hard, hard work, man. I’m staying up, I’m staying off it.

Phil Bray    

That works, that works.

Mark Ritson   

Books especially, man, if you want to look at a total waste of time for 99.9% of the people doing it, you’re going to spend what, two and a half, three years full time writing a book, no one’s gonna read it, and you’re just gonna waste all that time. And then, and when you say that to people and try to give them friendly advice they’re all like, “yeah, but it’s like a business card, isn’t it?” And I’m like, “well, just get a business card. Do you know what I mean?” Like, don’t write a book. Do you know what I mean? It’s.. bonkers. It’s absolutely bonkers. I always get asked to write the foreword of books. “Would you mind giving me a comment on the book?” And they send you this 800 page PDF, and you have no idea who the person is. And I’m always like, “if I get time to read it, I’ll give you a foreword”. And they always write back three days later, and go, “have you got something for me?” I’m like “I haven’t had a chance to read it yet”, and they’re like “well you don’t have to read it. Just give me something punchy”. And I’m like “no, no, I have to read it.” It’s an entirely ridiculous situation, right? With the exception of Byron Sharp, no one’s got any value out of a book in 20 years.

Phil Bray  

And there is an insight into your next 55 minutes, everybody. This is going to be great. 

Mark Ritson    

See you next time.

Phil Bray 

Just Dan, do me a favour, just do the usual housekeeping, so everybody knows where we stand. If that’s okay?

Dan Campbell 

Of course. Yeah, so let’s do a bit of quick housekeeping. So, what do we all need to know for today’s session? Well, because we’ve got a very special guest with us, Phil’s going to lead with his own questions, but of course, I’ll be reading yours out at regular intervals. I do have a list of questions for Mark that people sent across beforehand, so of course we’ll be getting to those too. And as always, don’t hold back, get stuck in, throw your comments and questions into the ring, and make sure you get the most out of the next hour. We’ve already got lots in two minutes, so really do get stuck in. Of course, there’s no such thing as a silly question, so be brave and ask away, and you can do that by using the Q&A box or the chat function. So, speaking of which, if anybody in the crowd can just give me a hello or a good morning to test that the chat box is working, that would be great. And, as usual, we’ll be recording the webinar, which means you’ll receive a neatly packaged follow-up email with a video link and all the important notes and resources we mentioned, and thank you to everybody saying hello in the chat shows that it’s working. So that’s enough of me. Over to Mark and Phil.

Phil Bray 

Dan, thanks for that. So Mark, books aside, I was watching a podcast over the weekend with Josh Spania. I hope I’ve pronounced that correctly, and one of the things you talked about was a CMO’s superpower is understanding who your customers are, what they think, and what they do. So we were chatting before that you have a financial adviser, so put yourself in the shoes of a consumer for a second. One of the first words that come to mind when you think about financial advisers, financial planners. What are the first words and thoughts that come to mind?

Mark Ritson  

I always remember these, a couple of blokes in London that would always kind of get a bit of paper out and take you through a routine where they go, “so here’s where your money’s coming, here’s how old you are, here’s what you’re going to do”. And they had this routine where they would sort of draw out your life in a 10 minute sketch, and then sort of get you to start doing things, and that’s kind of what comes to mind first. My financial adviser is a bloke called Foz, Chris is his first name and I don’t think of him as a financial adviser anymore. Him and Chocky,  we’re in Australia, remember where no one goes by their first names, Lee. Chocky and Foz are my financial advisers and if I think about them, I think with great affection of how much money they’ve made me, saved me. How much time they save me, there’s two things there. There’s sort of the generic industry association, which is a bit sort of “you know whatever”, but then there’s the actual financial advisers I ended up with, who I think it’s an interesting one. I did a lot of work with private banks a few years ago, and it’s interesting you really forge those relationships when a client like me is broke and pretty stressed about cash, which in my case would have been 20 odd years ago. You know, 25 years ago I was pretty broke and didn’t really… it was all over the shop. And that’s when, around the time I started working with Blue Rock, the firm that handles me now. So later on, when I’ve got tons of money, I wouldn’t go with anyone else because they’re the guys that you know got me through. So there’s a lesson there, I think, in terms of customer lifetime value, and when you make the value versus when you make the money. I think that’s an interesting one,

Phil Bray 

And in the same podcast you talked about the second superpower being putting strategy before tactics, talk about a bit about why that’s so important. I was chatting to a financial adviser a couple of weeks ago who said, “I don’t have the time or money for strategy. I just need to dive into tactic”.

Mark Ritson 

He’s an idiot, right? I mean, a well-meaning idiot, but he’ll be very unsuccessful for the rest of his career, and he’ll fight fires, and he’ll think he’s doing well, because he’s super busy. “Oh, look how busy I am”. And in reality, that’s the worst thing you could be. The point of good marketing, which we don’t see as frequently as we might, is that you have a marketing strategy first, which then directs your tactical execution. Strategy comes from the Greek word strategos, the general, and the general has a plan that he or she creates in a tent, and he builds that plan from the battle plan, the battle map that he’s had, his diagnosis. He comes up with his strategy, and then, and only then, does he do his tactics, tacticos, which is the Greek word for arrangement of the troops, and so what you find with most, I don’t know about financial planners, but certainly most people that do marketing work is they’re straight off into a little bit of Facebook and TikTok, and a banner ad, and all that nonsense. And they’ve no idea strategically what they’re doing, and so the point of strategy is it’s not that complicated. Strategy and marketing means basically three things: who are you targeting, what’s your position, and what’s your objectives? And you work on those first, and there’s a few ways to work on those, and once you work those out, all these tactical decisions become a lot more successful, a lot easier, and a lot more joined up, but 90% of the time to use a made up figure, there isn’t any strategy, and it’s just tactical pinball machines being played, and that’s a good thing, because those of us with strategy tend to mop up those that don’t have one, because there’s a general intent with a plan and another general just moving things around, moving his troops around randomly on the battlefield. Guess who’s going to win, normally.

