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 stumbled across the old cliche adage attributed to Cicero: “More is lost by indecision than wrong decision.” Every business is being asked to make decisions with incomplete information right now. What limited information we do have can change quickly. There’s often no clear right call in such a climate of uncertainty. And so, the default decision is no…
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Brands are judged less by how they operate when things go right, than by how they handle situations when things go wrong. Mark Ritson recently recounted the story of Marks & Spencer during World War II, when the retailer made ration clothing for the British public. They had to figure out how to manufacture clothing in a different…
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Team collaboration can be tricky in the best of times, but it will be interesting to see how completely virtual meetings will test this further — particularly when we add strained WiFi, the learning curve of more people learning new videoconferencing tools, and trying to juggle kids in the background. Videoconferencing technology has advanced (and kudos to Zoom for announcing…
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“The worst thing to do in a time of chaos is add to it.” I found this quote from an article from Ogilvy on British brands reacting to the Brexit vote a few years ago. While Brexit isn’t a good corollary for what is happening now, I was reminded by this quote that we will periodically have to navigate times…
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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.
Many companies pay lip service to being customer-centric, but don’t actually put it into practice. When used primarily as a buzzword, it’s no surprise the results are only buzzword-deep. The CMO Council found that “only 14 percent of marketers would say that customer-centricity is a hallmark of their companies, and only 11 percent believe their customers would agree with that…
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A recent report found that 94% of businesses said that digital transformation was high on their list of priorities and 51% said they’re moving on these priorities in the next month. Yet a separate YouGov study found that 54% of employees either don’t understand (20%) or misinterpret (34%) the meaning of digital transformation. When more than half of employees are…
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“It’s too bad most people only think about their network when they need something from it.” I heard this years ago from branding adviser Denise Lee Yohn and it stuck with me. In 2012, the default generic introduction message on LinkedIn was “Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.” …
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The Super Bowl is the world’s biggest marketing stage, so it’s always educational to see how brands place their bets. The stakes are high, with $5.6 million for the 30-second media buy alone in 2020. In the most recent Super Bowl advertising study from Communicus (2017), they found that 80% of Super Bowl ads failed to significant impact for…
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David Hieatt recently drafted a few internal principles he uses to create a culture of “Deep Work” at his company, Hiut Denim. The idea of Deep Work was famously coined by Cal Newport. Number one on David’s list is: “Protect you from meetings.” As he framed it to his team: “Most meetings are the result of lazy thinking. The problem…
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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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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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