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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Every company has some form of innovation funnel. The funnel is wide at the front to capture potential ideas and narrows to the select few that launch. Projects progress from the idea stage through design and ultimately to market. Amazingly, the average new product success rate is less than 10%. So companies spend a lot of time on this innovation…
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The Facebook “Like” land grab is in full swing. Fan acquisition is becoming an increasing part of many marketing plans, in the midst of a lot of debate on the value of Facebook fans. Different pundits are increasingly trying to pinpoint a universal value to fans. As one observer summarized, “Your Facebook fans are worth exactly $1.07. No, they’re worth…
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This week, brand marketers descended on Austin for SXSW Interactive in a bigger mass than ever before. Most are grappling with how to incorporate social media into their marketing plans. They face a decision on how much to insource and how much to outsource. Last week, Chrysler revealed some of the risks of outsourcing, when someone at their social media…
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There are no low interest categories. Only low interest brands. That’s the main lesson I took away from five years at method. Even in a category as mundane as household cleaning products, you can create a brand with deep emotional connections. Marketers often limit ourselves by the conventional rules of a particular category. When we first join a brand team,…
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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.
I spent a few days in Vermont last week with Eureka Ranch founder, Doug Hall. At one point, Doug said, “if you’re not meaningfully unique, you better be cheap”. Any idea that is “meaningfully unique” is inherently risky because by definition you can’t point to a precedent in the market. You have to step into the unknown, which is uncomfortable.…
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PR is called earned media for a reason. You have to earn it. If you earn it, PR can be far more valuable than paid media. But earned media follows different rules than paid media, and certainly different rules than spam. Some PR agencies forget that the “R” in PR stands for relations. They instead follow the antiquated “For Immediate…
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I sketched this cartoon while on hold with United Airlines last week. I spent a total of two hours and 12 minutes with United over four separate phone calls trying to get home from New York after the storm, so I had a lot of time to think about service. Many brands fall down on service. They view it as…
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There’s an interesting disagreement between Jim Stengel and Simon Clift, former CMOs of P&G and Unilever: “Who is Right: P&G or Unilever?“. Jim is in the process of writing a book and teaching a UCLA class on the role of purpose and ideals in business. He invited Simon Clift to talk to students last week and probed on the different…
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The founder of Geek Squad once described advertising as a “tax for unremarkable products”. No one wants to launch unremarkable products, so why do the vast majority of new products fall into this camp? We’ve all come across idea killers, those behaviors and attitudes that sand the edges of ideas as they are brought to life. Idea killers operate like…
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Many marketers asked Santa for a social coupon campaign for 2011. The explosive growth of Groupon and Groupon clones (BuyWithMe, LivingSocial, SocialBuy, and Tippr), offering “ridiculously huge” coupons (50-90% off), is taking marketing plans by storm. These social coupon sites promise high customer demand in return for a deep discount and a share of the deal. In August, Gap offered…
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Many organizations are better at blamestorming than brainstorming. It is far easier to critique than to create. No one wants to end up on the wall of failure. Blamestorming not only hampers big ideas. It creates a debilitating cycle of pointing the finger. Sales blames Marketing. Marketing blames R&D. R&D blames Operations. Operations blames Sales. Around it goes. Even thinking…
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There’s a diner in my town with a huge “Follow us on Facebook” sign in the window. Yet if you go to their Facebook page, there’s nothing worth following there. They haven’t updated it in months. It’s a social media ghost town. Nashville marketer Laura Click recently posed the question, “Is your company creating a social media ghost town?” Many…
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“Monetize” is one of the top 10 buzz words for 2010. Many businesses are retooling their business models and figuring out new revenue streams. Last week, I spent a few thought-stirring days in Portland at a publishing workshop organized by Todd Sattersten. We talked about the future of publishing, which is in the middle of epic change. The workshop offered…
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We can thank adman Alex Osborn for the brainstorm (he’s the O in agency BBDO). In 1948, Alex noted that most offices were full of “discouragement and criticism which so often cramp imagination”. So he invented the brainstorm as a break from the day-to-day office environment. In a brainstorm, ideas could blossom safely before being subjected to critical thought. Brainstorming…
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The famous Cannes Festival is adding a new category of Creative Effectiveness in 2011 “to establish a direct correlation between creativity and effectiveness … now more than ever ROI is paramount to the client.” This change touches on a long-standing grievance that clients have with ad agencies: a weak appreciation for the business results of the work. In the 1960’s…
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I’ve been thinking lately about where ideas come from and the conditions and environments that inspire creativity. I came across an inspiring article from Scott Belsky who writes on the importance of deep thinking and the “creative pause”: “This phenomenon is the seed of the break-through “a-ha!” moments that people so frequently report having in the shower. In these moments,…
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David Kelley at IDEO once said that you have to “fail faster to succeed sooner”. You can tell a lot about an organization by how they treat failure. Do they focus on the learning or do they focus on the punishment? When I worked at General Mills, they launched a new snack brand called Wahoos to take on Frito-Lay. The…
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Every brand has some form of a brand butterfly, whether they call it a brand onion, a brand architecture, a brand key, a brand pyramid, a brand d.n.a, or a brand unicorn. It’s the one-page blueprint of the brand. When written well, it can be an invaluable resource. It sparks new ideas and helps guide all of your decisions on…
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I’ve heard mobile apps described as the new web site. And that having a mobile app is essential to gaining “share of conversation”. There are more than 300,000 mobile apps today on Apple’s platform alone, up from 200,000 just last year. Many of these apps are launched by brands as a new way to reach consumers. Brand owners have taken…
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Brands are flocking to Facebook in greater herds than ever before. Facebook has become an integral tick box on just about every marketing plan. Yet setting up a Facebook page alone won’t suddenly make a brand more social. The question for a brand to ask is not whether to use social media. The question to ask is how to make…
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