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CMO Academy

Fourteen modules. Real coursework. Real assignments. Built by S&CC Group for a closed circle of friends and family. A marketing and creative leadership course for people who want to actually do the work, not just read about it.

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Why this course

Marketing skill is one of the highest-leverage capabilities a person can build, and almost no one is taught it properly.

Mark Ritson, a former marketing professor at London Business School and MIT Sloan and now one of the most-read voices in the field, estimates that roughly seventy-five percent of working marketers do not understand the actual discipline. They run channel calendars without strategy. They confuse promotion with positioning. They chase clicks because clicks are easy to measure, while the brand equity that drove the clicks quietly erodes underneath them. The remaining twenty-five percent who know the craft earn far more, command bigger budgets, and shape decisions instead of taking orders.

The gap is not talent. The gap is education. Most MBA marketing tracks teach Kotler frameworks from 1980 and stop. Most agency training is firm-specific. Most YouTube content is hot-take theater. The working canon, Binet and Field on effectiveness, Sharp on mental availability, Sutherland on behavioral economics, Simon on pricing, Balfour on growth loops, Cialdini on persuasion, sits in books most people never finish.

This course distills that canon into fourteen modules an operator can complete in a few weeks of focused evenings. It is free. It is real. It is built for the closed circle of friends and family on the roster, and the work it asks of you is the same work the top twenty-five percent did to get there.

Watch first

Why seventy-five percent of marketers are useless, and how to join the elite twenty-five percent.

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor at London Business School and MIT Sloan. He now writes Marketing Week's most-read column and runs the Mini MBA in Marketing, which has trained more than thirty thousand working marketers. He spends his time reading the actual research on what works in marketing, then telling people, bluntly, where they have it wrong. In this sixty-seven minute conversation he walks through the gap that separates the top quarter of marketers from the rest, and what it takes to cross it. Watch this before you start Module 1.

Mark Ritson on World's Greatest Business Thinkers Podcast, 67 minutes. The blueprint argument that anchors this course.

What you will study

Fourteen modules in four arcs, plus a library and an LLM guide.

Each module follows the same shape: a Read section in the working voice of the canon, two embedded YouTube primaries, four to ten verified-free coursework links from HubSpot Academy, Google Skillshop, edX, LinkedIn Learning, HBR, Reforge and others, a fillable AcroForm PDF worksheet, an assignment with a real submission form, and a roster Discussion thread.

Arc 1, Brand foundations

Modules 1 to 3

The CMO Mandate. Brand Strategy Architecture (Aaker, Kapferer, Sharp). Creative Direction at Scale. The strategic spine.

Arc 2, Campaigns and channels

Modules 4 and 5

Campaign Development Framework (JWT planning cycle). Channel Strategy and Media Intelligence (Binet 60/40, IPA evidence base).

Arc 3, Operating discipline

Modules 6 to 12

Agency and Team Leadership. Brand Measurement. Research and STP. Pricing Strategy. Consumer Behavior and Behavioral Economics. Growth, Retention, Lifecycle. Practical CMO Profile Setup.

Arc 4, Sales

Modules 13 and 14

Sales Training I, the framework canon (PSS, SPIN, Challenger, MEDDIC, Sandler, NLP, Cialdini). Sales Training II, Identity and Discomfort, five named drills.

Plus a Further Reading Library with fourteen on-platform cliffnotes summaries of the books referenced across modules, and a Cross-module LLM Guide on which model to use for which job and how to structure prompts for marketing work.

End state

By the end you will have shipped, not just studied.

This is a coursework academy, not a content library. The work is the point. Every module asks you to produce a real artifact for a real business. The compounding artifacts become your portfolio.

  1. A specific twelve-to-eighteen month North Star objective for a business you picked, with three vanity metrics you have committed to ignore.
  2. A defensible positioning statement using the only-formula, mapped onto Aaker's four dimensions and Kapferer's six facets.
  3. A one-page visual identity system with logo direction, color, typography, photography rules, and one prohibition.
  4. A creative brief that another human could execute, with a real audience insight, a single-minded proposition, and one big idea.
  5. A channel map for one audience segment plus a 60/40 budget allocation with rationale.
  6. An agency scorecard plus a reusable brief template.
  7. A CMO dashboard with eight weekly metrics and a nine-metric framework across three time horizons.
  8. A Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey design plus three pricing tiers and one discount you will refuse to give.
  9. A System-1 audit of a real homepage using Cialdini's seven principles.
  10. A growth model with one acquisition loop, LTV, CAC, payback period, and a North Star metric.
  11. A rewritten LinkedIn headline, About section, and three first post titles you have committed to publish.
  12. A sales framework choice with the first three questions you will ask in a real prospect call.
  13. A log of five named discomfort drills (cold call, public post, video selfie, daily compliment, daily no) and what you learned.

An independent reviewer who teaches MBA marketing programs gave this course a B-plus and said it teaches the work, not just the theory. By the end, you will know more about how marketing actually works than most of the people running marketing departments. You will not get a Harvard diploma to hang on the wall. You will get the skills they were supposed to teach you, and a real portfolio of work to prove it.

If you get stuck

Three places to look before you give up on a module.

You will hit moments where a concept does not click, an assignment feels impossible, or a video lands flat. That is a normal part of learning at this depth. Here is the order of escalation.

If a concept is not making sense

  1. Read the matching cliffnotes summary in the Library. Fourteen on-platform summaries, 700 to 1100 words each, distill the books the module references.
  2. Watch the Companion lecture video in the same module. The primary and companion are deliberately different perspectives. If the primary did not land, the companion often does.
  3. Skip ahead to the Assignment. The assignment forces application, and application reveals the concept faster than passive reading.

If you need help thinking it through

  1. Open the LLM Guide. It walks through which model to use and how to structure a prompt that gets you to a real answer in one round.
  2. Post your draft in the module Discussion section. Every module has one. The whole roster sees it. You will get feedback from the people who took the same module.
  3. Email David directly at dhall@sandccgroup.com. Subject line: which module, what you tried, where you got stuck. Concrete questions get concrete answers.

If you have lost your bearings

  1. Return to the Course Home. The fourteen-module grid shows progress and gives you a single place to re-orient.
  2. Re-read Module 1, The CMO Mandate. It is the North Star for the entire course. Most disorientation traces back to losing the through-line.
  3. Pause for forty-eight hours. The course is self-paced for a reason. Coming back rested beats grinding tired.

Roster access

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