The Calcified Canon
On knowing the rules well enough to know where they break
Earlier this week, Mark Ritson took a stage in New York with data from an Ipsos survey of 1,226 marketing professionals across the US, UK, Canada and Australia. 36% of marketers can’t list the 4Ps. 42% can’t recognise a positioning. 49% don’t know what penetration means. Only 33% pass a basic ten-question test on marketing fundamentals. And yet 84% believe they have above-average expertise.
The conclusion: marketers are ignorant of their own discipline. The solution: more formal marketing education. Which lands, with suspicious neatness, exactly where Ritson’s Mini MBA sits.
I pushed back. A vocabulary quiz isn’t a competency assessment. The leap from “49% of marketers can’t define penetration” to “the industry’s problems are fundamentally educational” skips over almost everything structural about why marketing is actually in the state it’s in.
Ritson read that as an argument against education entirely and called me a philistine. Classic ad hominem. And I'd expect nothing less.
But let me be clear. I believe in education and training with my whole chest. I taught business strategy at the APG for almost a decade. I've built industry-wide mentoring programmes for juniors trying to find their feet. Every deck, every essay, every idea I've ever had is out there freely - read it, steal it, argue with it.
I’ve been doing this for twenty-four years. I learned the rules. Properly. And then I broke them. That’s not the same as not knowing them. That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make.
What I am arguing is that we have a calcified, self-serving version of marketing education that hasn’t kept pace with the discipline it’s supposed to be teaching. That’s a very different thing. And it’s what I want to unpack.
Let’s start with the survey itself. What’s so wrong with a multiple choice test on the 4Ps and positioning? I’ll tell you.
It tests recall. Not judgment. Not application. Not the ability to walk into a room, read a brief, and know that something is fundamentally wrong with it before anyone else in the room has noticed. Not the ability to diagnose why a brand with strong awareness scores and positive ESOV is quietly losing cultural relevance. Not the ability to sit in a board meeting where a strategy is being killed for reasons nobody will say out loud and understand what’s actually happening.
I’ve known plenty of marketers who could recite the glossary cold. Some of them were absolutely dreadful at their jobs. Technically fluent. Practically lost. Because knowing what penetration means and knowing what to do when your penetration strategy isn’t working in the category you’re actually operating in are two entirely different skills. One lives in a textbook. The other lives in the room.
Medicine figured this out. You can memorise every condition in the textbook and still be a dangerous doctor, because real diagnosis is messy, overlapping, context-dependent, and frequently contradicts what the textbook predicts. Which is why medical education combines theoretical knowledge with clinical practice, case-based learning, and years of supervised judgment under real conditions. You don’t get to practise on patients by passing a multiple choice anatomy test.
Marketing hasn’t made that leap. We test recall and call it competence.
And there’s a second problem with this particular survey - one that matters more. The terms it chose to test are the vocabulary of classical marketing theory. They describe how marketing worked in a specific era, under specific conditions. Knowing them is useful. It’s the beginning of an education. But it is not the measure of one. Testing familiarity with classical vocabulary and using it to pronounce on the competency of an entire profession is like testing whether doctors know their Latin anatomical terms and concluding that modern medicine is in crisis.
The vocabulary is the map. The map is not the territory. And the territory has changed enormously.
Which brings us to the canon itself.
The frameworks that built this discipline were developed by serious people trying to make sense of genuinely hard problems, and many of them succeeded. The 4Ps, penetration, positioning, STP, brand equity, How Brands Grow, The Long and Short - these aren’t arbitrary constructs. They’re attempts to describe something real about how markets work and how brands grow within them.
Teach them. All of them.
But there’s a difference between knowing a framework and knowing how to use it. And a bigger difference still between using it in the conditions it was built for and navigating with it when those conditions have shifted under your feet. Ritson’s survey tests the first thing. It tells you nothing about the second and third. Which means it isn’t testing expertise. It’s testing whether you’ve done the reading.
Every framework in this canon was built inside a specific set of conditions. Those conditions have changed. More than most marketing curricula want to admit. And an education that doesn’t teach those conditions, that doesn’t ask what happens when they no longer hold, is preparing people for a cleaner, more controllable world than the one they’re actually walking into.
So let’s go through it.
The 4Ps - McCarthy, 1960
Jerome McCarthy took Neil Borden’s twelve-element marketing mix and distilled it into four categories - Product, Price, Place, Promotion. A pedagogical simplification, designed to give marketers a clean framework for thinking about the full scope of decisions available to them. The assumption baked in was that marketing had meaningful control over all four.
But that assumption has eroded considerably. Price is increasingly set by algorithms, marketplace dynamics, and real-time competitive pressure that sits well outside the marketing function. Product decisions live upstream with a different team. Distribution now runs across owned stores, third-party retailers, global marketplaces, direct-to-consumer, resellers, and platforms - each with their own rules, algorithms, margin expectations, and relationships with the end consumer that the brand doesn’t fully control or sometimes even see. And promotion hasn’t been something you do at people for a long time - it’s a negotiation with a culture that talks back, remixes your work, and occasionally burns your campaign down before the media plan is even live.
