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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It’s only a matter of time before holiday deals start lapping themselves. Last year, Target kicked off the Christmas shopping season with a holiday ad on October 7th, 79 days before Christmas and 3 weeks before Halloween. This year, Kmart upped the ante with a holiday ad on September 10th, 105 days before Christmas and right in the midst of…
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Many brands place far more emphasis on new customer acquisition than on customer retention. Yet it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer. According to Bain, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%. I’ve been thinking about this dynamic while dropping Comcast after a series of…
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Market research is a vital part of marketing. Understanding the consumer is the foundation of every meaningful brand. Yet market research can go overboard. Focus groups are frequently called as a knee-jerk response to just about everything. Not every question needs to be validated with a focus group. And not every focus group needs to run the same way. I’m…
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I’m in Turkey this week to speak at Brand Week Istanbul. I always love seeing how things are merchandized, marketed, and sold in different countries. The Grand Bazaar is a dizzying experience with over 3,000 shops trying to get the attention of between 250,000 and 400,000 visitors on a typical day (I preferred the smaller bazaars tucked in smaller streets…
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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.
The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. Native advertising is one of the more significant marketing trends of 2013. As consumers get progressively better at ignoring banner ads (or any other ad for that matter), marketers are experimenting with new ways to deliver advertising as content. Native advertising is advertising content that looks like editorial. While flagged as “sponsored”, native…
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Partly to appeal to Millennials, many brands are reframing what they do to sound purpose-driven. Many marketers are feeling pressure to define their “brand purpose” and create campaigns with a higher cause. The more brands that jump on the purpose bandwagon, however, the more that consumers will be skeptical and cynical about companies’ motivations, even if their motivations are sincere.…
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Marketing flash mobs peaked with T-Mobile’s famous “Life is for Sharing” series in 2009, but they are still going strong. Samsung did one earlier this year. My local farmer’s market staged a flash mob. There’s even a turnkey flash mob agency. The flash mob is symbolic of the mob mentality of marketers trying to go viral. Marketers see the 38…
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“As a CMO, you get one shot, then you’re pushed out,” said Tony Pace, CMO at Subway. The tenure of the average Chief Marketing Officer has been increasing, but it’s still the shortest tenure of any executive role. As recently at 2006, the average CMO lasted only 23 months. Starbucks replaced their head of marketing five times in seven years.…
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One of the takeaways from Advertising Week in New York last week is the rise of “branded content”. Brands are embracing the potential of branded content to blur the lines between advertising and entertainment. It seems like every week, I hear the expression, “Content is King”. It’s true that content marketing holds great promise, as marketers start to create communication…
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The rise of the online review is one of the more transformative shifts in marketing. Giving or reading feedback on just about any brand (personal or corporate) is only a smartphone touch away. Brand communication is increasingly coming from sources other than the brand. Reputation management is now a fundamental part of brand management. Gone is the bait-and-switch school of…
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The design community has been in a tizzy since Marissa Mayer shared the shallow design process that led to the new Yahoo logo. Over a weekend, Marissa personally rolled up her sleeves to micromanage the logo design with a small team. The whole approach was pilloried by a number of designers, including a very funny piece from Oliver Reichenstein: “Logo,…
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RedBull achieved marketing nirvana last year when they sponsored Felix Baumgartner’s jump from a helium balloon in the stratosphere to become the first human to break the sound barrier without vehicular power. This publicity stunt was the perfect marketing win-win. “Red Bull Stratos” captured the world’s attention and perfectly gelled with the positioning statement that “RedBull gives you wings”. Many…
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Marketers are increasingly challenged to create short-form media. Some of this shift is driven by new standards. Facebook will start offering 15-second video ads this Fall. Instagram video is capped at 15 seconds and Vine from Twitter is capped at only six seconds. But the underlying driver is the vanishing attention span. This year a study pegged the average attention…
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Marketers often confuse loyalty with getting consumers to carry one more plastic card in a wallet already filled with plastic loyalty cards. I experienced this cartoon a few weeks ago at an Office Depot in Colorado. The one and only cashier leisurely chatted up every customer with the same up-sell pitch (loyalty points, extended warranties, impulse items at the till),…
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One of the more memorable scenes from the 2002 movie Minority Report was a dystopian view of advertising in the year 2054. The protagonist, John Anderton, walks through a mall, where retina scanners match his identity with purchase history so that billboards can pitch personal ads to him as he walks by. Consumers have been dreading this and marketers have…
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Businesses have increasingly realized that they can’t do innovation alone. Many have implemented open innovation programs to make it easier to bring in ideas from the outside world. As Nanako Mura from Kraft put it, “we recognize that we don’t know everything.” A.T. Kearney wrote, “No single company is large enough or inventive enough to be an innovation leader without…
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Marketers are in a mad rush to target Millennials. They are the largest consumer group in history and expected to spend more than Baby Boomers by 2017. Millennials also came of age with a different relationship to marketing and brands. This creates tension as marketers figure out how to communicate to a new wave of consumers who can be resistant…
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Many brands aspire to become lifestyle brands. Lifestyle brands are seen as the pinnacle of marketing. Marketers elevate these brands beyond functional attribute to higher-order benefits. Consumers express their identities through these brands. This strategy promises differentiation and growth. One of the reasons that method succeeded was its positioning as a lifestyle brand in the commodity category of household cleaning.…
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Many brands are hardwired for one-way conversations. These brands work hard to limit the time actually engaging with consumers. They consider call centers as cost centers. They sometimes program the call center computer voice to say that “0” is not a valid option because they don’t want to pay for anyone to talk to a live person. These brands may…
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Walmart projects that 100% of its sales growth will come from multicultural customers. They are doubling their multicultural advertising spend. Marketers can’t ignore the demographic trends. In the US, 93% of population growth is multicultural, nearing 40% of the population, and one in four babies born is Hispanic. To grow, marketers clearly need a strategy to drive penetration with multicultural…
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