Mark Ritson

I have a PhD in Marketing and spent 25 years working as a marketing professor. I was an Assistant Professor at London Business School and the University of Minnesota, an Associate Professor and then Adjunct Professor at Melbourne Business School, and Visiting Professor at MIT and SMU. My MBA teaching won a shit ton of prizes including best teacher at LBS, MIT & MBS.

I have also worked as a global brand consultant for clients that include Baxter, Loewe, McKinsey, Subaru, Donna Karan, Westpac, Shiseido, Flight Centre, Johnson & Johnson, De Beers, Sephora, Benefit, Amgen, Ericsson, Jurlique, Cloudy Bay and WD40. These days I sit on the boards of The Marketing Academy and tech firm Lakeba.

For thirteen years - from 2002 to 2015 - I served as the in-house brand consultant for LVMH - the world's largest luxury group - working in Paris with senior executives from brands like Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon and Hennessy.

I’ve been a columnist for (gulp) 20 years, writing a weekly column for Marketing Week. On five occasions I've been voted Columnist of the Year at the PPA Press Awards, the highest award for magazine journalism in the UK. I’ve also been the British Society of Magazine Editors Business Columnist of the Year in 2018, 2022 and 2023. More scholarly publications include articles in the Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Consumer Research.

I was a Thouron Scholar and spent 1995 at Wharton. I was a recipient of the Ferber Award in 2000 for my doctoral thesis. My co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof during his 2001 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In 2018 AdNews rated me one of their “Power 50” and I made SmartCompany's top ten business thinkers list. The AMI gave me the Sir Charles McGrath Award, the highest honour for marketing in Australia. I gave the 30th Anniversary Levitt Group lecture for the Chartered Institute of Marketing in 2019 and the Ogilvy lecture for the Marketing Society a year later. In the IPAs 2024 honours list I was a made an Honorary Fellow of the Institute.

These days I focus on my Mini MBA courses. I live in Tasmania with three Tasmanians plus three idiot dogs. I have a boat and a gym that I don’t use. But I do find time to drink fine wine, usually in my underpants, until very early in the morning stopping occasionally to marvel at the absurdity of it all.

Please note, I’ve maxed out my 30,000 LinkedIn connections. So please follow me instead. And I’ll follow you. Like FDR and Churchill. At Yalta.