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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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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“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.
“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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One of my favorite idea killers is the statement, “if it were really a good idea, someone would already be doing it.” In innovation, we often fixate too much on the competition. We benchmark and validate ideas based what everyone else is doing. This cycle of one-upmanship makes it hard to launch something truly new and different. It also creates…
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Should campaigns be media-driven or idea-driven? Lately, it feels like the media tail is wagging the campaign dog. Many campaigns are built around a media platform, as if the media platform alone was the big idea. Most of the Foursquare campaigns I see feel like that. Sometimes marketers forget that media platforms are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the…
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Every time I buy a new technology product, I wonder how long it will last. I salivate over anything new from Apple. But, I’ve had a number of Apple products fail recently. My Apple Time Capsule, marketed as a “revolutionary storage device”, died after just two years, unfixable, losing all the files it was designed to store. My two-year old…
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Mobile is the next frontier for marketing. Not all mobile marketing is spam, of course, but many current campaigns feature exactly that — unwanted, unsolicited SMS text messages. The potential of mobile marketing is far more powerful — location-specific, time-based, highly personalized messaging. It has the potential to offer real utility to consumers. But the current state seems more geared…
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The gamification bandwagon continues, promising customer engagement and loyalty. What some marketers miss is that gamification means a lot more than badges, points, mayorships, and leader boards. Those game mechanics don’t necessarily create experiences worth playing. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. More importantly, gamification can’t make an un-engaging brand engaging. It may be the shiny new thing,…
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We all know the IDEO maxim, “Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner”. Rapid prototyping is a key principle of successful innovation. The sooner we make prototypes, the sooner we figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what to make in the next prototype. Yet marketers are quicker to PowerPoint than to prototype. We spend more time on two-by-two matrixes and venn diagrams…
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It is a lot easier to kill an idea than to create one. Groups are often better equipped to critique than to create. I was struck by a recent NY Times article on the challenges of group creativity: “The Rise of the New Groupthink“: “Decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and…
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This is the latest in a marketoon series with Baynote called “Intent to Buy” that parodies the state of e-commerce personalization. The series spotlights the top challenges that marketers face in online experience. Baynote is offering a signed print of this cartoon to every comment or cartoon suggestion posted at the Baynote blog over the next week (by 3/21; U.S.…
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The Kony video famously generated 70 million views last week. It left many marketers thinking of the “viral video” as a silver bullet. If a viral video could raise so much awareness of an Ugandan warlord, then maybe a viral video could raise awareness of a brand’s single minded proposition. Marketers often add viral videos to marketing plans as if…
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