Reeling off the 4Ps tells you they’ve read the textbook. It tells you nothing about what to do when most of those levers aren’t yours to pull.
Positioning -Ries and Trout, 1981
Ries and Trout developed positioning theory in the 1970s and 80s for mass media markets. Cluttered, yes, but still finite - a limited number of channels, a manageable volume of brand communications, and consumers who largely received rather than responded. The brands that won were the ones that planted a clear, simple, differentiated idea in the consumer’s mind and held it there through consistent, controlled messaging. Own a word. Own a space. Defend it.
It described something real about how perception worked when brands controlled a one-way conversation.
That conversation is now multi-directional, and the brand is not necessarily leading it. Meaning accretes from everywhere - from how a creator interprets your product, from what happens when your ad appears next to the wrong piece of content, from a cultural moment you got sucked into that suddenly makes your tagline read differently, from what your CEO said on a podcast in 2019 that someone just found and made a viral TikTok about. The strategic question - what do we want to mean, and to whom - is still the right one. But the idea that you can declare an answer, hold it through consistency, and defend it through messaging assumes a degree of control over meaning that brands simply don’t have anymore.
Positioning as it’s taught is a big brand, big media construct. Clean, controllable, declarable. The reality for most marketers is considerably messier than that - and knowing the theory tells you nothing about navigating the mess.
STP - Kotler, 1969
Kotler’s Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning framework - STP - gave marketers a logical sequence: divide the market into segments, choose the most attractive one, position your brand for it. Clean, rational, repeatable. In a world of finite media channels and relatively stable consumer behaviour, it was a workable approximation of how markets operated.
The problem is that it was always an approximation. Real people are not segments. The ‘25-45 year old mum’ is not a homogenous block of identical needs waiting to receive the same message through the same channel at the same moment. She is irrational, contextual, contradictory - a different consumer on a Tuesday morning than on a Friday night, influenced by communities and platforms and moods that no demographic cut can predict or contain.
And that was always true. The framework just assumed you could ignore it. What’s made that impossible is that the assumption you can define a target, craft a message for it, and reliably reach it has been shredded by fragmentation, algorithmic distribution, and the collapse of mass media as a coherent targeting environment.
The real measure of expertise isn’t knowing what STP means. It’s knowing how much of it is wishful thinking.
Share of Voice and ESOV
Share of voice emerged as a metric for a simpler media landscape - finite channels, measurable spend, a world where shouting loudest in the right places had a reasonably predictable relationship with being heard. The core finding that came out of it - that brands spending above their market share in share of voice tend to grow, and those spending below it tend to decline, what we now call excess share of voice or ESOV - is one of the more robust empirical relationships in the effectiveness literature. Real, worth knowing, still broadly true.
The problem is what counts as voice now. SOV was built when you could credibly calculate what proportion of category spend you owned across a limited number of channels. In a world where earned cultural presence, creator-driven distribution, community advocacy, and algorithmic amplification are as commercially significant as paid media, the metric captures an increasingly partial picture. You can dominate every paid channel and lose the cultural conversation entirely. You can spend almost nothing and generate more meaningful presence than a competitor outspending you ten to one.
And even if you accept the ESOV principle, above what share? In which channels? Measured how? Against which competitors? Those are not simple questions anymore.
Knowing what ESOV means is the starting point. Knowing where to invest to actually build excess presence in an environment that’s sprawling, increasingly unmappable, and where the most valuable voice is often the kind you can’t purchase - that’s the expertise.
How Brands Grow - Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2010
Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow is probably the most rigorous contribution the discipline has produced in thirty years. The core argument - that brand growth comes primarily from penetration, from reaching light and infrequent buyers rather than deepening loyalty among heavy users, from building mental and physical availability - is evidenced, important, and worth understanding properly. His 2025 research doubles down on this: he suggests that even tiny brands, those with less than 1% market share, typically show loyalty deficits rather than surpluses. When they grow, they grow via penetration.
But that 2025 study was conducted on Australian wine market data. Traditional retail, shelf-based, FMCG conditions. And it’s not an outlier - it’s representative of the entire empirical base, original and new, which skews heavily toward traditional retail categories where physical availability is the primary distribution mechanism. It was never designed to answer different questions: how does a subscription business optimise when churn is the existential threat and retention is the entire commercial model? How does a community-built brand grow through belonging rather than availability? And what about platform and marketplace businesses, where existing users are the primary acquisition mechanism - where retention and engagement drive penetration rather than the other way around? In those models, loyalty isn’t secondary to growth. It’s what makes growth possible. Sharp’s framework has no real language for that inversion because it wasn’t built to address it.
