The Battling Professors: Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson Go Head to Head!

Two titans of the marketing industry will square off in the most important debate you will witness this year. In one corner the brand consultant, academic, agent provocateur and award-winning Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson will assess the impact of the marketing best-seller "How Brands Grow" and the areas where he believes it still falls short. From the other corner, Byron Sharp, best-selling author and the man that has the attention of some of the world's biggest brands will review the impact of his book seven years on and respond to Ritson's rebuttal. Mark Ritson is widely acknowledged as one of the world's best marketing instructors. He has worked globally on projects ranging from brand strategy, market research, segmentation, CRM, marketing communications, brand acquisition, brand valuation and brand extension. Weekly columnist on branding for Marketing Week for over a decade, on three occasions he has been judged the Business Columnist of the Year at the PPA Press Awards, the highest award for magazine journalism in the UK. Byron Sharp is a Professor of Marketing Science and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – the world’s largest institute for research into marketing. His first book How Brands Grow: what marketers don’t know has been called one of the most influential marketing books of the past decade (Warc, 2015) and was voted marketing book of the year by AdAge readers. In 2015 he published the follow-up How Brands Grow Part 2 with Professor Jenni Romaniuk, and he has also written a textbook Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice which reflects modern knowledge about marketing and evidence-based thinking.