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
I gave a 30-minute talk today at the MarketingProfs conference on Content Marketing. In case you missed it, they’ve archived the talk here. I’ve also posted my slides and notes below. >>>>> I am both a cartoonist and a career marketer. I run a studio called Marketoon Studios that brings the two together. We create content marketing campaigns with cartoons…
Read More
Pinterest is the talk of the marketing town. It’s the fastest growing social network, stars a highly engaged high-income audience, and is driving more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and MySpace combined. As brands jump on the Pinsanity bandwagon, remember the lesson from every social network that preceded it. What’s more important than the platform is what we’re asking…
Read More
Design thinking is regularly talked about in business, but design is often relegated to a supporting role. Two years ago, I spent a couple days at IDEO, seeing their approach to design thinking first hand. IDEO pioneered much of what the business world knows about design thinking. IDEO calls it human-centered design. In contrast, many organizations follow heritage-centered design. I…
Read More
This cartoon is inspired by one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons, showing two panels of a dog owner scolding his pet to stay out of the garbage. The first panel illustrates “what we say to dogs”. The second panel shows “what they hear”, with every word (except the dog’s name) replaced by “blah blah blah”. Consumers have this same…
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.
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 2/22; U.S.…
Read More
Few topics generate as many deer-in-headlights looks from marketers as social media ROI. It’s hard to know what to measure and it’s tricky to tie social media efforts directly to business results. A recent survey from the Chartered Institute of Marketers showed that very few marketers can measure the effectiveness of social media. Nearly a third describe social media as…
Read More
I started sketching this cartoon weeks ago after hearing that Carnival offered a voucher for 30% off future cruises to passengers of the Costa Condordia. Coincidentally this was before last week’s dramatic blunders of Susan G Komen for the Cure. PR crises are nothing new. The field of crisis management originated with the environmental and industrial disasters of the 1980’s…
Read More
Next Sunday’s Super Bowl will be one of the biggest social media integrated live events ever, including a 2,800-square-foot social media command center built for the game. Super Bowl advertisers are building social into their campaigns like never before. GM created a Chevy Game Time mobile app to answer trivia, win prizes, and engage during the game. Coke is hosting…
Read More
How we execute matters a lot more than which tactics we execute. A few years ago, I helped launch the method brand in the UK. We thought sampling would help tell the brand story person-to-person. We soon discovered that most in-store sampling treated all brands the same. The sampling staff did their jobs, but it was obvious that our brand…
Read More
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 1/25; U.S.…
Read More
My big brand training taught me the “test, test, test, test, launch big” school of market research. I’m a big believer in the power of market research when done well. But I’ve also experienced the purgatory of over-testing. Over-testing limits our ability to move quickly and delays getting our ideas into the real world. I find inspiration in the philosophy…
Read More
The holy grail of marketing is loyalty. Every marketing plan includes a flow chart on how to migrate consumers from awareness to trial to repeat to loyalty. Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts even defines a brand as “loyalty beyond reason”. Yet many brands approach loyalty primarily through loyalty programs and loyalty cards that bear little relationship to true loyalty. It’s “loyalty…
Read More
Some brands are line extension machines. To jockey for shelf space, they launch waves of new SKUs each year, often without meaningful differentiation from what is already there. I’m sure there are category management justifications for every niche item, but most supermarket shelves are cluttered and hard to shop. Does Crest really need 40 varieties of toothpaste? Clutter causes confusion…
Read More
It’s beginning to look a lot like January, even with nearly a week left until Christmas. Retailers started post-Christmas markdowns extra early this year. Deloitte analyst Jason Gordon explained it this way: “There’s a finite amount of spend. If one of your big rivals goes on Sale, you don’t have any choice. You’ve got to get your share of the…
Read More
I heard Crossing the Chasm author Geoffrey Moore share that the most important moment in mobile adoption was December 25, 2010, when executives around the world opened up the new iPads their families had given them for Christmas. Suddenly, mobile made the corporate agenda, because the iPads made it personal, in ways that even smart phones hadn’t. One year later,…
Read More
PowerPoint presentations may not have actually killed anyone, but they’ve sure killed many an idea. Our ideas are only as good as how we communicate them. Yet it is common to neuter ideas with mind-numbing slide presentations. We sometimes assume the longer and more verbose the slide deck, the more credibility our idea will have. I was struck by this…
Read More
This is the second in a new 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 12/5;…
Read More
Social media is not a cure-all. Yet it is often treated as a marketing magic elixir. It can be difficult to sort the promise from the hype. Jennifer Nelson kindly pointed me to a short book by Dan Zarrella, Hierarchy of Contagiousness, where he poses the question, “are you a snake-oil salesman or are you a scientist?” In these early…
Read More