Phil Bray   

And if you’re the general moving things around randomly, what are the disadvantages from a business and a marketing perspective of doing that rather than thinking more strategically?

Mark Ritson  

Well, you first of all, you don’t make choices. So the main definition of strategy, when you really get down to it, is making hard choices and making sacrificial choices. And the reason for that is we want to do everything, but we can’t. And it turns out some of your activities and tactics are 10x more important than others, and it’s only strategy that reveals that, and so what you end up doing is favouring certain things and focusing on certain things and ignoring others that make you less busy, but far more successful and much richer in the long run. The other thing is it’s more enduring, so strategy lasts a much longer period of time, and you’re not caught up in this constant tactical churn. The final one is we tend to focus on the tactics that are closest to our face, the obvious ones in marketing that tends to be communications, which is easily the least important of all the tactical choices. It’s not that it’s not somewhat important, but marketing is not advertising. In fact advertising is about 8% of marketing, and there’s another 92% that’s far more important, and that if you wanted some other things that are more important, start with the other tactics like product and distribution and pricing, which far outstrip the importance of the communications stuff. So yeah strategy and training really does make you a lot better, but again, it’s a competitive pursuit, so we don’t want everyone to get trained and get strategic, because then it would take away a lot of the value of the training and the strategy, right? We want most of the people out there to be industrious idiots and allow the rest of us to do less work, make more money, and be more successful by being smarter. Marketing is a competition. It’s not, it’s not an equal opportunities event. 

Phil Bray  

Yeah, picking up on that competition point, where does differentiation fit into a strategy? Because most consumers will look at financial advisers and thinks that things will be the same. They do pension, savings, investments, and all financial advisers will claim to be transparent, holistic, trusted, all those kinds of hygiene factors that they think make them different. What does meaningful differentiation look like for a financial adviser?

Mark Ritson  

Well, there’s a couple of ways to answer that. So first, if you step back, the first lesson of differentiation is it often begins with targeting, weirdly. So, differentiation is a positioning thing, but it often will begin with targeting. So targeting a specific niche, however you choose to define that niche can often allow you then, to be the financial adviser of second division soccer players. Suddenly, you’ve got a niche which allows you to differentiate via targeting. More broadly, when we approach differentiation, there’s a huge error, and I say this with all due deference to Michael Porter, the great Harvard professor. Michael Porter’s a bit of an idiot on this one, right? And he’s done an enormous damage to marketing and strategy for the last 30 years, because Porter, when he really defined this idea of strategic differentiation, defines it as “finding something unique” and that’s nonsense. We’re both native English speakers, Phil. We know that the root word of different and the root word of unique haven’t got anything to do with each other, for the most part, right? So everyone goes “oh, to be differentiated, one must find something unique about my financial advisory”. No, you don’t. That would be nonsensical. There’s nothing unique about your advisory, but what there is is an opportunity to find what I call relative differentiation. You would be, you’re a handsome man, Phil. I’d say you’re about what you’re about, you 5’11, that’s my guess.

Phil Bray 

A little bit taller than that, a little over six foot.

Mark Ritson 

I’ll give you six foot, then. Okay. Well done. So, I’m glad to tell you, I’m six foot one. So, I’m taller than you. That makes me relatively different from you. Doesn’t mean I’m unique. You don’t have zero height. I haven’t got a unique quality there, but I’m taller than you, that makes me relatively different. And that’s the principle to apply here. So, if my financial advisory can be more trusted, more innovative, more friendly, more laid back, and that’s what the client wants. And, frankly, you don’t even have to actually deliver on it. It helps if you do, but the point is you’re going to again be choiceful and focus on those one or two things and you’re going to say it more often with more creativity and more certainty, and hopefully deliver a service which is more that over the long run as well. That’s what actual differentiation looks like. And we should preface all of that by saying we now know, thanks to a lot of good research, the differentiation is still very important, but distinctiveness trumps it. By distinctiveness, what we mean is coming to mind first. Once you come to mind, “I want the consumer to think that I’m this and I’m this”, but coming to mind first is the ultimate game, because we know with things like financial advice, if I can come to mind first, 70-80% of the time that’s the adviser I’m in, I’m going to go and end up recruiting, and working with, not because they mean anything particularly different, but they came to mind first, so the likelihood is two things will happen. First, I don’t want to think about any other options. It’s a boring topic, and if you’re good enough, I’ll take you. And second, even if I do think of other options, I’m a cognitive miser, and what that means is my brain now is trying to favour the first option that came up in my head, so I don’t have to waste it thinking about financial advice anymore, and I can think about more important things, like I don’t know, race horses or mineral water, or whatever it is people think about. And I can use my brain for that instead. So don’t forget distinctiveness. If you can come to mind first and have that relative differentiation on a couple of key points you are winning the game now. 

Phil Bray 

It’s easier to come to mind if you are an adviser working in a niche, right?

Mark Ritson  

I would say so. Yeah, if you’re a small financial adviser, one of the tips I would give you is, yeah niche yourself. So, we’ve learned this from all small businesses, that there’s a huge advantage to be big. We could spend the rest of the podcast talking about what those advantages are. And so, if you’re small, the first message is you’re probably in trouble, right? But I get all the time people will say to me, “well, these are all lessons for big brands. What do you do if you’re a small brand?” And I say, “ well you’ll probably go out of business, because it isn’t fair and never said it was fair”. So, what do you do if you’re a smaller or independent financial adviser? Yeah, niching yourself is a good thing to do, so you want to pick a geographic area or a specialty area that a big firm couldn’t cater to, because now we have the opportunity to build strength and scale in that area, and then maybe bounce out later on”. I always like the Chobani story. Lunatic American gets access to a bankrupt yogurt factory and goes, “right, I can make yogurt now. Now, what kind of yogurt shall I make?” And it’s dominated by these giant yogurt brands, so he thinks, “right well, we have to find a subcategory here, so no one’s doing Greek yogurt”. So he goes, “right we’ll become the kings of Greek yogurt and gradually make that subcategory bigger than everything else, which is pretty much what they’ve done”. You couldn’t have done that by just going mainstream. So, financial advisory for single women, financial advisory for retiring sports people. You know what I mean, that kind of thing. It’s small, but it allows you the chance to get big.

