“Sophisticated mass marketing doesn’t mean targeting everyone, nor does it mean treating everyone the same. That is not quite what Sharp says what he actually claims – and I quote – is as follows. He is not necessarily opposed to segmentation and targeting but unfortunately his work has been used to make the case for ignoring segments and targeting everyone. Sharp has been misquoted and misrepresented frequently on this point in the past. My critique centered on the most contentious and debated conclusion from How Brands Grow – the focus on ‘sophisticated mass marketing’. You came here for blood.” The audience stiffened.

“But,” I observed half way through my speech, “you did not come to hear me make sweet academic love to Byron. It is one of the great works of our marketing generation and has done much to pull the marketing discipline back to reality, towards empiricism and away from the corporate wankery that passes for branding so much of the time these days. I made sure I started by explaining just how good and how influential How Brands Grow is, and how much I agreed with so much of it. It might have been my imagination but even Professor Sharp’s infamously ice cold demeanour moistened for just a second as we entered the cavernous room. In the end I ran out of time, got massively pissed the night before the debate and ended up in Waterstones four hours before the debate with a gigantic hangover and an urgent need to speed-read both editions of How Brands Grow and write down my bullet points on the back of my Tube pass.Ī short read and then a long Tube trip across London and, before I knew it, there was Byron and off we went into a massive conference hall featuring two lecterns and 3,000 assembled marketers. In the months preceding the event I planned to take some time out to review Sharp’s impressive corpus of work and build an impressive empirical case with key points and perhaps a few dress rehearsals. READ MORE: Ritson versus Sharp – Who won the clash of the marketing titans? The organisers asked me and my old arch nemesis Professor Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute to close the conference with an animated debate about Sharp’s seismic impact on the field of marketing and, specifically, some of his more contentious evidence-based claims that I had taken exception to. The ads for this year’s Festival of Marketing have sparked happy memories of last year’s event. Mark Ritson debates Byron Sharp on mass marketing versus targeting at the Festival of Marketing 2017

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