Mark Ritson

Meet Mark Ritson

Mark Ritson has a PhD in Marketing and spent 25 years working as a marketing professor. He 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. His MBA teaching won a shit ton of prizes including best teacher at LBS, MIT & MBS.

Mark has 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, Penfolds, Jurlique, Cloudy Bay and WD40.

For thirteen years – from 2002 to 2015 – he 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.

Mark has been a columnist for 20 years, writing a weekly column for Marketing Week. On five occasions he has been voted Columnist of the Year at the PPA Press Awards, the highest award for magazine journalism in the UK. He has 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.

He was a Thouron Scholar and spent 1995 at Wharton. Mark was a recipient of the Ferber Award in 2000 for his doctoral thesis. His co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof during his 2001 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In 2018 AdNews rated him one of their “Power 50” and he made SmartCompany’s top ten business thinkers list. The AMI gave him the Sir Charles McGrath Award, the highest honour for marketing in Australia. Mark 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 2024 honours list he was a made an Honorary Fellow of the IPA.

These days he focuses on his Mini MBA courses. He lives in Tasmania with three Tasmanians plus many rescue dogs.