Phil Bray    

Yeah, I was just looking. They’re not here today, unfortunately, but we’ve got a client that specialises in retail leaders working for certain supermarkets, a wonderful job there. Matt Campbell, another client of ours. We launched his website last week. He specialises in the LGBTQ+ community, and they’re doing really, really well, really good things.

Mark Ritson    

That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it, Phil. It looks like you’re going smaller, but you’re not. What you’re actually doing is being cleverer, and look, don’t forget the old regional play too. You can niche yourself that way, it makes perfect sense. But you can also just go, “we’re the guys that dominate West Cumbria”. That’s also not the dumbest move of the game either. Do you know what I mean? Play the local card, so that absolutely, that’s part of it, that’s really targeting. And what we find is where to play targeting, how you know, and then how you’re going to win with your positioning, and then your objectives, they should all link together, so that targeting choice bleeds into that positioning choice, and you’re making these selfish choices that are advantageous to you, and relatively winning in the market.

Phil Bray    

And once you’ve done that piece of work around your niche, your target audience to start building your brand, and in our experience, many business owners, people who write the checks want quick results.

Mark Ritson    

Yeah.

Phil Bray  

And they tend to focus on short-term sales tactics. Just talk about the difference between brand building and short-term sales activation, and how the two work together.

Mark Ritson   

So the big work of that last decade or so, is the long and the short of it by Field and Binet, and what it talks to is, is that point, but a lot more. So, there are two forces going on in marketing, and they’re both good forces. There’s the long, which is about building an enduring, distinctive, relatively differentiated emotional picture of your brand to the whole market that you’re going after. You’re not ever going to use segments for that, unless you’re going after a particular community, in which case that’s your whole market. So that’s what we mean by sophisticated mass marketing. So you’re building it to everyone, you’re going top of funnel, you’re being emotional, you’re driving salience for the brand, making it come to mind, and making it stand for this and this, and you’re not really talking about products there, you’re talking about who we are, what we stand for. But at the same time, the other half of your money is being spent on promoting a specific product or a specific service to a particular group of people at a particular time to get them to buy it. And that combination of the two together in the right balance is how we win, the best way to explain it to financial advisers, we have this great thing that John Dawe’s invented, called “The 95/5 rule”, so if you look at people, if you’re going after dentists, let’s invent a niche. We’re going after dentists right in the North of England. That’s our financial advice target. You’re going to find sure as anything that of the 100% of dentists working in the North of England, only about 5% of them right now are looking for a financial adviser. The other 95% either don’t think they want one, or they’ve already got one, or they have no money, and they don’t care. What we find in almost every market is that ratio, right? 93, 94, 96% of the market aren’t in market now, they will be at some point, but not right now. So that’s why you want to half your money on the short targeted activation performance stuff. You want to target them with a product offer that brings them in and gets them going. But the point here is, if you’re a bit stupid, and lots of people are, and it is stupidity, there’s an explanation for it, you’re not going to spend your money. So spend your money where the money is, sure, but don’t spend all of it there, because there’s 19x as many customers not in market right now, but who will come into market one day when their financial adviser retires, or they make some money, or they change locations, or whatever. Don’t forget the 19x bigger market, and my earliest statistic that 70% to 80% of the time the brand that you think of first is the one you buy. If I can prepare that market, predispose it with my brand, and a couple of key messages, or well look the minute they enter the market for financial advice, we’re going to take three quarters of them. And that’s 19x bigger than the current opportunity there. We get a lot of questions about why are companies so short term, why do managers think only about performance marketing? And the answer is because they’re stupid, that’s why, and they lose a ton of money because of it. This is not rocket science. We’re talking to financial advisers here. This isn’t the most complex calculation that’s been revealed to them in the last couple of days. Trust me, you would be amazed at the number of half-wits that can’t get this into their heads and dump all their money into performance because they think ROI is the same as making lots of money.

Phil Bray  

Which takes us on nicely to a question that we got before this webinar, and I think we’ll do this question anonymously, Dan. 

Dan Campbell 

Okay yeah, another one you’re talking about then. So the question is, “how do you stay effective in a business that doesn’t value good marketing?”

Mark Ritson   

Ah, interesting. I’ll give you the answer I’d have given you, maybe 20 years ago, and the one I’ll give you now. So, 20 years ago when I was a young and buffy assistant professor, I just said, “well, you’ve got to educate them, you’ve got to show them the value of marketing, you’ve got to persuade them using various karate moves that marketing is good and valuable”. I’m now pretty sure that the doofuses in your business that don’t get it will never get it, and rather than looking for a karate move to convert them and give them an extra 47,000 brain cells, you should start looking for a job with someone who isn’t a doofus, because I’ve spent long enough now to watch good marketers being destroyed by idiot sales-driven bosses. Life’s too short, man. So don’t leave. I mean because the market is a mess at the moment, but start looking, would be my advice. There are good businesses out there that get this. There aren’t, they’re not in the majority, but I’ve seen what happens when a good marketer liberates herself from a mess organisation and finds one that believes, and that the transformation is phenomenal.

Phil Bray    

Good advice, career advice, as well as marketing advice. 

Mark Ritson    

It’s all here, it’s all here.

Phil Bray   

Dan, let’s do Emma’s question as well now. 

Dan Campbell  

Yes, so Emma asks, “how do you get your brand into the heads of the 95% who aren’t currently interested in what you do?”

