Ignore Anyone Who Tells You to Forget About Targeting

We've heard a version of this argument in more boardrooms than we can count: that targeting is old-fashioned, that a famous case study proves the case for mass reach, and that everyone in the room should just get on board. It's a seductive idea. It's also, according to Mark Ritson, not that simple.

His Marketing Week column, "Ditching targeting for mass marketing is going back to the dark ages," is one of the sharper versions of this counter-argument we've read. It's worth sitting with properly rather than just nodding along, so here's what landed for us, and where we'd add a bit of nuance of our own.

Five things worth taking from it

1. Even "reach everyone" is a decision. When a CMO says their target is "seven billion people," they haven't escaped targeting, they've simply made the least deliberate version of it. That distinction is what got us thinking about how many "broad reach" strategies we've seen over the years were never actually decided on at all, just defaulted into before the harder conversation about focus had happened.
2. Scale changes what's sensible, not what's true. Coca-Cola can afford to go broad. Most businesses we work with can't, not yet. Ritson's point about smaller challengers needing to pick a lane first matches what we see on the ground: companies that try to be everything to everyone before they've built the distinctiveness to support it usually find it harder to be memorable to anyone.
3. B2B doesn't get to have this debate the same way. A finite sales team facing an infinite market isn't really a targeting question. It's basic maths. This is the line in the piece we'd underline twice.
4. The real disagreement isn't about targeting. It's about confidence. Read between the lines and what's actually being argued over is how much marketers trust their own judgement versus the data in front of them. Ritson sides with judgement, informed by evidence rather than replaced by it. That feels right to us too.
5. Where we'd push back a little. Ritson is arguing against a straw man some of the time. Most experienced marketers we've worked alongside were never proposing "no targeting at all." They were reacting against the kind of hyper-narrow, over-optimised targeting that shrinks a market before it's even been properly tested. The real debate is about degree, not principle, which admittedly makes for a less punchy headline.

Where this sits in the wider debate

Ritson's column is one exchange in a longer-running argument with Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. If you want the fuller picture, it's worth reading a couple of the other angles:

• The counterpoint: "Don't shoot yourself with target marketing," Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The evidence-based case that narrow targeting caps growth by writing off light and non-buyers, who still drive most category sales over time.
• The common ground: "Five marketing 'truths' Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson can agree on," Marketing Week. A useful reminder that the two aren't as far apart as the headlines suggest.
• Ritson's later refinement: "Targeting or mass marketing? The answer is both," Marketing Week. He eventually lands on a "two-speeds" model: broad reach for brand-building, targeted precision for activation.

Why we cared enough to write this down

This isn't really an argument about targeting at all. It's an argument about whether teams are willing to make, and defend, a deliberate choice about who they're for. That's basically the conversation we end up having with clients again and again: not whether to target, but how confidently they can stand behind the choice they've already made, whether or not it was made deliberately.

It's close to how we think about Where to Play, less a one-off segmentation slide, more a live, defensible position the whole business can point to when someone in the room asks the obvious question: who, exactly, is this for?

Source: Mark Ritson, Marketing Week