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
More Details Here
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,…
Read More
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”.…
Read More
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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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 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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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.…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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.…
Read More
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”…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More