Mark Ritson  

Well, you use different media, Emma. So you don’t need to be as targeted at this point. So Ehrenberg Bass came up with this brilliant concept of the category entry point, and so, if you look at what most financial advisers do, what they do is they talk about themselves too much, like how they do it and why they’re good. That’s not what positioning is. Positioning is all about the client and the client needs. It’s not about you and how awesome you are, it’s about the client and how we serve the client’s needs. To use the old marketing aphorism, it’s about the hole, not the drill bit. And so when you look at category entry points that take a consumer into the category, they’re pretty obvious, and when you follow the Ehrenberg Bass approach. Normally, three, four, maybe five of them account for 80-90% of that conveyor belt into purchase, and so the trick is to work out where those things happen, associate your brand with those things, and sit back and count your money. Yeah, don’t waste your money telling the market how awesome you are, spend your money associating your brand with the category entry points that deliver 20, 30 or 40% of the consumers eventually into the category. So, an example would be of a good category entry point would be champagne, associate yourself with fine moments of congratulations rather than talking about the terroir and the vintages, get yourself in front of the Grand Prix, show everyone getting drenched in Moet, and generally, generally own that moment of celebration and victory, because that’s going to be about 35% of the times people reach for champagne, if that makes sense, and by the way, financial advisers, it is pronounced Moet. I worked for Moet & Chandon for many years, and I’ve found to my horror that financial advisers should know better, financial people generally keep correcting me about when I order a bottle of Moet, they say “actually it’s pronounced Moet”, and I say “no, it’s not, bring me my Moet”. Yeah, Claude Moet was a Dutchman, he was not French, and we pronounced the T in Netherlands, so there’s a nice one, because it’s a nice way to be courteous, and then an idiot. You order your Moet, and if someone is stupid enough to correct you, then you can pounce rather than doing it the other way around.

Phil Bray  

Excellent advice. You’re talking earlier, Mark, about differentiation. Each year we do a research project looking at the websites of 500 financial advice firms in the UK.

Mark Ritson  

I’m familiar with this, Phil. It’s very good work. Congratulations.

Phil Bray  

Thank you. The person at the moment is currently head down, looking at all these websites.

Mark Ritson  

The person who does all the work isn’t on the podcast. I know that, Phil. I know how this works. You stand in your loft there, talking all day, and then some poor junior downstairs is knee deep in Excel. I get it, that’s what I do too. I’m with you. I feel you.

Phil Bray   

Actually, the person doing it is my son. 

Mark Ritson  

Even worse, even worse. You make your family, I do my son and my wife and my mother-in-law, they do it right. Quinn McCarthy, there he is to everyone, weeping emoji.

Phil Bray 

So, one of the things that research finds is that only 14% of financial advice and planning firms disclose their feeds on their website, yet those who do, and we talk to them a lot, say when they do it, it improves the quality of new enquiries and makes future conversations about fees much, much easier. So, why are firms still so nervous about putting fees or fee examples on their websites?

Mark Ritson  

Look, there’s a couple of explanations. So, first of all, it depends on your brand. I always get very uncomfortable when we see brands with a small b, plural s. So, if your brand is about being private and a coot-style operation, then you shouldn’t put your fees on there, because it’s not how you play the game, whereas if you’re the Wetherspoons of the financial advisory, you put them on the front page, you see what I mean. So the first point is pricing, like everything else, should be consistent with your position, but let’s speak generally for a second, there’s no doubt that this is a bigger, and a broader point. I have learned in my journey to really appreciate pricing more than anything else, and I don’t mean price here, I mean what you’re talking about now, which is pricing, the verb. It’s a different thing. So every financial adviser has a price. Good for you. Let me be clear about how this works. So, you’ve got to have a price, but if you do pricing, and most of your listeners don’t, they’re missing two things. So, first of all, when you set your price, you don’t set it the classic, stupid way. There are two dumb ways to set price. The first is to look at your costs, and then mark up from there. Costs have got nothing to do with price. You wave goodbye to them at the start and make sure you’re over them, and that’s it. There’s nothing, there’s no anchor there. The other dumb way is you look at your competitors, who are just as stupid as you, and there’s cost driven you, and you look at their prices, and then you work off them. The way you set price is by doing research on potential clients to find out what they’d be prepared to pay for the services you offer, and that’s not, as it turns out, that difficult to do. A little Van Westendorp costs no money. A conjoint can be done with synthetic data for nothing. With real data for about £5000, both of them are going to give you an absolute precise idea of what you can charge, and that’s important, because when you don’t do research on price among consumers, 90% of the time you under price your services and lose loads of cash because of it. And then your point is more specifically the second one, which is once you’ve set a price based on research, the other thing is the way you present your price, the way you frame it or anchor it is more important than the price itself. So the problem with the financial adviser community is you’re very smart as a group, you’re very switched on by numbers, and therefore you’re pricing idiots. You’ve got no clue what you’re doing, because you’re looking at, you’re hypnotised by those numbers. Trust me, I’ve set the prices of many of the world’s greatest companies, and I will not mention one of them, for obvious reasons. The way we present a price, the way we frame it, the way we anchor it, the way we contextualise it is more important than the price itself, and so as long as they’re using their website to use price framing techniques, what would be a good example? Every one of the financial advisers listening to this, here’s your challenge for the afternoon. What time is it in the UK? Was it like 11 o’clock?

Phil Bray 

It is 10:31?

Mark Ritson 

Perfect. In an hour and a half, your homework from Professor Ritson, I’m not really a professor anymore, is get in your car and drive to the nearest McDonald’s. Okay, watch carefully through the driving experience, or even better, if you walk into the McDonald’s, how they are framing every single price bundle alternative to detach you of about twice as much cash as you would have intended to spend in a beautiful way. McDonald’s over the last 15 years has approximately sold the same number unit number of food items, but has doubled its profitability because it knows about pricing, look at how to frame and present a price, and your website is a perfect way to do that. Look at your brand positioning, look at your target market, do your price research, but understand the dark arts of price framing, and remember something really important for financial advisers. I know something about finances that you don’t. What’s the most important thing for a financial advisory business? Profitability. It’s got nothing to do with revenues. Anyone can make revenues. Making profit is a difficult game. The single thing that drives profit more than anything else is price. That isn’t my point of view. That’s 30 years of research from Wharton Down. A little increase in price generates massive impacts on corporate profitability. So, first of all, don’t discount ever and second, learn how to frame and anchor and increase your price, because at the heart of that is 30-40% of total firm success, in my opinion.

