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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Fred Reichheld is the grandfather of the one-question customer satisfaction survey. In 2003, he famously introduced the concept of the Net Promoter Score with a single question: “how likely are you to recommend X to a friend or colleague?” Today even Fred Reichheld has survey fatigue. In a Bloomberg interview a few years ago, he said “The instant we have…
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It can be difficult to separate myth from fact in marketing. There’s a lot of marketing folklore passed on as inherited wisdom. It’s also far too easy to cherry-pick data that supports our pre-existing point of view. And there’s always a shiny new thing that captures everyone’s attention until the next shiny new thing comes along. The first time I…
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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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“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.
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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CMOs and CFOs often speak completely different languages. This can create a lack of understanding and appreciation for the role and impact of marketing on the business. Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar calls this the “existential crisis of the CMO.” He says it’s essential for marketers to think and talk more like business managers than communications experts. As Raja says, “Because…
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Creating a lifestyle brand is catnip to marketers. Many brand teams find it irresistible to try to elevate and stretch their brands as far as they will go, occasionally losing sight of the actual consumer in the process. Lifestyle branding gone awry can lead to a phenomenon that David Taylor coined as “Brand Ego Tripping.” Levi’s suits and Colgate Ready…
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As marketing becomes increasingly data-driven, we have to be careful we’re measuring the right metrics. It’s easy to cultivate a false sense of security looking at rosy marketing dashboards that don’t actually tie to business results. I like how Lloyd Tabb, Founder and CTO of Looker, distinguishes between vanity metrics and clarity metrics. In his words: “Vanity metrics are surface-level…
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“In most organizations, innovation isn’t hampered by a lack of ideas, but rather a lack of noticing the good ideas already there. It’s not an idea problem; it’s a recognition problem.” I like this observation from David Burkus in the HBR a couple years ago. There can be a lot of friction when ideas move from conception to execution. The…
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A clear, concise positioning statement is the starting point of branding and marketing. It creates consistency when consumers see an ad, pick up a product, talk to a salesperson, or visit a store. Yet many positioning efforts are far from clear and concise. Encapsulated in elaborate diagrams as brand onions, brand keys, brand pyramids, brand architectures, brand unicorns, etc., the…
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We’re in a marketing catch-22. Consumers increasingly demand hyper-personalized experiences but are increasingly reluctant to hand over the data needed to make those experiences personalized. A recent Accenture report found that 44% of U.S. consumers are frustrated when companies fail to delivery relevant, personalized shopping experiences but half (49%) are concerned about personal data privacy. And 43% of U.S. consumers…
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Marketing for the long-term and the short-term is a constant balancing act. Pressure to show immediate results can lead marketers to focus on quick-hit sales conversation tactics, which can look good temporarily in marketing dashboards, but are far less effective in the long-run. Last year, Peter Fields and Les Binet published an IPA report on on marketing effectiveness that charted…
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We’re all working in a time of perennial change. Marketing priorities are frequently a moving target. This climate can create a sort of organizational Attention-Deficit Disorder. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the push toward digital transformation. Gartner released a study a few weeks ago that found senior executives were rapidly shifting priorities to embrace digital business. And yet,…
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“The word ‘agile’ as been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless,” wrote Dave Thomas, one of the 17 original signers of the Agile Manifesto. First drafted as a manifesto for software development by software developers in 2001, Agile as a methodology has since spread business-wide. An organization called AgileSherpas recently released the “2018 State of Agile Marketing”…
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Sprout Social released a survey that concluded two-thirds of consumers say its important for brands to take a stand on social or political issues. Edelman echoed that sentiment with a 2017 study that found 51% of respondents believe brands have more power to solve social issues than the government. And they reported that 57% of consumers are more likely to…
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Gartner L2 recently reported that 70% of brands across industries worked with influencers on Instagram in 2017. Influencer marketing is projected to become a $5 to $10 billion market in the next 5 years. These reports came before the Facebook algorithm change and the impending GDPR deadline threw many marketers’ social plans into disarray, which suggest even more brand investment…
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