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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Last week, I gave the keynote at Google’s marketing conference in New York (which you can read as a cartoon-filled post here). I spoke about how to create “marketing worth sharing” and that technology can’t save a boring idea. One of the bigger themes of the day was the shift needed in how marketers tell stories. Many of us were…
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I’m giving the keynote presentation today at Google’s “Think Branding” event in New York. I want to share my slides and notes. I’m speaking about the power of “Marketing Worth Sharing”. Many thanks to Google for inviting me. There has never been a better time for marketing. New technologies give us an unparalleled opportunity to connect with our consumers. Google…
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“Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story,” the maxim goes. Aside from politicians, marketers have the worst rap for bending (or breaking) the truth. We’re so used to disingenuous marketing that we come to expect it. The large print giveth what the small print taketh away. Quotes in political ads are always taken out of…
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Earned media is on the rise as marketers scrutinize the effectiveness of traditional paid media. Marketing plans have always juggled some form of paid media (buying an ad), owned media (building a web site or store), and earned media (coverage in press or word of mouth). But the lines have blurred between these three forms of media. Some ad agencies…
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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.
“It does not matter how awesome your product is or your presentation or your post. Your awesome thing matters ONLY to the extent that it serves the user’s ability to be a little more awesome.” I stumbled across this quote from Kathy Sierra and it struck me how important this rule is for social media, yet how rarely it’s followed.…
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Southwest Airlines describes itself as a customer service company that happens to fly planes. Contrast the Southwest philosophy with the Grinch mentality of many other airlines. I heard recently that “SLF” is aircrew slang for “passengers”. It stands for “Self-Loading Freight”. Many brands outwardly market themselves very differently from the actual brand experience. United used the “Fly The Friendly Skies”…
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There’s always room for one more feature. Feature creep is the ongoing addition of new features, over-complicating the original idea. It often comes from committees making compromises. At Square, Jack Dorsey’s payment company, they call their product managers “Product Editors”. Deciding what not to put into a product is more important than deciding what to put in. I stumbled across…
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One of the great marketing campaigns from the 2012 Olympics didn’t come from an official sponsor. It came from a headphone brand called Beats by Dr. Dre. The Beats brand customized headphones in national colors and then strategically sampled them to athletes. Athletes wore Beats everywhere in the games, particularly in swimming. This is “ambush marketing”, a marketing strategy where…
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The right client/agency fit can make all the difference in marketing. Yet the typical RFP cattle call used to make that match is broken. The hoops clients give agencies to jump through in a pitch don’t really mimic the working relationship. Agencies are also often asked to create actual campaigns for free that may never be used, all the while…
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At the heart of a great marketing story is usually a “single-minded proposition”, or SMP. The SMP sums up the most important thing you can say about the brand or product. It ignites creative briefs and serves as a rally cry for marketing communication. Most single-minded propositions resemble a peace treaty more than a rally cry however. Marketers cram in…
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“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole,” an HBS professor named Theodore Levitt famously told his students. Too often, marketers get wrapped up in the features and functions of their products, rather than solving the actual problems of the consumer. That leads to a lot of one-upmanship versus competition and over-bundled products that don’t…
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Our goal as marketers is to inspire “loyalty beyond reason”, as Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts put it. What better proof point than consumers who get a brand permanently tattooed on their skin? Last week, a rum brand called Sailor Jerry held a marketing event in Brooklyn where they gave away free drinks to everyone willing to get a…
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Every brand needs an anthem. Most settle for a humdrum mission statement or competitive benchmark instead. In my recent “Brand Laddering” cartoon, I parodied brands that stretch too far beyond believability, trying to make corn chips stand for world peace. I think there’s just as much to make fun of with brands that don’t try to stand for anything at…
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“Brand Laddering” is one of the most common marketing tools. To drive growth and loyalty, marketers frequently work to elevate benefits of the brand from technical to functional to emotional. But there’s a risk of over-reaching, particularly when brands aim for abstract emotional benefits not really supported by the product story. Brandgym founder David Taylor calls this phenomenon “brand ego…
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I heard recently that the average click-through-rate of a banner ad is less than the average failure rate of birth control. I stumbled across this eye tracking study showing how people look at web content. Whether a quick scanning, partial reading, or thorough reading, the eyes rarely took in the ads. The study calls this “banner blindness”. The banner blindness…
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The last time I tried to redeem a Groupon, I arrived at the sushi restaurant to find an “out of business” sign in the window. The restaurant had launched a daily deal promotion six months before. Half-price sushi at a good restaurant is a great deal for consumers (more interesting than the eyebrow waxing and air duct cleaning deals I…
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The unrequited hype of the Facebook IPO last week echoes the unrequited hype many brands experience with social media in general. There’s a get rich quick mentality – a “Like Grab”. Many brands believe if you just build it, the audience will come. The problem is that this sets the false expectation that social media is easy. Social media holds…
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I heard someone say recently that the difference between networking and not working is one letter. I’m amazed how many LinkedIn requests are indiscriminately sent to acquaintances or strangers without even personalizing the generic invitation message: “Since you are person I trust…” Recently LinkedIn modified the generic message, but the same behavior is there. Many of these interactions start and…
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The world needs wild ideas. But every wild idea faces a road of obstacles to bring it to life. The hard work comes after the brainstorming rumpus when you have to bring others along. Few of these obstacles are as rough as the devil’s advocate. IDEO founder Tom Kelley once called the devil’s advocate the single greatest threat to innovation:…
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There has never been a greater level of marketing clutter. Yankelovich Consumer Research charts that “we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 marketing messages a day back in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 a day today.” At the same time, marketing communication is often little more than a string of adjectives: bigger, better, faster, cheaper, etc. So…
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