And the debate isn’t as closed as it’s often taught. A GfK analysis of over 2,000 German consumer brands found that the majority of brand growth in their dataset was explained by increases in loyalty rather than penetration - a direct challenge to the universal claim, in the same category type. Sharp disputes the methodology. The argument runs on.
And that’s the point. It runs on. Teaching penetration theory as settled law, stripping it of the dataset and conditions that produced it, and presenting it as the answer to how brands grow is how a genuinely important piece of thinking gets calcified into something it was never meant to be.
Knowing Sharp’s thesis is not the same as knowing which growth model is right for the brand in front of you. And a quiz that tests whether you can define penetration tells you nothing about whether you can answer that question.
I could go on. The story is the same every time - serious thinking, built for specific conditions, taught as universal truth.
The questions are right. The evidence, where it exists, is real. But every framework was built inside conditions that no longer hold the way they once did.
Knowing these frameworks is where a marketing education begins. It is not where competency lives. And a survey that asks whether you can define them, then uses the results to pronounce on the expertise of an entire profession, is not a rigorous diagnostic. It’s bullshit.
It tells you whether someone has read the map. It says nothing about whether they can navigate the territory.
And the territory has changed.
CMO tenure at consumer brands now averages 3.5 years. CEOs average 7.6. Every time a new CMO arrives, the clock resets. The agency changes. The strategy changes. The brief starts from zero. Brand building is a long game - it compounds over time, it requires patience, it demands a willingness to make investments whose returns won’t show up in this quarter or the next. But if you’re gone in three and a half years, the rational move is to hit numbers fast. So that’s what you do. The brand slowly hollows out. And the next CMO inherits the mess and resets the clock again.
Tell me again how this is an education problem.
The holding companies that used to develop great marketers have been eating themselves alive. Between 2016 and 2023, WPP shed nearly 20,000 people. IPG cut more than 6,000 roles in 2025 alone. As part of the Omnicom merger, DDB - founded in 1949, the agency behind Think Small, one of the most important creative institutions this industry ever produced - is being folded into TBWA. Seventy-six years of accumulated craft and institutional knowledge, fed into an efficiency programme.
The talent leaves. The knowledge leaves with it. The craft stops compounding. And what’s left is an industry that’s very good at performing expertise it no longer has the conditions to actually build.
And underneath all of it sits a structural wound that predates everything else. Marketing has never owned a P&L. It has always had to justify its existence through proxies - brand equity, share of voice, awareness scores - because the thing it actually creates, the meaning a brand holds in people’s lives, resists the spreadsheet.
So someone else always gets to define what proof looks like. First the media owners. Then the platforms. Then the algorithm. Every time marketing adopted a new measurement framework, it handed over a degree of sovereignty. Brands got built for dashboards rather than people. The case for investment got harder to make. The cuts got easier to justify.
The loop has been running for decades. It wasn’t started by a generation of marketers who can’t name the 4Ps.
And that’s before we get to the gutting of training budgets, the tyranny of performance metrics, the data obsession that squeezed brand building out of the room, the risk aversion that killed creative ambition, the shorter timelines, the volume imperatives, the fill-the-feed culture that values output over thinking.
The decline of marketing is not purely an education issue. It’s not even mostly an education issue. It is a systemic, structural, incentive-driven unravelling that has been happening in plain sight for a very long time.
But if we are going to talk about education - and apparently we are - then let’s talk about the right things.
What would a genuine competency assessment look like? What would I actually test?
Not the vocabulary of a world that no longer fully exists. The ability to operate inside the one that does. A world where there is no paint by numbers process. Where the instruction sheet was written for a different problem entirely. Where you need both the judgment to navigate ambiguity and the knowledge base to understand the terrain you’re actually on.
Here’s what I’d want to know.
Complexity science and systems thinking.
Markets are not stable environments you can analyse and act on predictably. They are complex adaptive systems - they respond to interventions in non-linear ways, they produce emergent behaviour no individual actor intended, they have tipping points that nobody sees coming until after they’ve tipped. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework makes a distinction that every marketer should understand: the difference between a complicated problem - where expertise and analysis produce reliable answers - and a complex one, where the relationship between cause and effect is only visible in retrospect. Almost every interesting marketing problem is complex, not complicated. Teaching only complicated-problem frameworks for complex-problem environments is why so much marketing strategy looks brilliant in a deck and falls apart upon contact with the real world.
So here’s what I’d put in the survey: how many marketers can explain the difference between a complicated and a complex system, and why it changes how they’d approach a brand crisis versus a category disruption?
Cultural economics and the sociology of value.
