Diagnosis before tactics: Mark Ritson's case for market orientation and strategy first

Who Mark Ritson is, and the core idea

Mark Ritson is a marketing professor, a long-standing Marketing Week columnist and the creator of the Mini MBA in Marketing, an online course for working marketers run in collaboration with Marketing Week (The Marketing Meetup has a detailed review). The course curriculum follows one sequence all the way through: diagnosis, then strategy, then tactics. Its ten modules map onto those three stages:

• Diagnosis: market orientation, market research and segmentation. This is about understanding the market before making any choices.
• Strategy: targeting, positioning and objectives. This is where choices are made.
• Tactics: product, price, marketing communications and distribution, the classic four Ps. Each tactical decision should follow from the target, positioning and objectives.

The curriculum sums up the strategy stage in four words:

"Strategy is choice and sacrifice." — Mini MBA in Marketing curriculum

Diagnosis starts with market orientation

Ritson treats market orientation as the foundation. In a 2014 Marketing Week column, Assume your market and bingo! you bomb, he argued that customers see the world very differently from the people who design strategies for them. Managers who assume they know what customers think are usually guessing, and strategies built on guesses tend to fail. One of his examples was marketers on social media dismissing Thinkbox research on how much traditional TV people watch, because it did not match their own viewing habits: in effect, a sample size of one.

A 2025 Mini MBA article describes the same idea as looking at the business from the outside in. Seen through customers' eyes, a cinema's competition includes bowling and streaming, not just other cinemas. The article also makes a subtle point: research is not supposed to hand you a strategy. Its job is to give you an understanding of customers' motivations and anxieties, on which you then build a strategy.

Why tactics-first fails

In a 2016 column, Tactics without strategy is dumbing down our discipline, Ritson warned about the tactification of marketing. He blamed a flood of new tools, pressure to plan in real time rather than for the long term, and marketers who pick execution methods before doing any research.

His central example was a client's annual marketing plan. The general manager felt it was all bells and whistles. It contained plenty of digital activity, but when asked about targeting, positioning and objectives, the marketing manager could not answer. Ritson invoked Sun Tzu's warning about what tactics without strategy lead to.

The underlying problem is logical. A channel, tool or format can only be judged good or bad relative to a target and a goal. Without them, every tactic looks reasonable, budgets spread thinly, and results cannot be evaluated because nobody agreed what success meant.

Why it matters for SMEs

Smaller companies are especially exposed to tactics-first planning. Platforms, agencies and software vendors all sell tactics, and a lean team rarely has time for research. In our work with European SMEs we often see plans that start with a new platform or an AI tool rather than with who the customer is and what the brand should stand for. A short diagnostic phase is usually the cheapest way to make the rest of the budget work harder.

A practical playbook

1. Write down your assumptions. List what the team believes about customers: who buys, why, what they compare you with, and what they would pay. These are hypotheses, not facts.
2. Talk to customers. Use qualitative interviews to understand why people behave as they do, then simple surveys to measure how many think that way. The Mini MBA curriculum covers both.
3. Start research from decisions. The curriculum also teaches backwards market research, an approach from Alan Andreasen that designs research around the specific decisions the business must make.
4. Map the market from the outside in. Include the alternatives customers really consider, not just your direct competitors.
5. Segment only as far as it changes decisions. If two groups would get the same product, price and message, you do not need to separate them.
6. Choose a target, and decide who you will not prioritise. That is the sacrifice part of strategy.
7. Define a simple positioning of a few ideas you can repeat consistently for years.
8. Set measurable objectives for each target before choosing a single channel.
9. Only then choose tactics. For each product, price, channel and campaign decision, write one line explaining which target, positioning element and objective it serves. If you cannot, drop it.

Limits and nuance

Diagnosis does not mean endless analysis. Ritson himself has questioned how much segmentation many brands need. Speaking at the Festival of Marketing in 2023, he argued that marketers often segment because convention demands it, that the best ad for one audience is frequently the best ad for all, and that brands should combine broad reach for brand building with targeted activation, drawing on Binet and Field and on Byron Sharp. He did not dismiss the practice entirely:

"I don't think segmentation itself is necessarily always pointless." — Mark Ritson, Festival of Marketing 2023

The lesson for SMEs is proportion. Diagnosis should be just deep enough to make confident choices, then be refreshed periodically, not turned into a one-off research project that delays action indefinitely.

FAQ

Sources

• MiniMBA Curriculum — Mini MBA in Marketing / Adweek
• Mark Ritson: Tactics without strategy is dumbing down our discipline — Mark Ritson / Marketing Week, 2016
• Mark Ritson: Assume your market and bingo! you bomb — Mark Ritson / Marketing Week, 2014
• How customer centricity drives successful strategy — Rachel Morris / MiniMBA, 2025
• Mark Ritson: Segmentation is not the prerequisite for success — Chris Sutcliffe / Marketing Week, 2023
• Mark Ritson Mini MBA in Marketing: the comprehensive review — The Marketing Meetup, 2022 (updated 2023)