Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
“If being purposeful means doing ads to you, then you’re probably doing it wrong.” I was struck by this observation from the ever-insightful Tom Roach in his essay exploring whether brand purpose is “the biggest lie the ad industry ever told.” The topic of brand purpose has always inspired some of the most absurd BS in marketing. Last week, Mondelez… Read More
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Traditional strategic planning is often neither “strategic” nor much of a “plan”. It usually resembles a peace treaty more than clear marching orders for an organization. Strategic planning also tends to be out-dated the moment it’s written. I like this characterization from consultant Richard Gold: “Traditionally, strategic planning has been a hierarchical, top-down process where someone in the organization… Read More
Gapingvoid creator Hugh MacLeod once observed, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.” Hugh shared this insight years before the marketing automation revolution, but the same could be said for many forms of marketing, now more than ever. Analysts at Demand Gen Report recently revealed that 60% of respondents would… Read More
A Capgemini study found that 75% of organizations believed themselves to be customer-centric. Only 30% of customers agreed. The numbers were even more stark for consumer products companies — 80% believed they were were customer-centric and only 14% agreed. There’s a wide gap between what customers expect and what organizations deliver. Deloitte identified one of the key CX challenges that… Read More
In this time of change, I’ve been thinking about the gap between a desire to change and uncertainty on where or how to change. The pandemic has been a change accelerant, but the path isn’t always clear. Jeff Bezos has some relevant insights in how he describes Day 1 versus Day 2 thinking. He first codified this idea in the… Read More
From data plans to toothpaste to headache medicine, most categories operate as if more choice is better than less choice. But if you’re actually a shopper with a headache in a headache medicine aisle, the only thing a complicated product assortment will do is make your headache worse. As Scott Galloway put it recently (echoing Barry Schwartz’s 2004 classic, The… Read More
Psychographics are back in the news as part of the US election cycle, four years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal made the term mainstream. This week, CB Insights published a useful primer on psychographics, which they describe as one of the “dark arts” of social media and internet marketing. Yet psychographics are nothing new; they were first developed in the… Read More
