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.
Learn MoreCartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, & Doodling in Meetings
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“The number of walled gardens is growing and we can only expect their walls to get higher,” Quantcast VP Mark White observed recently. “Walled gardens” as a business concept describing a closed tech ecosystem is nothing new. John Malone is credited with coining the term in the 90s to apply the world of telecom. But walled gardens are increasingly the…
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A CB Insights study found that 35% of startups failed because they launched a product with no market need. It’s one of the main reasons cited why startups fail. As Sean Ellis, founding Dropbox marketer and “Hacking Growth” author, put it: “Scaling growth before having product/market fit is the fastest way to kill your startup.” Finding product/market fit (PMF)…
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No one knows exactly what form the internet of the future will take, but the frustrations of the current internet won’t automatically go away with new technology. With all the hype and investment in the metaverse, marketers are naturally questioning how big a deal the metaverse will be for brands. Here’s a prediction I found interesting from Jane Lacher,…
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Baymard Institute reports that 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned. High cart abandonment rates are a headache for any marketer in charge of e-commerce sales. Some cart abandonment is simply the nature of omnichannel shopping — the complexity of shifting between web sites and physical stores as a consumer does research in one place and buys in another.…
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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.
“Loyalty programs need to be treated as a trade-off, meaning they need to provide something of value to the customer and in return customers will provide their personal information along with the permission to track their shopping behavior and actions providing that Big Data.” This is a good reminder from Andy Wood, MD at GI Insight. With the death of…
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The power of user-generated content (UGC) in marketing is nothing new, but the lightbulb went on for many brands in 2020 when Nathan Apodaca’s truck broke down on the way to work. He grabbed a longboard and recorded a 23-second TikTok video of himself skateboarding to work while listening to Dreams from Fleetwood Mac and drinking from a bottle…
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“Children today are not only digital natives, they’re AI natives.” I was struck by this observation by Cynthia Breazeal, MIT professor and founder of RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education). Artificial intelligence is impacting every walk of business life. And yet, as with most sea changes in technology, your mileage may vary. A study from BCG Gamma found…
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Last week I got ready to share a weekly cartoon I drew on some marketing topic, and it just didn’t seem to matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. So I took a pause. Two days ago, I lost someone close to me, and my original topic seemed to matter even less. I don’t generally share my…
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Meetings have always been a favorite punching bag of modern work life. One survey in 2014 found that employees rated meetings as the “number one office productivity killer.” But the shift to remote and hybrid work has strained our collective meeting culture even further. Microsoft’s most recent Work Trend Report found that weekly meeting time increased 2.5X from pre-pandemic levels,…
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Gartner has been mapping the Hype Cycles of emerging technologies for nearly 30 years. Jackie Fenn (still at Gartner) originated the widely-used Hype Cycle Methodology in 1995. She later described the Hype Cycle this way: “It was really an observation we were seeing with technology … We’d see a lot of enthusiasm and overexpectation — and then a trough of…
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Computer scientists coined the colorful expression “garbage in, garbage out” in the earliest days of data processing, a term first recorded in an article in 1963 when an AP reporter visited an early computer lab. Nearly 60 years later, we’re still struggling with data credibility. A study last year from HFS Research found that 75% of execs don’t have…
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Marketers are perennially excited about the shiny new thing. Few shiny new things have captured the imagination of marketers quite like the NFT bandwagon of the last year. Of course, it’s always good to experiment with shiny new things that come along. What is fringe today could be mainstream tomorrow. But experimentation can lead to distraction. And the dynamic of…
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Amid some of the hype surrounding the metaverse, I was struck by a Washington Post profile of Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, creator of Fortnite. The article included this synopsis of Tim’s vision for brands and the metaverse: “The metaverse … would be an expansive, digitized communal space where users can mingle freely with brands and one another in…
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The term “thought leadership” was first coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor of Strategy+Business, with a narrow focus in mind. He wrote: “Thought Leaders are those people who possess a distinctively original idea, a unique point of view, or an unprecedented insight into their industry.” Since then, the meaning of thought leadership has devolved into a catch-all term that…
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Marketing has always been a little full of it and there are many forms of marketing B.S. Ironically, the more that brands push to sound “authentic”, the more these efforts can come across as fake. YUM! Brands CMO Ken Muench oversees global marketing for KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. He has a particular pet peeve about brand purpose. He…
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Mastercard gave the first glimpse of the 2021 holiday shopping season last week. In their SpendingPlus report, they found holiday spending rose 8.5% over the previous year — the biggest spending increase in 17 years and higher than their expected forecast of 7.4%. They also found that e-commerce holiday sales were up a whopping 61% over the 2019 pre-pandemic level…
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Brands from retailers to restaurants are all struggling with staffing issues in the last sprint of holiday shopping, and beyond. Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor, said: “I would say ‘labor shortage’ is kind of a tricky term because is does imply that there aren’t workers available … what we know is that there are a significant number of workers…
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Supply chain issues have become the go-to excuse for just about anything. Supply chain ripple effects are impacting every industry from restaurants to retailers. And even as some supply chain snarls are growing less severe, others have no end in sight. This week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger predicted supply challenges for semiconductors would continue through 2023. Yet supply chain excuses…
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Organizations have always struggled with making decisions. One McKinsey study found that more than half of all business time spent making decisions is ineffective. In an average Fortune 500 company, McKinsey estimated that decision paralysis cost $250 million of wasted labor costs per year. But decision paralysis is particularly acute in the face of an uncertain future. And decision making…
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Wired editor Brian Barnett suggested a few years ago that Cyber Monday is the perfect day to battle annoying marketing emails: “Today more than any other, every single marketer in possession of your email address has set their phasers to send… “Whether you’re partaking in deals this year or passing them by, take a moment to embrace the season’s true…
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