Phil Bray  

Just looking for discounting and don’t discount ever, just talk a bit about that. We wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago about the seven ways you can deal with clients who ask for discounts, ask for fees to be sharp. What’s your view? 

Mark Ritson    

Was one of them tell them to go away? Because that should be actually answer number one. 

Phil Bray 

Worded slightly differently but it was. 

Mark Ritson  

On MiniMBA, I got it this morning actually, as I was cleaning my teeth, and so forth. I got a ping message from someone asking “when does the next course run?” I’m like “oh yes very good”. And second, “are there any discounts?” I’m like “no, and if you do module nine, you’ll find out why”. And the reasons against discounting are really very simple. So it’s a cavalcade of issues that you create for your firm. First of all, why do I say that? Well first of all, to my earlier point, when you discount a price 20% or 30%, you don’t lose 30% of your profits. It’s not that simple. You’re usually eradicating all margin and possibly starting to lose money. Second, you’re not generating incremental sales. What you’re doing is pulling sales forward that you would have got otherwise, but you’ve got them at a much lower margin. And then of course what happens is, when you get to quarter number two, having run your sales promotion, what you discover to your horror is that everyone wants the same promotion again, or there’s no business left in the market now. So, of course, you’ve now learned that if you run a sales promotion you can get more customers. So you do it again and again, and before you know it, you’re Dolce & Gabbana. So the point about discounting is it’s just a circus show. You annoy existing clients that pay full price, you encourage your competitors to do it and create a price war. You commodify your offering overnight. Good luck being relatively different if you’re also boasting that you’re 30% off this week, so the whole thing is business destroying, basically. Hold the line. Hold the line is one of the most important pieces of pricing advice. I’m not saying the line is necessarily super high. You don’t have to be Louis Vuitton here. Zara is a brilliant example of a company that prices at an accessible line, but then does not discount very often, because it knows what it’s doing. So, follow that approach, would be my advice. It’s the dumbest thing you can do, without exception, is running discounts of any kind. And when my advice is, and it’s happened to me throughout my consulting career, when clients ask for a discount, I always say, “I don’t do that, because I’d let down the other nine clients who are paying full price right now. You don’t want me to do that, do you?” And they go “no, we don’t”. I said “I’m not going to then”.

Phil Bray   

Then excellent. And Dan, this is a good chance to go into Alistair’s question that has come through, and Harry sent one about pricing before we started.

Dan Campbell 

Yeah, sure thing. So we’ll start with Alistair’s. So, going back to price framing, Alistair asks “can you give some examples of price framing for financial advisers, perhaps reflecting on your own needs of your advisers?”

Mark Ritson 

Yeah, it’s tricky because I’ve been with him so long. I don’t cross compare anymore, because I’ve been with him so long. But the typical thing you would do, I’ll give you one from MiniMBA. How about that? Because that’s one I can share. And you’ll have to pull them into the world of, one of the dangers of being a loyal 20 year client of a financial advisery business is I have a beer with them now, and I trust them with literally my life. I haven’t thought about this category in a long time, but in MiniMBA, a good example is the name itself. People say, “why did you call it MiniMBA?” And the answer is, because we’re price framing. Every time I talk about MiniMBA, what I do is I start by saying, “you can do a very fine MBA at INSEAD or London Business School, cost you £100,000 and take a year, take two years, or you can do the MiniMBA with us. It takes 12 weeks, it’s going to cost you about £2000, and everyone goes “Oh wow, that’s amazing” because I framed it. Or I could start out by saying, “we have an online training course, and it’s £2000”. “Wow, that’s steep”. You see what I mean? It’s a very simple opening, anchor point that can, that can sort it all out. So that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. It’s where you present the price, how you bundle the price, how you contextualise it against other things. Remember, no one has a clue what a financial adviser should or could cost. They come into the market with no clue at all, and so they take their clues from your environment and what you’re doing, and that’s an enormous place of ignorance and enormous potential opportunity for you.

Dan Campbell   

Brilliant, and as Alistair mentions, “so it’s not just price framing, it’s also service framing in a way”.

Mark Ritson  

Yeah, it’s the whole thing, but it’s particularly about how you’re at the point now where you present the offer, and another good example is in the supermarket. You’ll find that every supermarket, from Tesco down, is actually going to give Heinz ketchup a very prominent place in the aisle, and that doesn’t make sense, because you would think they would give prominent position to the private label ketchups that they’re selling and making more money from. But of course, that’s again an example of anchoring. They want you to see that Heinz ketchup costs £2.49 and their ketchup is only 62p. So again, there’s a way to handle the presentation, but it’s McDonald’s that you need to visit, because those LED screens at McDonald’s are not there to show you burgers issuing forth steam. It’s the way things are being bundled and moved and framed that you need. You’ll see as soon as you get there what’s going on

Dan Campbell  

Brilliant. Let’s move on to Harry’s question. So Harry says “when considering price, what levers can be pulled in a regulated industry, which encourages slash pushes constant assessment of value?”

