Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon exploring the nonstop drumbeat of change in business, particularly from a marketing perspective. When everything is constantly changing, it’s easy to lose sight of the power of consistency. And yet the flip side of that dynamic is resistance to change, even when change is necessary. A couple years ago, Gartner shared snapshots…
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It’s still early days with AI Generation tools. We’re all still learning the potential and limitations. One watch-out is the bias toward homogeneity — the tendency for AI results to look alike. As AI predicts what to generate, the path of least resistance is an averaging of the content in its source material. Ian Whitworth once referred to this as…
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Marketers are frequently the biggest agents of change in a business. Inside marketing teams, there’s a constant drumbeat for change, particularly when new members join the team. In my first marketing job, junior managers rotated to new brands every 12 months. Each new assignment brought fresh energy to make a mark on the brand. Higher level marketers rotated less frequently…
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“Upskilling” as a business term was coined in the late 70s. But the pressure to “upskill” has never seemed more acute. Andrew Geoghegan, CMO of William Grant & Sons, described the challenge of upskilling for marketers a few months ago: “There used to be significant investment in-house in upskilling teams and building on those core skills and competencies. “Now, though,…
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A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon about the “silo syndrome” that most organizations struggle to navigate. It got me thinking about the challenge of strategic alignment in general — how hard it is to get and keep the extended organization on the same page. A big part of the marketing job is learning to manage by influence —…
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I was struck by an observation from J. Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer at Kantar: “The foundational prerequisite of growth is the courage to grow. Impediments to growth sit within a company itself. Growth is rarely hostage to the marketplace.” I like the idea that a brand is not “hostage to the marketplace” — that marketers can take agency for…
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My cartoons are often inspired by something I overheard the previous week. Last week, I traveled to speak at the GPeC Summit in Romania and got to hear UnMarketing author Scott Stratten’s entertaining take on marketing while I was there. Part of Scott’s talk included a rant on vanity metrics — the seductive allure of focusing on data that makes…
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