Ten years ago, Mark Ritson identified a problem that most business schools were neither willing nor equipped to address. Marketers were losing their grip on the core discipline of their own profession. Not because they lacked ambition or intelligence, but because the traditional MBA, built for general management, priced at six figures and designed around two years of full-time study, was the wrong tool for the job. It was built for a different problem.
His answer was the MiniMBA: a marketing education built around how marketing actually works, delivered in twelve weeks, designed to fit around a working life rather than suspend it. Diagnosis first, then strategy, then tactics. Frameworks that hold up on a Monday morning, not just in a case study.
A decade on, more than 50,000 marketers across 60 countries have completed the programme. What started as a single course has grown into three: the MiniMBA in Marketing, the MiniMBA in Brand Management, and the MiniMBA in Management. Alumni include marketing leaders from some of the world's most recognisable brands.
The business has moved further into organisations, too. A seven-figure agreement to train 1,500 marketers at a global FMCG firm. A partnership with Omnicom covering more than 1,200 marketers across Oceania. Growing corporate accounts including Campari. And since joining Brave Bison, a year ago, that enterprise focus has sharpened further. The individual practitioner and the enterprise turn out to be the same problem at different scales: marketing capability that does not keep pace with what the business actually needs.
To mark the ten-year point, Cavendish's Andy Renton ( Brave Bison PLC's investment broker ) sat down with Mark Ritson and MiniMBA CEO Tim Plyming to talk about where the idea came from, what has driven a decade of growth, and what the next chapter looks like. New short-form courses. AI-supported instruction built on ten years of Ritson's teaching. Both point back to the same question the original course was built to answer: what does a properly trained marketer actually need to know?
Watch the conversation below.