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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Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. Twenty years ago, 17 software engineers went skiing in Utah. After bonding over their shared frustrations on the state of software development, they drafted the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The principles they defined helped change software development forever, but also inspired more widespread organizational shifts. As the signers…
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Marketers use personas as a tool to try to bring customers into the room — to help organizations be more customer-centric. They’re intended to help with everything from innovation to experience design to marketing and sales. At their best, personas can help visualize and communicate insights from research. But at their worst, they have nothing to do with the real…
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In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg famously said that privacy was no longer a “social norm.” New research this month showed that 94% of consumers are uncomfortable with how their personal data is shared online. Drew MacRae at the Financial Rights Legal Centre, said consumers’ expectations had fundamentally shifted. As he put it: “Privacy is making a comeback. People are slowly realizing…
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“If being purposeful means doing ads to you, then you’re probably doing it wrong.” I was struck by this observation from the ever-insightful Tom Roach in his essay exploring whether brand purpose is “the biggest lie the ad industry ever told.” The topic of brand purpose has always inspired some of the most absurd BS in marketing. Last week, Mondelez…
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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.
Traditional strategic planning is often neither “strategic” nor much of a “plan”. It usually resembles a peace treaty more than clear marching orders for an organization. Strategic planning also tends to be out-dated the moment it’s written. I like this characterization from consultant Richard Gold: “Traditionally, strategic planning has been a hierarchical, top-down process where someone in the organization…
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Gapingvoid creator Hugh MacLeod once observed, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.” Hugh shared this insight years before the marketing automation revolution, but the same could be said for many forms of marketing, now more than ever. Analysts at Demand Gen Report recently revealed that 60% of respondents would…
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A Capgemini study found that 75% of organizations believed themselves to be customer-centric. Only 30% of customers agreed. The numbers were even more stark for consumer products companies — 80% believed they were were customer-centric and only 14% agreed. There’s a wide gap between what customers expect and what organizations deliver. Deloitte identified one of the key CX challenges that…
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In this time of change, I’ve been thinking about the gap between a desire to change and uncertainty on where or how to change. The pandemic has been a change accelerant, but the path isn’t always clear. Jeff Bezos has some relevant insights in how he describes Day 1 versus Day 2 thinking. He first codified this idea in the…
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From data plans to toothpaste to headache medicine, most categories operate as if more choice is better than less choice. But if you’re actually a shopper with a headache in a headache medicine aisle, the only thing a complicated product assortment will do is make your headache worse. As Scott Galloway put it recently (echoing Barry Schwartz’s 2004 classic, The…
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Psychographics are back in the news as part of the US election cycle, four years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal made the term mainstream. This week, CB Insights published a useful primer on psychographics, which they describe as one of the “dark arts” of social media and internet marketing. Yet psychographics are nothing new; they were first developed in the…
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I once heard Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah advise businesses, “Don’t make your process my problem. Solve for my success, not your systems.” Six months into the pandemic, this strikes me as good advice for brands to think about their COVID response as well. Many businesses continue to follow the same stock script using COVID as an excuse for all…
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I’ve been re-reading the 1983 classic, “Ogilvy on Advertising” to see how much has changed — and how much has remained the same — in advertising over the years. One constant is the challenge of how to measure sales impact in advertising, and the tension of long-term brand building versus short-term direct response. As David Ogilvy wrote (more than a…
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A recent survey from Blind found that 83% of marketing and communications professionals are reporting burnout, the highest of any job function. There are likely many factors at play, but I wonder how much of this burnout relates to productivity anxiety, the pressure to be busy, and the hustle culture in business. The pursuit of constant productivity can actually…
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This cartoon is dedicated to Comcast, the most recent company to show me how far we have to go before we reach conversational AI that can come close to a human voice. The only thing worse than the Comcast customer service bot that greeted me when trying to resolve a technical issue was having to have identical conversations with the…
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A Gartner study recently reported that more than half (57%) of CMOs expect to see a return to business as usual in the next 18-24 months. It made me think about what “business as usual” even means right now. Some aspects of how we work have changed so fundamentally, it’s hard to imagine that some of these changes aren’t permanent. …
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We are never finished with digital transformation. In the late 90’s, I worked as a project manager helping build early web sites. For many of the companies I worked with, this was their first-ever web site. One of my clients was a regional airline based in Milwaukee called Midwest Express. I remember big hoopla to celebrate when their web…
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Brand safety has been high on marketers’ agendas since the 2017 YouTube crisis, when some advertisers found their ads next to terrorist videos. Yet the blunt tool response that followed has brought its own problems. Many brands started addressing brand safety with overly broad keyword blocklists that can penalize legitimate content and make it harder to find audiences, limiting reach…
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“The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again,” Justin Trudeau famously said in his 2018 speech at Davos. Of course that was two years before COVID-19 changed and accelerated everyone’s plans beyond recognition. A recent McKinsey report chronicled a few examples of organizations making heroic overnight changes in the last…
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COVID-19 is drawing fresh attention to the promise of customer experience management (and all its ancillary marketing buzzwords shown in this cartoon). Yet there’s still a yawning gap between the shiny promise of technology to deliver a better customer experience and the old-fashioned analog organizational limitations that hold back that potential. Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, recently…
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“Universities are no longer nonprofits, but the highest-gross-margin luxury brands in the world,” NYU Professor Scott Galloway wrote recently. Professor Galloway has been exploring the crisis of higher education in the U.S. lately, accelerated by the pandemic. Of all the wrecking ball implications of Covid-19 on brands, the impact on higher education is one of the most dramatic. And as…
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