Imagine if your baker couldn’t name different types of flour

Imagine walking into a bakery and asking what kind of flour they use — and the baker shrugs.

Or worse, confidently tells you it doesn’t matter.

You’d question their credibility immediately. Because in most professions, foundational knowledge is non-negotiable.

In marketing, it often isn’t.

Recent research highlighted by Mark Ritson, drawing on work with Ipsos, found that only 35% of marketers have any formal training in the discipline. Across more than 1,200 marketers in four countries, many could not explain basic concepts: penetration, excess share of voice (ESOV), or even the Four Ps.

This isn’t a fringe issue. It’s systemic.

And yet, it’s often dismissed.

 Ritson has long described this mindset as philistine thinking: people who do, but don’t think.

The argument is familiar. Execution matters more than theory. Action beats understanding. The real world is too messy for academic models.

On the surface, this sounds practical — even admirable. But it creates a dangerous false equivalence: that doing marketing is the same as understanding marketing.

It isn’t.

Marketing is not just a set of tasks. It is a discipline built on principles — segmentation, positioning, mental and physical availability, pricing strategy, brand building. Without these, execution becomes untethered. Activity replaces intent.

The myth of the successful amateur

Of course, there are successful marketers without formal training.

But they are exceptions, not evidence.

In any field, some individuals succeed despite lacking formal grounding. But we don’t design professions around anomalies. We design them around what reliably works.

The problem in marketing is scale. When a large proportion of practitioners lack training, poor understanding becomes normalised. It stops looking like a deficiency and starts looking like diversity of thought.

Worse, those without training often dismiss those with it:

“They’re too theoretical.”

“They have narrow thinking.”

Yet the Ipsos data suggests the opposite.
Training improves capability.

Not always perfectly. Not uniformly. But directionally, clearly, and consistently.

“But the real world is messy”

This is the standard rebuttal that hits those of us in Higher Education hardest. And by no means do I think universities do themselves a favour.

But the normal logic is as follows: Universities don’t reflect reality. Markets move too fast. Context changes everything.

All true.

But also irrelevant.

Pilots don’t begin in the cockpit. They start in classrooms, move to simulators, and only then enter controlled real-world conditions. No one argues that training is unnecessary because reality is more complex than simulation.

Education is not meant to replicate reality.
It is meant to prepare you for it.

Marketing should be no different.

Why we resist marketing education

So why does this resistance persist?

The answer is simple psychology: cognitive dissonance.

If I have built a career without formal training, I am motivated to believe that training is not valuable. Otherwise, I must confront an uncomfortable possibility — that I may be missing something important.

When enough people share that belief, it becomes amplified.
Louder. More confident. More dismissive.

And over time, expertise itself becomes suspect.

The AI accelerant

If this problem were static, it would already be concerning.

But it isn’t. It is being accelerated by AI.

AI can now do much of the doing of marketing. It can generate copy, produce creative, optimise campaigns, and automate execution at scale. What once required teams can now be done in minutes.

But AI cannot define what good looks like.

It cannot decide whether a brand should pursue penetration or loyalty.
It cannot determine the right positioning in a crowded market.
It cannot meaningfully evaluate trade-offs between short-term activation and long-term brand building.

In other words, AI can execute.

But it cannot think. (not yet at least)

And when execution becomes easier, cheaper, and faster, the relative value of judgement, strategy, and foundational knowledge increases.

The risk is clear: organisations will produce more marketing than ever before — more content, more campaigns, more activity — but with less understanding behind it.

AI will not replace marketers.

It will expose them.

The real risk

The danger is not just individual underperformance.

It is the erosion of marketing as a discipline.

Without shared principles, there is no common standard for quality.
Without training, there is no consistent way to evaluate decisions.
Without foundations, there is no accumulation of knowledge — only repetition of mistakes.

Imagine a doctor dismissing anatomy as “too theoretical.”
Or an engineer ignoring basic physics because “the real world is more complex.”

Marketing should demand no less rigour.

Because at its core, marketing is not about activity.
It is about effectiveness.

 And if you haven't already gathered it ...we don’t actually have a marketing talent problem.

We have a marketing education problem.

And until we fix it, we will keep mistaking activity for effectiveness.