Mark Ritson  

Do you want constant assessments of value, though? Is that what they’re looking for here? I would suggest what we want to do is avoid that. The most obvious play of all is you need to win these customers when they’re price sensitive and you win them with, I think, aggressive pricing, not discounting and then build in additional services later as they become more sticky, more trusted, more loyal, and of course more switching costs. I worked for several banks in my career, and none of them ever really got it. I have four or five different brands handling my financial affairs, from my checking account to my credit card to my advice to my insurance. I don’t want that. I just want one brand. I want to keep it simple, and so the fact I’ve got Blue Rock who do my financial advice, my investments, my tax, some of my law stuff now, some of my HR, they’ve extended all of that is a brilliant win for me. So, I think it’s more about demonstrating early value, delivering the goods, but later on then expanding into as many things as you can, because the client wants that. I remember I once was courted to join the private bank of the bank I was with, and they took me upstairs to the top floor of their offices, and then sort of seven or eight guys sat down around this table, and each gave me their beautiful business card, and they said “my name’s Charlie, and I handle investments”, and “my name’s Roger, and I do insurance”, and blah. And I said “look, you guys don’t get it, you know? I’ve got no time for anything. I want one guy that I can call”. And I just picked Oscar in the end. I said “look Oscar, you’re the best looking of these seven”. They’re all blokes. “I’ll just pick you, you’re the best looking bloke, Oscar. I’m going to pick you. Give us your business card. No offense, gentlemen, but I’m not interested in having seven more contacts than I need. I’m just going to ring you for now. Oscar, are you happy with that?” “Yeah, I’m happy with that”. And I sort of just created one. That’s, for me, the source of value for most people that need proper financial advice. Make it easy, man. Just make it easy. It’s still not easy enough. I mean, an interesting point to raise here is most companies don’t know what their most important touch points are, they worry about offices and advertising and all that. I can tell you with financial advisory, the biggest fight is still signing, it’s still not clear, it’s still done in a bad way. It’s got better. Acrobat, Adobe, is possibly the world’s worst company. If you’re using Adobe to get a PDF signed, you’re putting your service in the hands of buffoons. It’s just a horrible service. If you can make it easy, if you can make it quick, I think the value there is greater than anything else for most of the people that need proper financial advice. I remember trying to get Blue Rock, and for once they did fail on this one, like getting my will sorted and the wills of my brother-in-law and father-in-law. I said “look, we’ll do it all in one go. We’ll have a bit of a nice dinner. You bring all the paperwork, we’ll get it all signed in one go”. And they still couldn’t do it right, but getting that signing stuff done, that’s the biggest fight problem we still got. It’s not smooth enough, man. And it will get there if you can be smoother and quicker and more efficient than the competition. I think most people would really enjoy that.

Phil Bray 

Now, let’s wrap up the value conversation with Kusil’s question,

Dan Campbell   

Yeah, sure thing. So Kusil asks “value-based pricing is the best way then?”

Mark Ritson  

Yeah, it’s the only way. There’s no other kind of pricing. You should never do cost plus, it’s the dumbest thing in the world. If I was doing cost plus pricing, my MiniMBA would cost $60. Yeah, value-based pricing, it isn’t an option. It’s the only way to do it. And the key point is, if you haven’t done the research to find out what your particular customers are prepared to pay, you are almost certainly under charging. You just don’t know it. And therefore, your profitability is a fraction of what it could be.

Phil Bray  

Talk about return on investment now, and how marketers demonstrate to the people in the business who hold the purse strings return on investment. Let’s assume that moving careers for the marketer is not an option, and they want to stay where they are. How do they demonstrate return on investment to those people who are interested in that data?

Mark Ritson   

So the secret, first of all, is kind of setting out a decent set of objectives for your plan. So some of your business is sticky and incremental, and you can just use a sort of a standard CAGR to show that we’re either up or down five percentage points, and that’s what the general customer base or market will do. I think there’s a tolerance for that, but on top of that, you’ve got to show that your proactive marketing strategies have generated an incremental return. So the way to do that is to write objectives in a way that can be measured. And it’s one of the great ways to test good marketing versus bad marketing. Objectives really do sort out the women from the girls and the men from the boys. If you look at a well-trained PMG or Diageo marketer, they’ve got four or five objectives, and all of them are smart or OKR based, which means increase consideration from 10% to 20% by December 2026 among the total market. So what you’ve got there is a benchmark, you’ve got a goal, you’ve got a who, you’ve got a what, and you’ve got a mechanism by which you can then value how much it was worth to generate that much more consideration when you run it through the funnel. The key part, as well, is you haven’t got 10 objectives right, which means you’ll get nothing done. That’s not choiceful. The great CEO, AG Lafley once said, “you know if you’ve got 10 objectives, you haven’t got objectives, you’ve got dreams that will never come true”. And so we’re looking for a handful of objectives smartly written, which we can then calculate the incremental value of achieving them in the year, and if you want to be properly clever, you can annualise them as well, because obviously, if you go from 20% consideration to 40% consideration, it doesn’t happen on January 1st. So you can annualise that data, you can run it through a funnel, look at what it’s worth, and you can generate a pretty decent estimate of value, and that’s what a good marketer can do, and thereby demonstrate their value. If you look at a good marketing plan, it doesn’t end with, “thank you very much”, it ends with “if you give me £2.4 million of marketing budget, I’ll give you an incremental £12 million next year”. And that’s if you train a marketer properly, that’s what they’ll always do. Now, whether they’ll get the £2.5 million investment, that’s up to the company or the firm, and whether they deliver the £12 million incremental is up to the marketer. But that’s the system of professionalism we want. Again, if you look at every dumb company on the planet, they set their budgets by taking their revenue last year, let’s say £10 million, applying and advertising the sales ratio, let’s say 5% goes to marketing. “So here’s half a million quid”, and then basically, then just saying “right, that’s how we’ve done it”. And if you think about that for a second, it’s the dumbest possible approach you could ever apply to marketing, because we’ve already worked out how much money we’re going to make, so what was the point of marketing? And these arbitrary percentages just come out of nowhere. In that sense, it’s important to set proper budgets with proper objectives and with decent ROI, and not just ROI that’s immediate, “I’m going to get more people to buy”. You can do ROI at the top of the funnel and trickle it down as well.

Phil Bray  

Dan, that takes us on to Christine’s question.

