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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I recently started helping out with a Stanford Business School course called “Humor: Serious Business”, which is teaching students about the power of humor in work. I came across the curriculum while researching my TED Salon talk on humor last fall, and the professors kindly invited me to be their cartoonist-in-residence. Last week, one of the lessons involved talking like…
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Bloomberg reported last week that Amazon employs thousands of workers to listen to voice recordings captured from Echo speakers as part of it’s efforts to improve the performance of Alexa. “Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The…
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Recently the owner of a small hotel in the Philippines called White Banana grew frustrated by the constant stream of requests he received from “wannabe influencers” (his term), each one trying to score a free vacation in return for Instagram posts. He posted the following announcement: “We are receiving many messages regarding collaborations with influencers, Instagram influencers. We kindly would…
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Here we go again. Marketers are circling around a hot new social media property heralded to be the next big thing. One representative FOMO headline — “Brands not on TikTok in 2019 will be left behind.” From a marketing perspective, TikTok promises a perfect storm of big numbers (500 million monthly active numbers and record app downloads), a hard to…
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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.
Apple has used “one more thing…” as a closing catchphrase off and on since 1998. Steve Jobs would pretend the event was over, start leaving the stage, and then would say “one more thing” before revealing some magical new innovation. Tim Cook said it most recently with the launch of the Apple Watch in 2014. The next big Apple event…
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According to Gartner, marketing technology now accounts for 29% of the total marketing budget. That’s currently the single largest area of marketing investment, greater than talent (24%), paid media (23%), and agencies (23%). Scott Brinker started mapping the marketing technology landscape in 2011, with 150 marketing technology solutions available to marketers. In 2018, he released an updated graphic with a…
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As the marketing saying goes, “brands want to be people and people want to be brands.” When Tom Peters wrote “A Brand Called You” in Fast Company in 1997, he first popularized the whole notion of personal branding: “As of this moment, you’re going to think of yourself differently! … You don’t ‘belong to’ any company for life, and your…
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As the old maxim goes, you can’t cut your way to growth. Last week, Kraft Heinz posted record losses and an historic goodwill write-down. Many are pointing to years of aggressive and relentless cost-cutting as a root cause. Since their merger in 2015, Kraft Heinz has become the poster child of a budget planning tool called zero-based budgeting (ZBB), evangelized…
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Marketing personas sometimes say more about the marketing team than the customer. Often written out of sight in the ivory towers of marketing, personas are frequently unveiled without clear context of what they mean, how they were formed, or how the rest of the organization is supposed to use them. A couple years ago, I consulted with an early stage…
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Sometimes we marketers can climb so far up the brand ladder from functional benefits to emotional benefits to social benefits, we can lose touch with why people are buying our products in the first place. There is power in purpose-driven brands. And yet, when every piece of marketing attempts to communicate some kind of social purpose, social purpose can start…
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After serious political forays in 2017 and 2018, ads focused much more on levity in this year’s Super Bowl. A recent Morning Consult poll showed that two-thirds of Americans don’t think political ads have any place in the Super Bowl. Morning Consult CEO Michael Ramlet said, “The Super Bowl is definitely the wrong place to make a statement.” He goes…
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User experience design often loses sight of the actual user. When sites optimize so much for the behavior that it wants to influence next (collecting an email address, moving people into a funnel), the reason that people come to the site in the first place can get overlooked (or buried under pop-ups). There’s a continual balancing act between user experience…
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Whenever I’m in the midst of a frustrating customer service exchange, I find myself reaching for a sketch pad. Last week it was Nespresso, but I think what happened is commonplace and illustrates some of where customer experience frequently falls short. I placed a simple coffee order online that turned into a lengthy web chat a week later when the…
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This time of year, we marketers love to make bold predictions about the year ahead. We are perennially excited about the shiny new thing. That excitement can keep us informed but it can also distract us from what may actually be most important for our marketing strategy, our brand, and our business. It can also keep us tethered to the…
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My TED talk just went live. In October, I spoke at the TED headquarters in New York on how humor can be a vehicle to talk about things that are otherwise hard to talk about. At work, humor is often overlooked or discouraged, but it can be one of the most powerful communication tools. Humor brings people a sense of…
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Last week’s NYT exposé into the intimate location data collected and shared by mobile apps (including one app that tracked a user’s location more than 14,000 times a day) is the latest in a constant stream of bombshell data privacy revelations in 2018. A recent GlobalWebIndex survey found that 72% of consumers in the US and UK are more aware…
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Ryan Wallman recently make a few hysterically true marketing predictions for 2019, including “Marketers will continue to ignore all consumers over the age of 35, unless someone discovers a way to put these consumers on the blockchain.” Baby Boomers control 70% of disposable income in the US, spend close to 50% of consumer products dollars, and have greater buying power…
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A couple months ago, I cartooned about customer survey fatigue and the barrage of satisfaction surveys for every minor brand interaction. Marketers sometimes forget that the survey experience is as much a part of customer experience as the customer experience they’re designed to measure. Boring, long, or pestering surveys leave a brand impression too. I recently bought a new car…
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Black Friday continued to take over Thanksgiving this year, expanding into a whole booming Cyber Week that set shopping records focused on mobile. According to Adobe Analytics, online shopping on Thanksgiving Day was up 28% over last year (the fastest-growing day for e-commerce sales in history). Smartphone drove a majority of the traffic (54%) and over a third of the…
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Singapore Airlines has long been a pioneer in customer experience, not just in airlines, but the hospitality industry in general. They’re investing in taking their customer experience even further, partly with a sophisticated app that tracks granular customer data from check-in, through the flight, to baggage claim. Here’s how HBS professor Rohit Deshpande describes just how granular the customer data…
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