Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne, a career marketer and cartoonist.
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Net Promoter Score is the mother of all customer satisfaction metrics. Created by Bain partner Fred Reichheld 16 years ago, NPS is the two-digit number generated by the ubiquitous one-question survey that now seems to trail just about every customer interaction — “How likely are you to recommend this brand to your friends and family?” Ironically, this most popular mechanism…
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A French entrepreneur named Nicholas Baldeck pranked CES 2020 last week by debuting the “World’s First Smart Potato” at an actual CES booth. It’s an antenna that you stick into a potato and connect to your smartphone over Bluetooth. You can then ask the potato questions like a Magic Eight Ball, tapping into the potato’s “artificial intelligence”. As he…
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I was struck by a recent editorial from Russell Parsons on “peak brand purpose”, which he linked to a crisis of confidence in marketing as a discipline. He wrote: “We reached peak brand purpose in 2019 with Gillette’s ‘The Best a Man Can Be’ and Cadbury’s ‘Unity Bar’… “Marketers have sought to become part of the solution to the…
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I always liked the inventiveness of the flops on the Island of Misfit Toys in the classic 1964 Rudolph animation — a cowboy riding an ostrich, an airplane that can’t fly, a spotted elephant, a train with square wheels. Every business has their own island of misfits — innovations that failed to make it. Most companies treat these misfits the…
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“If marketing kept a diary, this would be it.”
- Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs
Packed with nearly 200 marketing cartoons, this new book collection celebrates 15 years of Marketoonist.
As we transition to a new decade in marketing, it can seem like everything is up for grabs. Long-established marketing concepts are continually challenged. There’s a lot of pressure to throw out the old and jump on to the new. In this cartoon, I cherry-picked just a few things we regularly read may be dead or dying: TV, retail, segmentation,…
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Black Friday has long shed its American Thanksgiving roots, spreading around the world, spanning more of the calendar, and pulling in more brands and retailers. Black Friday has morphed into Black November and Cyber Monday has expanded into Cyber Week. As Marshall Cohen of the NPD Group put it: “Black Friday used to be the greatest day in retail all…
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“Customers are in the midst of a trust crisis,” Salesforce CMO Stephanie Buscemi recently observed. Citing a Salesforce study, she said “54% of customers don’t think companies operate with their best interests in mind.” Richard Edelman made a similar observation after the Edelman 2019 Brand Trust Survey published earlier this year: “Eighty-one percent say, ‘Trust in brands is an important…
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Customer engagement is often discussed purely as a technology challenge. If only brands had the right platform, the right tools and the right customer data, they would somehow build deep and meaningful relationships with their customers. But I think what sometimes gets lost is why a customer should care about having a relationship with a brand in the first place. …
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We are working in a golden age of metrics. But the explosion in available data and metrics can give us KPI tunnel vision. It can blind businesses to what’s really most important. Sky found that it was tracking more that 2,000 KPIs across their business, leading to short-termism and disjointed marketing. They eventually found a way to narrow the KPIs…
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As marketing evolves, one of the key shifts is the ability to test everything, all the time. Compared to my earliest marketing jobs in the late 90s, the tools of experimentation have been democratized and the cycle time between experiments have disappeared. We can get instant learning on just about any attribute we care to test on just about any…
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The situation of this cartoon was suggested by Dan Morrill, on how organizations frequently approach new ideas. Organizations give mixed signals with innovation. There is pressure to come up with breakthrough new ideas that will push the business forward. Yet there is simultaneous resistance to any ideas that are actually breakthrough. It’s an innovation catch-22. As a result, organizations can…
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I recently rediscovered a beautiful quote from Jonathan Ive on the fragility of ideas. This was part of the tribute he delivered at Steve Jobs’ 2011 memorial: “Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea. And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful.…
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According to an Appiterate survey, 71% of all app uninstalls are triggered by a push notification. And eMarketer found that the top reason (57%) US smartphone users unsubscribe from a brand’s mobile messaging is “too many messages or updates.” In the pursuit of customer experience, brands sometimes create a crappy customer experience. Constantly optimizing for engagement metrics can lead to…
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“Apple delivered exactly the iPhones everyone expected on Tuesday — and that’s kind of the problem. Instead of “one more thing,” Apple’s event was more like none more thing.” This was how Axios summarized Apple’s latest new product event earlier this month. The most notable new iPhone feature was a camera system with three cameras. Samsung had already launched a…
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This cartoon idea was suggested by Brian Fung, reacting to some interesting Google research on how even a one-second delay affects bounce rates. Google found that as page load time goes from 1s to 3s, the probability of bounce increases 32%. As it goes from 1s to 5s, the probability of bounce increases 90%. Brian questioned how much had do…
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I’ve never understood why so many brands turn the choice of unsubscribing from their newsletter into a negative brand experience. Or why purchasing a t-shirt means that the retailer assumes you want to hear from them 5 times a week for the rest of your life. It’s as old as digital marketing, but the humble email newsletter remains one of…
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Consumers increasingly look for sustainability credentials in the brands they buy. And yet, whenever brands talk about sustainability, consumers are increasingly sensitive to green-washing and hypocrisy. Google caught flak most recently for hosting a climate change summit on the coast of Sicily a few weeks ago, when it came out that over 100 of the celebrity attendees turned up…
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In an advertising shoot, we often hear someone say, “we’ll fix it in post”. It can be comforting to hear (particularly at the end of a long day), but it’s often a cop out. Marketers learn the hard way that there’s only so much that we can actually fix in post-production. Our source footage limits how much we can…
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McDonald’s is the latest company to ditch the Chief Marketing Officer role, with news that Silvia Lagnado is leaving the company and her role absorbed by restructuring. The CMO role similarly disappeared in recent years at Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark, Mars, Uber, Lyft, Taco Bell, Beam Suntory, Hyatt, and Coca-Cola. While 70% of the Fortune 500 still have a…
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Cheryl Calverley, CMO at UK mattress brand Eve Sleep recently observed: “We’ve reached peak performance optimization. Everyone has piled in and done the easy stuff in digital marketing … so we come back round in a circle. The only way to stand out from the crowd is creative.” I like Chery’s sentiment of “peak performance optimization”. So much of the…
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