Dan Campbell  

Yeah, so Christine asks, “how should firms balance educational content and sales messaging without relying on short-term ROI to prove value?”

Mark Ritson

Oh, look, they should do short term ROI. It’s part of it. It’s not one versus another. The most important word in the long and the short is, “and” so we need ROI, and we absolutely need marketers that can go out and target the 5% who are in market and get them to buy. But at the same time you’re running top of funnel brand building why not educational stuff, which is also doing the job to the 95% and the balance you can run. There’s a great firm, by the way, called Tracksuit, which is an online brand tracking firm out in New Zealand, if you visit their website, they’ve stolen all of Field and Binet’s data and created a calculator where you can actually, for free, you can plug in answers about your firm, and it will give you a pretty good estimation of what your split between long and short should be. But I’ll tell you in advance, for a financial advisery business, it’ll run about 70% brand, about 30% activation, and the reason it runs a bit more than the usual 50/50 or 60/40 is financial services is famously requires more brand building, because the number of times in the lifetime of a client that they will switch is famously low, so it’s not like yogurt or cars, where regularly they’ll come back into market and buy. You’ve got to build that brand, so the one time they’re ready to go, you’re there. So actually, if you look at retail banking, the right ratio is about 80% brand building, 20% targeted performance. So, financial advisery, you should be spending more on brand building each year, more to the 95% than you are to the 5%. Nobody is, because they’re too dumb and they’re obsessed by ROI, and they’re losing money, but they shouldn’t be, and they’d make far more money if they went the other way.

Phil Bray  

Right, I’m going to try and put the slides back on the screen, and Mark, for a couple of minutes. Can you just talk about the MiniMBA, if that’s okay?

Mark Ritson    

Oh it’d be my pleasure to, Phil.

Phil Bray  

I thought it might be.

Mark Ritson   

I didn’t know you’re going to give me this chance. This is great. Yeah, I’m ready.

Phil Bray    

So tell us about The MiniMBA.

Mark Ritson  

Yeah, so I taught. I was a marketing professor for 25 years. I taught at London Business School, won the teaching prize. I taught at MIT, won the teaching prize. I taught at Melbourne Business School, won the teaching prize for my course, my core MBA course on marketing. And 10 years ago, I stopped being a professor, and I put the course online in a very modern and green screen type way, and now we train around 4 or 5000 marketers a year across lots of sectors, including financial services, and we train them in how to do marketing at an MBA level. We charge £2000 for a 12 week course. Why do we charge that? Well, we charge it because we’ve done the research with a Van Westendorp that tells us that’s the optimum price point, and we frame it, as I’ve already told you, as a mini MBA, and we have a net promoter score of plus 79 which is better than any of you guys have, and it’s an amazing course, and we’d love you to come on it. You’ll be studying alongside people from 40 different countries. It does what it says on the tin. About 95% of the people that do the course, most of them are experienced, come out and say “it’s made me a better marketer”, and so we teach pricing, positioning, the whole caboodle. The next course runs in September. Visit our website, sign up, and join, join this wonderful experience. I would love to see you there. Thanks, Phil. That’s a lovely pitch moment for 98 potentially interesting targets. Thank you.

Phil Bray    

97 there’s actually one person that’s been on that course already.

Mark Ritson 

Alright they can come back, they can come back. We encourage repeat attendees.

Phil Bray   

And Harry might want to put something positive in the chat to explain the benefit.

Mark Ritson   

You should put your son on, let him out of the dungeon for the afternoon, once a week.

Phil Bray 

It’s not a bad idea. He’s got to do a transcript of this later, as well. So he’ll, he’ll understand.

Mark Ritson

By hand, by hand.

Phil Bray    

We’ll do some questions in a minute, but now it’s my turn to pitch. Later on this month, we’ve got the wonderful Heather Murray coming on Wednesday the 24th June, 10am till 11am, and we’re going to talk about something we’ve not mentioned at all today. How to use AI in marketing, so Heather’s the queen of AI in marketing. Delighted to have Heather on Wednesday 24th at 10am. Get your place by scanning the QR code. Dan, we have got lots of questions. Let’s do those.

Dan Campbell 

Yes, we do. So, a question from Celeste. This goes back to when you were talking about market research providers. Celeste asks “who were they that you mentioned and who are the best ones to look at?”

Mark Ritson 

If we’re talking to smaller financial advisers, my strong advice is to use synthetic data, so synthetic data is AI-generated, but slightly different from saying to Claude, “is my price point okay?” What you can do now with a degree of accuracy, which is encouraging, is basically say to Claude is “right, create some synthetic focus groups, clients who all are Premier League or second division footballers, ask them what the seven or eight biggest drivers are in choosing a financial adviser, and then test against 1000 financial advisers, a survey that reviews me versus the local competition to see which has the strongest salience and highest points of differentiation”. So you can effectively create your data and get the results back in five or six minutes. Now there’s a catch: you have to know what research to ask and how to structure research in order to do synthetic research, and it makes my point that, and I don’t want to take any passion away from Miss Murray, who’s coming on. I’m sure it’d be a good session, but you don’t need to learn AI. You need to learn how to do marketing, and then use AI. The analogy I use is that AI is a fantastic racehorse, the race horse that runs faster than any organic, natural horse we’ve ever seen. You don’t need to learn how to be a horse to ride it, you need to be a really good jockey. And so all these courses in AI are a complete waste of time. We don’t need to learn AI and read what it says on the tin. AI is AI. You just use it like a spanner. You don’t learn how to be a spanner, do you? What you need to learn how to do is to be a tradie or an electrician or a joiner or whatever. By the same token, learn how to be a proper marketer, learn the three or four different techniques for pricing, and then use AI to run synthetic data for you. There is a firm you can use called Evidenza, who are a professional synthetic firm. I mean, their stuff is astonishing, but you’re talking £15-£20,000 to do the synthetic data for you, as opposed to £40-£50,000 to do it for real. And the synthetic stuff is now more accurate at that level than actually talking to real consumers, but if you’re a smaller operation or a one man or one woman band, you can just get onto AI and say “I want to run some synthetic research, do this, do this, and present me back the results. And why not the implications of the results?” It’s trustworthy enough now to really start to move you through it. I don’t want to be on these horrible guys that does prompting tips, but the one thing to do at the end though is just to say, and “now put it through a real-world filter” that’s just a final test to make sure it isn’t complete BS. You do that, you’re getting literally £100,000 worth of value in about eight minutes for free.

