Nordic Business Forum 2027 Speaker
Mark Ritson
Mark Ritson is a globally recognized marketing professor and brand consultant. He has 25 years of experience in teaching and his MBA teaching won prizes including best teacher at LBS, MIT & MBS.
Alongside academia, Mark has advised some of the world’s most renowned brands and organizations, including Loewe, Johnson & Johnson, Sephora, and Subaru. From thirteen years, he served as the in-house brand consultant for LVMH – the world’s largest luxury group.
Mark has been a columnist for more than 20 years, writing for publications including Marketing Week, AdWeek, and The Drum. A seven-time PPA Press Awards Columnist of the Year winner, he now focuses on teaching marketers through his Mini MBA courses.
Mark at Nordic Business Forum 2027
Marketing Means Making Focused Choices
In this keynote, Mark Ritson explores how to make better strategic marketing decisions by defining the right audience, sharpening brand positioning, and focusing on the objectives that matter most. He examines how organizations can create greater focus through clear positioning and by concentrating resources on fewer, clearer objectives.
Learning points:
- How to make sharper choices about who your marketing is for.
- How positioning creates focus — and why trying to be everything weakens brands.
- How to set fewer, clearer objectives and concentrate resources where they matter most.
Mark at Nordic Business Forum 2027
VIP Session: The Ten Tests of Your Marketing
In this VIP session, Mark will share how to objectively assess the strengths and weaknesses of your current marketing. He will introduce ten tests designed to evaluate whether your marketing fundamentals are working and show how to turn the results into clear priorities for improvement.
Learning points:
- How to objectively diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of your current marketing.
- Which ten tests reveal whether your marketing fundamentals are actually working.
- How to turn the diagnosis into clear priorities for what to improve next.
More from Mark Ritson
Read
In this MarketingWeek article “Ignore anyone who tells you to forget about targeting”, Mark Ritson argues that despite advances in AI and algorithms, marketers still need to make deliberate targeting decisions rather than relying on platforms to find the right audience automatically. He explains that targeting is the foundation of strategy because it shapes product, pricing, positioning, and resource allocation decisions long before advertising begins.
Watch
In this episode of Frontier CMO by Think with Google, Mark Ritson and Josh Spanier discuss the current state of marketing, emphasizing strategic discipline, market orientation, and brand positioning. They also explore how AI is changing marketing and why understanding the fundamentals of marketing remains essential.
Listen
Mark Ritson joined the Business of Marketing podcast to explore whether marketing has truly changed or whether marketers have simply forgotten its fundamentals. In conversation with Justin Cooke, he discusses topics including market orientation, strategy, brand consistency, AI, and why organizations should focus less on trends and more on building strong brands.
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22-23 September 2027 | Messukeskus, Helsinki