Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
Gartner recently categorized the buzzword “360-Degree Customer View” on its Hype Cycle and determined that it was at the “peak of inflated expectations.” Marketers everywhere are touting a “360-Degree View” as the holy grail for customer experience. And yet the actual results are mixed. I’ve heard reference to another Gartner study (but I haven’t found the original source) that claimed…
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Brands are increasingly adopting marketing automation, with email marketing as the most common application. Marketing automation has great potential to help deliver personalized useful messages to an audience that wants them. Yet a recent Econsultancy study found that 37% of brands say their marketing automation efforts are not successful. I wonder how much of the failure rate relates to how…
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In 1988, a Goodyear manager named Phil Ensor first coined the phrase “Functional Silo Syndrome” to describe organizational structure. He was inspired by the grain silos of his native rural Illinois, which reminded him of how departments, divisions, and geographies so often work in business — fragmented, insular, and sequestered. The “silo” term caught on. Jack Welch famously pioneered the…
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Forrester found that 56% of companies have official digital transformation projects underway. They also found that “many don’t realize that transformation will be a permanent state of being” and that 21% of businesses think they are “finished” with digital transformation. There’s a lot of talk about the promise and hype of digital transformation. But digital transformation means different things to…
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Burberry announced a new visual identity a few weeks ago. After only a 4-week design process, they dramatically shed 162 years of brand heritage for something entirely new, which they unveiled on Instagram. The largely negative fallout that resulted (conveniently enshrined in the comments of the same Instagram post) reminded me how Mark Ritson once described rebranding: “[Rebranding is] the…
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A few months ago, Unilever CMO Keith Weed raised an alarm on the state of influencer marketing. In particular, he went after the widespread practice of influencers who buy fake followers and use bots to juice engagement. “We need to take urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever… “This is a deep and systematic issue, an issue…
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Marketers can track business performance more closely than ever before. Reports that used to take weeks or months are now available practically in real-time. All of this can make marketers savvier. Better data can lead to better decision-making. But with noses buried in dashboards, marketers need to be careful not to miss the big picture. Obsessing over metrics can lead…
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