Dan Campbell    

Brilliant. While I look for the next one, both Aaron and Nathan are ex-cohorts of The MiniMBA, both, which is good. So it’s not one, not two, but three that we are invited to come back.

Mark Ritson   

Come back again chaps, come back again, come on, do it again. I’ve changed the syllabus slightly, come back.

Dan Campbell    

And Nina says…

Mark Ritson  

Sign up again, Nina, come on. Loyalty discount, no loyalty discount, go away Nathan, you know the answer, you know better than that, come on.

Dan Campbell  

Brilliant, let’s do a fun one next. “What does Mark think of Seth Godin’s recent comment that universities are doing a horrible job of teaching marketing?” And that’s from Paul, who asks that.

Mark Ritson  

Yeah, Seth Godin is very interesting. I think he’s slightly insane. He varies his comments between really, really spot on stuff and complete drivel. I think it’s a real warning for me that if I sit in rooms like this for too long, I might turn into Seth Godin and talk nonsense a lot of the time, with occasional nuggets as well. Having said that, I think this is one of the occasions where he’s more accurate than he’s wrong. Yeah, it’s true. The big problem we have, and I did it myself for a long time, you can’t teach marketing if you’re not doing marketing. And our universities are populated by people who never did marketing, or if they did it, they did it 35 years ago, it’s a trade. My dad, who’s very working class, made a very good point a long time ago, which is that I did a lot of work with medical companies. And I’d work with professors of medicine and surgery as key opinion leaders on programs. I’d work with guys from New York University in the hospital, medical school, and they’d all be professors teaching surgery two days a week, but the other three days they were doing surgery, but then I go back to business school and no one’s done any surgery ever, so how can they be teaching surgery? And the answer is they shouldn’t be, it’s all nonsense, and it’s easy for me to say that, but it’s true. I won the teaching prize six weeks after I got to MIT, and it wasn’t my good looks, was it? It was the fact that I was literally teaching, “this is what I’m doing”, and when MBAs get a load of that, they’re like, “hang on, what is this?” So, yeah, unfortunately, in this case, Seth Godin is correct. It’s not the best place at the moment to learn math. There are exceptions, you know. I still hold up London Business School as pretty good, but it’s a shame. It’s a real shame.

Dan Campbell  

Brilliant, thanks, Mark. So next, a question from Ruth, who asks “we always think services are different from retail when it comes to marketing, is that true? Is there something distinct?”

Mark Ritson 

No, there’s absolutely nothing distinct. So, there’s no difference between B2B and B2C. There’s no difference between services and product. There’s no real difference between big and small. We get these people who often say “this product marketing, that’s all the same, but then there’s service marketing is different”. But they’ve made product marketing into this thing that’s all the same, but inside the product marketing thing, they’re saying the same is trombones and super glue and playing cards and microphones, they’re all different as well. So you can learn across the remit that the main thing about marketing is to learn it, not to look for differences from one thing to another, which are largely not there.

Dan Campbell  

Brilliant. Let’s go for a question from Miriam, who says “in referral-led firms, what actually creates differentiation and competitive advantage among other firms?”

Mark Ritson   

Oh, I don’t know, but you can certainly find out very quickly by looking at the best data to use is correlation coefficients, so you can look at “how much I perceive a firm is x?” And then in another question, “how likely would I be to recommend that firm?” And what you’re looking for is the correlation between those two data points, it can be minus one “the more I think they’re this expensive, the less I’m likely to refer them”. Or it can be plus one, “the more I think they’re this trustworthy, the more likely I am”. So it goes from plus one perfect correlation, to minus one perfect negative correlation, to zero orthogonal in the middle. And what you’re looking for is, I don’t have the data, I’m not the god of marketing. You’ve got to ask your representative sample for data, and you’ll get it. Don’t ask them for the answer. You need unspoken correlated data to find it, but it’s a very standard two-question approach.

Dan Campbell  

Brilliant, and I’m aware of time, so let’s end on a fun one from Nina, ex MiniMBA cohort. So, needs a good answer. Nina says, “hi, Mark. What did you want to be growing up, if anything?”

Mark Ritson   

Oh gosh, it’s terrifically boring. I always wanted to work in marketing. I’m afraid I don’t have a transformation story. I went to university in the 80s to study marketing. I wanted to work in marketing, and I’ve never had any desire to do anything else. I can’t explain that or justify it, but unfortunately it’s very boringly true. I think one of the reasons I was a very different marketing professor is I wanted to be a marketing professor because I like marketing. A lot of my colleagues wanted to be a marketing professor because they like being a professor, something I had zero interest in. So I’ve always wanted to be in marketing, and I can’t explain it.

Phil Bray

Thank you Nina for that question to finish off. Mark, it’s been a fabulous hour. Thank you so much, very entertaining. And we will put the link to the recording in the follow-up to everybody. We’ll put the link to The MiniMBA in the follow-up go and spend some money, and get 12 weeks of education. I think everybody’s going to McDonald’s.

Mark Ritson   

Look, one more challenge for you is, do you want to call my bluff, and I will now pan the camera down to reveal what I’m wearing, or do you not want to gamble?

Phil Bray  

Oh, we’ve got a gamble, mate.

Mark Ritson 

I’m glad you said that, because you know it’s shorts, it’s shorts. What a shame, what a shame.

Phil Bray

Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mark. See you soon, everybody. Cheers, bye.

Dan Campbell  

Take care, guys. Bye bye.