Do Canadian Marketers Know Marketing?

I was in a room full of Canadian marketers yesterday to hear world-renowned marketing professor, brand consultant, and award-winning columnist Mark Ritson answer a simple question: Do Canadian Marketers Know Marketing?

His answer, backed by data, was almost certainly not what the room wanted to hear.

But it's certainly something we will need to address quickly as an industry.

The study

Ritson partnered with Ipsos, a leading global market research and consulting firm, to survey 305 Canadian marketers: a representative sample in both size and composition, which reflects the actual makeup of the profession in this country.

Ipsos then administered a ten-question multiple-choice quiz covering the basics of marketing: strategy, research, communications, and distribution. Not advanced topics. Sub-undergraduate material, by Ritson's own characterization.

The pass rate was set at seven out of ten. Ritson said that Ipsos pushed for a lower bar, but that he refused because he thought the test was already embarrassingly easy for anyone who'd actually studied the discipline of marketing.

Only 29% of Canadian marketers passed the test.

Put another way, seven out of ten people with "marketing" in their job title could not answer seven basic questions correctly about the field they are paid to practise.

What they don't know

The question-by-question breakdown is where it gets specific, and specific is where it gets both alarming and difficult to dismiss.

Thirty-eight percent of Canadian marketers don't know what "STP" stands for in a marketing context. (The answer is "segmentation, targeting, positioning".) Ritson's point wasn't that respondents need to believe in STP as a framework, but that they need to know what it is before they can have an opinion about it.

Thirty percent can't identify "the four P's". In fairness, this would be an extremely difficult question for someone working in marketing without any marketing training, given how many companies have foolishly reduced the function of marketing to just one of them: promotion.

Forty percent don't know what positioning means.

Over half have no idea what "omnichannel marketing" refers to.

Sixty percent can't define excess share of voice.

And two-thirds of Canadian marketers cannot identify a quantitative research method.

These aren't trick questions: they're what would be taught in any decent marketing fundamentals course.

And it needs to be noted that the test was multiple choice, with four options per question. Probability dictates that when you have a 10-question multiple-choice test with four options for each question, you could randomly guess every question and still get two or three questions correct.

And yet, only 29% of Canadian marketers passed the test, which means a significant portion of the industry is performing below chance on the fundamentals of their own profession.

In January 2026, in a rousing speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney proudly proclaimed, "We have the most educated population in the world."

Sadly, that statement doesn't appear to apply to marketers, because in a study that was also run in the UK, Australia, and the United States, Canada ranked last globally.

Ritson, with characteristic bluntness, said the difference isn't just that fewer Canadians pass.

It's that Canada's untrained marketers are more ignorant than untrained marketers in other parts of the world. Ouch.

The Dunning-Kruger problem

To address a gap in your knowledge, you first have to realize a gap exists. And, according to Ritson's data, Canadian marketers are ignorant of their knowledge deficits.

Seventy-eight percent of Canadian marketers rated themselves as above average at their job; this, in itself, shows a stunning over-confidence since, by definition, only 50% of a sample can be "above average".

And yet, while 78% of the survey rated themselves as "above-average" marketers, 71% of them couldn't pass a basic test of marketing knowledge. (When you look specifically at the marketers who failed the test, 74% of them still rated themselves as above average. Yikes.)

Many Canadian marketers don't know what they don't know, so they don't think there's anything to fix.

Ritson called it by its proper name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. When you have minimal knowledge of something, you tend to overestimate your competence, because you don't yet understand the full complexity of what you're dealing with.

Canadian marketing, he argued, is sitting right at the peak of that curve. High confidence, low knowledge, and no particular sense that those two things are in tension.

Ritson then suggested the reason for this isn't difficult to understand. As I hinted above, too many Canadian marketers equate marketing with advertising. Topics like pricing, distribution, segmentation, or product strategy rarely come up at Canadian marketing events (according to Ritson's alumni who attend them). And when your mental model of the discipline is limited to communications, the job looks much simpler than it really is.

Ritson pointed out that advertising is only a small fraction of what true marketing really involves. And if you're only operating across "8% of what marketing actually encompasses", that's a good explanation as to why you might think it feels manageable. Easy, even.

The profession is working against itself

The knowledge gap is a problem. But the attitude toward fixing it might be a bigger one.

Ritson shared a slide of quotes from senior marketing figures, all pushing back on the idea that formal training matters. A marketing consultancy founder arguing that she knows plenty of great marketers with no training. A CMO at a major insurance group said you don't need a marketing degree, you need curiosity and creativity. The managing director of a large national marketing association proclaimed he'd take a degree in robotics or philosophy over a marketing degree any day. An agency founder described marketing education using phrases that would earn an R-rating at a movie theatre.