Pierre Bourdieu spent his career mapping how meaning accretes around objects, practices, and symbols - how taste works, how cultural capital operates, why certain things become status objects and others with identical functional quality never do. This is the intellectual territory that explains why Supreme can sell a brick for thirty dollars, why some challenger brands become cultural institutions and others with identical spend and strategy remain permanently invisible. It’s not in a marketing syllabus anywhere I’ve seen. It should be foundational.
How many marketers can articulate why their brand occupies the cultural position it does - not in positioning statement terms, but in terms of how meaning actually accumulates?
The anthropology of community.
Not community management as a tactic. The actual study of how human groups form, develop shared identity, maintain coherence over time, and relate to external symbols and institutions. Brands that understand this build differently. They understand what belonging actually requires, how trust operates inside groups, how an outsider brand earns the right to participate in a community’s meaning-making rather than extract from it. Almost none of this is taught. All of it is increasingly essential.
How many marketers understand the difference between an audience and a community - not as a marketing distinction, but as an anthropological one? How many can explain what makes community identity sticky, and what it actually takes for a brand to become part of that identity rather than an intruder in it?
Information environment literacy.
How truth gets established and contested in networked environments. How narratives spread, mutate, get captured, get weaponised. How a brand’s meaning can be actively rewritten by actors entirely outside its control - not through a competitor’s campaign, but through a cultural moment, a coordinated community response, an information cascade that sweeps meaning somewhere the brand never intended for it to go. This is increasingly a core marketing competency. There is almost no formal education for it.
How many marketers know what an information cascade even is? How many can identify when their brand is caught inside one, and what the options are when that happens?
The political economy of platforms.
Not how to use platforms - every marketing course covers that. How platforms work as economic and political actors. How their incentive structures shape human behaviour, what it means to build brand equity inside an system you don’t own, that can change its algorithm, your organic reach, your community’s access to you, at any time, for reasons that have nothing to do with your strategy and everything to do with their business model. TikTok doesn’t distribute content neutrally (especially now that the Ellisons are in charge). Meta doesn’t surface posts in order of relevance. Understanding why - the underlying economic logic of attention, engagement, and advertising revenue - changes everything about how you think about building a brand inside these environments.
How many marketers can explain how platform incentive structures - not the features, the underlying economic logic - shape the cultural environments their brands actually live in?
Geopolitics and ideologies.
The world has fractured along ideological lines in ways that have made brand neutrality a fiction. Brands are operating across markets with fundamentally different and often directly opposed value systems - what reads as progressive in one context reads as provocative in another, what signals integrity in one market signals political alignment in another. Your supply chain is a geopolitical statement. Your silence in a crisis is a position. Where you choose to operate, and where you choose not to, gets read. All of it gets read.
And yet almost no marketing education addresses this. There is no framework for how to think about operating in a world of competing ideological blocs. No curriculum for understanding how geopolitical conflict reshapes consumer behaviour, how sanctions and supply chain exposure become brand reputation issues overnight, how a brand’s silence in a moment of global disaster gets read as loudly as its speech.
How many marketers can map the ideological fault lines their brand is operating across? How many understand how the same brand action lands differently inside different value systems - and have a framework for navigating that rather than just hoping nobody notices?
None of these are unanswerable. None require a PhD. But they describe a practitioner who can operate in the world marketing now exists in - not just recall the vocabulary of the world it used to.
That’s the test I’d run. That’s what competency looks like to me in 2026.
Not a glossary. Range.
Not a certificate. A willingness to keep learning from places the canon never thought to look - from complexity science and cultural theory and political economy and anthropology - because that’s where the actual terrain is being mapped.
Marketing has outgrown its education. And if you think fluency in 1960s marketing theory is what’s going to save you in the world we’re actually operating in right now - I genuinely don’t know what to tell you.
I know there’s a version of this conversation that just points backwards. Back to the long brief. Back to the big campaign. Back to the good old days when clients trusted agencies and agencies invested in people and the work had time to breathe and compound. Some of that was genuinely better. The thinking was deeper. The craft had room to develop.
But you cannot build for now using the architecture of then. The history is worth honouring. Not worth living in.
If believing that makes me a philistine, fine. I don’t really give a shit.
I’ve spent twenty-four years learning the rules, cracking them open, and watching as they continue to change under everyone’s feet. I know what the canon taught me. I also know where it ran out.
And a profession that keeps mistaking the map for the territory - that keeps handing people a glossary and calling it expertise - deserves every crisis it’s walking into.
The world has moved. For the love of god, move with it.
Zoe is surely one of the sharpest minds of our time. Phenomenal.
Hi Zoe,
working in a field that’s rapidly changing and realizing every single day that most around you live in a deluded model of the world that dates back decades has been deeply frustrating.
I’ve tried to find mentors who understand this complexity and who can help me mind think sharper. The fact that you take the time to guide so many of us free of cost is testament to your commitment to education, and I’m so grateful to have found a mentor in your recommendations even though we’ve barely interacted one-on-one.