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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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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“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.
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” I think this 1963 quote from William Bruce Cameron (often misattributed to Albert Einstein) touches on some of the potential pitfalls of marketing dashboards. In this era of data-driven marketing, dashboards can give marketers a false sense of security. They always appear authoritative, but the…
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As marketers, it’s easy to lose touch with what consumers and customers actually experience with our brands. In the bubble of our marketing offices, writing strategy decks and brand architecture documents, we sometimes over-inflate the role our brands play in peoples’ lives. I once interviewed for a job with a senior executive at Apple. He told me that every Saturday,…
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“Technology changes exponentially; organizations change logarithmically.” Scott Brinker described this observation as “Martec’s Law” five years ago, but I think the same can be said beyond the world of marketing technology to digital transformation in general. Scott went on to write: “I believe these two things are true: “1. Technology is changing very rapidly, and those changes seem to be…
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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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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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