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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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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“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.
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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“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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