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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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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“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 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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New ideas inherently carry risk. And there’s often friction between the risk profiles of our ideas and the risk tolerances of our organization. How we navigate and manage that friction impacts what, if anything, makes it through the gauntlet of the innovation process. Risk tolerance can vary across different parts of the business. Ultimately we need all of these different…
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“Hey Ms. Consumer, you get email, search, maps, friendship interaction and voice-activated homes for free! How good is that? Just don’t look at the pipe at the back of your house pumping terabytes of data back to Northern California.” This quote was from a fascinating Mark Ritson editorial a few weeks ago in MarketingWeek. Mark wrote about the recent data…
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“You go to the drug store now, you buy one or two things, you get a receipt that’s like a Miss America sash,” Jimmy Kimmel joked a couple years ago. E-receipts may be on the rise, but many retailers are still cranking out massive paper receipts at the till. Adweek performed an experiment with eight national retailers in the US.…
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In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple and increasingly grew frustrated by all of the product complexity he saw at review meetings. He famously shouted “Stop! This is crazy” and drew a two-by-two grid on the whiteboard. At the top of the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Professional” and to the left of the two rows he wrote “Desktop”…
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A few years ago, a security expert named Mikko Hyppönen set up free WiFi hotspots in the center of London. As part of the “terms of service,” Mikko put in a “Herod clause”. In exchange for WiFi, “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Several people signed up. Mikko’s point: “The…
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“Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service,” Jeff Bezos said in a Fast Company interview about Amazon last year. Similarly, Google published a 2015 study on mobile strategy that found that “people are more loyal to their need in the moment than to any particular brand.” Google calls these needs…
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There’s an influencer marketing land grab underway. Influencer posts on Instagram alone nearly doubled between 2016 and 2017. That spike was even before January’s Facebook news feed announcement. And influencer marketing is getting far more granular. Brands are increasingly focused on marketing with pools of “micro-influencers” who claim fewer than 10,000 followers and “nano-influencers” who claim fewer than 1,000 followers.…
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It’s a tricky time to be a food marketer — navigating the Wild West of consumer expectations and unregulated food claims like “natural.” According to the most recent Consumer Reports Survey, 73 percent of consumers seek out foods labeled as “natural”. But, “natural” is not a legal or regulated term. The FDA signaled a few years ago that it would…
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