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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Brand loyalty can be pretty fickle. Marketers often overestimate the motivations of their brand loyalists and how prominent their brands are in their consumers’ lives. This is particularly apparent when more than half of all grocery items are sold on price promotion. We train consumers to buy our brands on deal and then wonder why we have so many brand…
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Super Bowl ads have long rivaled the Big Game. Thanks to social media, the ads now spread far beyond the game itself. The actual Super Bowl media time is an increasingly smaller part of the campaign. Many brands release their ads (or at least a teaser) in advance. YouTube recently shared that ads that ran online before the Super Bowl…
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Idea generation at many companies is sporadic and haphazard. It often starts with a random one-off brainstorming meeting. Then a handful of ideas run the organizational gauntlet. A very small number of those ideas ever see the light of day. I recently followed a long-time dream of going to The New Yorker with a batch of cartoons and had lunch…
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One of the biggest threats to traditional retail is “showrooming”, where consumers check out products in a store, but then go online to buy. Mobile devices have made prices fully transparent to everyone. Since traditional retailers carry higher overhead than online retailers, it’s a real marketing challenge. Do retailers drop their prices and cut their margins, or do they find…
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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.
A packaging redesign is often the first lever that marketers pull when they are either new to a brand or facing a marketing challenge. If all else fails, redesign the packaging and slap a “New Look. Same Great Taste” burst on it. From my time at method, I learned that packaging design, when done well, can be the best media…
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The marketer’s toolkit isn’t complete without Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a theory of what motivates people. The gist is that as our more basic needs are satisfied, we look for fulfillment progressively higher up the hierarchy. Brands that tap these higher-order needs can deepen their meaning with consumers. The classic Maslow marketing case is Michelin Tires. Rather than focusing on…
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The large print giveth and the small print taketh away. Consumers rarely read the small print. That’s partly because so much of it is written in legalese that is not easily understood. Who honestly reads the lengthy “terms of use” disclaimers we have to accept before using a mobile app or the iTunes clickthrough agreement? Yet even legal disclaimers are…
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Brands are historically hardwired to communicate in one direction. Ever since P&G invented brand management in the 1930’s, brands have been designed to hammer home their single-minded propositions as efficiently as possible. The first steps into social media can be tricky for brands, because they have to put down the megaphone and engage in conversations. Unlike a 30-second spot, we…
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Our brands are increasingly brought to life by others out of our direct control. Innocent Drinks describes its brand as composed of “thousands of nice little touches”. It can be tough to synchronize the brand so that it feels consistent at every touchpoint. Many brands create strict guidelines to keep everyone in check: a style guide, visual standards, identity manuals,…
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This cartoon follows this theme of the Marketing Strategy post a couple weeks ago. Jennifer Nelson shared a comment on that post that struck a particular chord with me: “If you can’t invest the time in developing and aligning on a good brief, why should your company invest (potentially) millions of dollars in A&P to execute it?” In marketing planning,…
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Apple and Microsoft both ousted executives in the last few weeks for abrasive management styles. Scott Forstall was Apple’s head of iOS software and Steven Sinofsky ran Windows. Both managers caused a lot of friction, but their approaches were overlooked for many years because they got results. The shakeups got me thinking about the management archetype of the “Brilliant Jerk”.…
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A marketing campaign is only as strong as the strategy that drives it. Yet sometimes we treat marketing strategy as an afterthought. This often comes across in the creative brief process. Marketers copy and paste old creative briefs or parrot benefit statements without getting to the heart of why our brands or products are meaningfully unique. In an ad shoot,…
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Marketers often try to tap what’s happening in the news. The reasoning is that if they can take over water cooler conversations, their brand message will travel that much faster. Yet many brands misfired last week during Hurricane Sandy. In an attempt to capitalize on the storm news, they outraged consumers with self-serving and insensitive promotions. Gap used the #Sandy…
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The marketing funnel (sometimes called the purchase funnel or customer funnel) maps a consumer’s journey toward the purchase of a product or service. Marketers spend a lot of time thinking about the stages of that journey and how to maximize the number who make it from one stage to the next. The marketing funnel actually dates back to 1898, when…
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I wanted to share that I’m putting on a a two-day workshop in Dubai next month called “Innovation Worth Sharing: Beyond New and Improved“. I’m partnering with Training Hotline, a Training & Development company based in Dubai Knowledge Village. Here’s a little background on the workshop on November 27 and 28. If you’re interested, register at thetraininghotline.com. Thanks! Every year…
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It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and it’s not even Halloween. Many retailers like Restoration Hardware are already decorating for the winter holidays. Target even aired a Christmas TV ad on October 14, three weeks before Halloween and six weeks before Thanksgiving. The Target voice-over announces, “The holidays are coming and they’re gonna be big”. One consumer replied…
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Facebook debuted its first ad campaign ten days ago to celebrate its one billion user milestone. The ad has been ridiculed and parodied for it’s confusing and overwrought story centered on the message, “Chairs are like Facebook”. It’s one of the more inadvertently hilarious pieces of marketing communication I’ve seen. My favorite spoof so far is arelikefacebook.com, a site that…
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“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” Steve Jobs famously said. Cannibalization risk is a major factor in evaluating innovation. No product is 100% incremental so we have to decide whether new products will more than offset the sales loss of what’s already on the shelf. What’s often left out of the equation though is the risk of our…
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Most corporate apologies sound the same. They’re driven more by risk management than by empathy. That’s why genuine corporate apologies are so surprising, and powerful. Apple CEO Tim Cook’s apology for the Maps App last week was unusually good. Apple even went so far as to recommend alternatives from rivals Microsoft and Google. Honesty and accountability are disarming. Brands are…
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Now that everyone carries a GPS-enabled supercomputer in their pockets, the marketing possibilities are endless. Location-based marketing is the new frontier. But, as with any new technology at a marketer’s disposal, the value is not in the technology, it’s in what great marketing ideas the technology enables. Location-based marketing won’t work if the goal is just to interrupt more effectively.…
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