Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
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
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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
I once heard Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah advise businesses, “Don’t make your process my problem. Solve for my success, not your systems.” Six months into the pandemic, this strikes me as good advice for brands to think about their COVID response as well. Many businesses continue to follow the same stock script using COVID as an excuse for all… Read More
I’ve been re-reading the 1983 classic, “Ogilvy on Advertising” to see how much has changed — and how much has remained the same — in advertising over the years. One constant is the challenge of how to measure sales impact in advertising, and the tension of long-term brand building versus short-term direct response. As David Ogilvy wrote (more than a… Read More
A recent survey from Blind found that 83% of marketing and communications professionals are reporting burnout, the highest of any job function. There are likely many factors at play, but I wonder how much of this burnout relates to productivity anxiety, the pressure to be busy, and the hustle culture in business. The pursuit of constant productivity can actually… Read More
This cartoon is dedicated to Comcast, the most recent company to show me how far we have to go before we reach conversational AI that can come close to a human voice. The only thing worse than the Comcast customer service bot that greeted me when trying to resolve a technical issue was having to have identical conversations with the… Read More
A Gartner study recently reported that more than half (57%) of CMOs expect to see a return to business as usual in the next 18-24 months. It made me think about what “business as usual” even means right now. Some aspects of how we work have changed so fundamentally, it’s hard to imagine that some of these changes aren’t permanent. … Read More
