Mini MBA: Those trained for yesterday, are old hat today

The most popular marketing education in the industry is teaching you to fail. Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA has trained thousands in brand building, segmentation, and positioning. It’s brilliant at grounding practitioners in strategic principles. The problem? It’s delivered in a context where AI-enablement and machine relevance doesn’t feature.

While Mark’s course debates whether there are four or more Ps, 95% of B2B buyers are using AI to make purchasing decisions and 89% say generative AI plays a role in evaluating vendors. Your landing pages, brand narratives, customer journeys? Buyers bypass them, getting answers from AI summaries that never touch your website.

Ritson addressed a critical gap – only 51% of marketers have formal training. But training in fundamentals isn’t enough when those fundamentals must evolve for an AI-mediated world.

The obsolescence paradox
Some marketing teams continue to optimise for web traffic while buyers have different conversations with AI agents about which vendors to consider. You’re measuring clicks. They’re asking ChatGPT.

Only 21% of CMOs believe they have the people needed for AI success; 70% admit their companies are behind competitors; 45% say understanding how GenAI will impact marketing remains a major challenge. These aren’t skills problems. These are paradigm shifts.

Two languages, one brand
Marketing must now speak two languages – and most marketers are fluent in only one.

The first is emotional: storytelling that moves humans and builds brand affinity. This is what Ritson teaches. This remains essential.

The second is context-rich, semantically structured content that AI systems can parse and cite. No metaphors. No wordplay. Just crystal-clear problem-solution positioning that machines understand when evaluating which vendors to recommend.

Traditional marketing assumes humans will discover, consider, and choose you. AI-mediated marketing requires machines discover you first, then present you to humans. If your content isn’t structured for machine readability, you’re invisible.

Reengineering, not retrofitting
This isn’t about layering AI onto legacy models. It’s about reengineering marketing for machine-mediated decision-making. When 800 million people use ChatGPT weekly, your brand must be optimised for AI citation, not just search ranking.

If AI can’t explain what problem you solve, for whom, and why you solve it better, do you have a positioning? That’s what machines need to recommend you. If machines don’t recommend you, humans won’t discover you.

Lead or become obsolete
Marketers have two choices: lead the transformation or become casualties of resistance to change.

Lead means investing in both emotional storytelling and machine-readable content architecture, rebuilding operations for AI-native buying behaviour, and accepting that effectiveness requires fluency in two languages.

The brands winning in 2025 won’t be those with the biggest budgets or most creative awards. They’ll be those brave enough to admit that everything we learned still matters, but it’s no longer enough.

In March 2023, Ritson declared “artificial intelligence is mostly a distraction from marketing fundamentals” and dismissed ChatGPT as “a toy. A fucking toy”. Perhaps it was then. But AI is no longer a distraction – it has become the discipline.

AI isn’t here to replace marketers. It’s here to expose those who refuse to evolve.

Paul Evans is founder and chief positioning engineer at V2RSION