These weren't fringe voices. They're influential people with large platforms, actively discouraging the next generation from seeking formal education in the discipline.

And the broader industry appears to agree with them: Ritson shared that a Marketing Week poll found that 57% of marketers disagreed with the proposition that experts in marketing should be qualified in marketing.

Ritson was not diplomatic about this. His view is that the loudest voices against marketing education tend to be senior, untrained marketers who have spent years telling everyone that training is unnecessary, because acknowledging its value would mean acknowledging their own gap. The ignorant, he said, have become the dominant members of the discipline. And that isn't going to end well for the marketing industry.

Training is the single clearest explanatory variable

The Ipsos data controlled for a range of factors: role type, company size, B2B vs. B2C, age, and gender. Some of those things showed modest correlations with performance. Training showed a dramatic one.

Trained Canadian marketers (defined as those who self-reported they had earned a degree, a professional certification, or completed an online course) were nine times more likely to pass the knowledge test than their untrained counterparts.

Nine times! The trained group passed at a rate of 35%. The untrained group passed at 4%.

But the advantages don't stop at knowledge. Trained marketers were:

• 39 percentage points more likely to still plan to be in the marketing profession a decade from now;

• 22 points more confident in their role;

• 11 points better at budgeting;

• 15 points more likely to be part of an influential marketing team;

• 16 points happier in their careers.

The correlation runs across nearly every dimension the study measured.

To his credit, Ritson acknowledged the obvious bias: he sells a marketing training program, so he's obviously going to advocate for marketing training.

But his response to that criticism was straightforward: he recognized his own bias and thus commissioned Ipsos (i.e. an independent research firm) to ensure the data was objective.

The AI argument closes the case

If the knowledge gap alone isn't enough to make the urgency clear, Ritson added one more layer: Anthropic research estimating that 65% of marketing tasks have significant exposure to AI substitution. Of 800 professions analyzed, marketing ranks in the top ten for vulnerability.

Junior and mid-level roles are already being affected. Companies are not replacing marketers who leave. Salaries are softening. The pipeline is thinning. Ritson's projection is that the profession will lose somewhere between 50 and 60% of its current headcount over the next decade, not overnight, but steadily.

His point wasn't that AI is bad for marketing. It's that AI is particularly dangerous for untrained marketers, because the tasks AI can most readily absorb are exactly the tasks that untrained marketers tend to spend most of their time doing.

At one point, Ritson made a striking comment: he said, "If you're specializing in digital marketing, you're imminently replaceable within the next two years." Not only do I agree with that idea, but I'd add it may also apply to anyone whose version of marketing is producing content, pulling reports, and managing digital channels.

The implication is that the marketers who will still have jobs in ten years time will be the ones who understand the discipline deeply enough to direct the tools, not compete with them. The ones who can do segmentation and know what it means. The ones who understand pricing strategy, not just promotional mechanics. The ones who can build a brand plan, not just a campaign brief.

That's not a high bar, in theory.

But it's the bar that 71% of Canadian marketers currently can't clear.

The way forward

Canadian marketing has a knowledge problem it doesn't think it has, sustained by influential voices with a vested interest in convincing everyone that training is overrated, and it's arriving at exactly the moment when the cost of ignorance is about to go up significantly.

Ritson's message was direct: marketers need to know marketing.

More specifically, they need marketing training before they can have any hope of doing marketing well.

Not necessarily through his MiniMBA program, he said, although he also wasn't shy about stating that this would be his preference. But through any credible formal training program, and he listed several of them. (I'm biased myself, but the Schulich School of Business has an excellent Master of Marketing program.)

Because the alternative to getting trained in marketing isn't staying where you are today.

It's becoming exactly the kind of marketer an AI agent can replace by next Thursday.

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AI Disclosure: I typically will not use AI to write any part of dpThoughts, but I did ask Claude to take the notes and screenshots I captured at Professor Ritson's session to help me structure a framework for this post, which I then edited heavily to make it my own. I believe that what I captured here accurately reflects what was shared during the session, but if Professor Ritson should ever say otherwise, I will obviously defer to his version of what he said (and would be happy to make any edits he suggests). I also used ChatGPT to edit the photo I used for this post: I made the screen bigger and brought it much closer to the speaker, because the distance between the room and the speaker was awkward and would have made for an awkward photo.