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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I met Simon Clift a few weeks ago and he introduced me to the wonderful expression, "the abominable no-men". The longer the corporate ladder, the more people there are to veto or sandpaper an idea. And the harder becomes to usher an idea through the gauntlet unscathed. Simon is CMO at Unilever after 25 years there, so he knows all…
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I was fortunate to hear Seth Godin give a talk in London this last week. He led a packed room through a whirlwind tour of his ideas on marketing, business, and leadership at large. This cartoon was inspired by something Seth covered early in the talk. He put up a few slides with photos from his local grocery store,…
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I've been thinking about presentation style lately. I'm gearing up for a big customer meeting and trying to avoid the "death by PowerPoint" trap. Fortunately, I have a few cartoons up my sleeve. Somehow the preparation reminded me of management consulting. In business school, I was first blown away by the technical skill of ex-consultants who had been using PowerPoint…
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"Risk aversion, prudence and frugality – these are rational short-term responses to a serious global recession but will in the longer term make it much worse." This quote comes from an interesting management journal editorial that inspired this cartoon. From a Baroness no less. Like many of us, I've been playing armchair macro-economics lately. I've been struck by the economic…
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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.
"What we're experiencing right now is a complete sea change requiring us to completely rethink what were doing. We need to think our way out of this recession, not just wait for it to get better." I read this quote from Michael Perman (Levi Strauss) in this AdAge article and thought it was spot-on (thanks to Don and Eliza for…
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This cartoon isn't a critique of factories per se. Some of the sharpest people I've ever worked with have been factory engineers. Instead, this cartoon is about factory-thinking as a business metaphor. I just finished Seth Godin's new book on Tribes, where Seth frames the danger of being factory-centric as a business. Factories are designed to do the same repeatable…
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It's never easy to do business forecasting, but this year is a total mystery. Every forecast discussion seems to start with a conversation to agree how optimistic or pessimistic to be. It reminded me of the old "glass half full/glass half empty" test. Most of what I'm hearing is pretty pessimistic. And it's only a few weeks into January. In…
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I remember learning about "trading up" when I worked on the Häagen-Dazs brand a few years ago. Our VP was a big fan of the book Trading Up, which described how middle-market consumers felt affluent and were starting to trade up up higher premium products. We baked "trading up" into our brand strategy. Afterall, we weren't just a premium brand,…
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I originally started this cartoon as a series of panels on "recession survival tactics". I started thinking about different brands as "species" and I sketched a few panels with examples of how different brands approach the threat of recession: a turtle hiding in its protective shell, an ostrich with its head in the sand, etc. Then I started sketching a panel…
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Value is of course the theme of the moment, and marketers are all scrambling to add more “value” into their marketing plans for 2009. I met with a retail buyer last week, and tried to convince her that there was still a role for premium brands in a recession. I shared my opinion that a recession simply heightens the urgency for…
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We had a dinner party Friday for some friends moving away from London, and one of them described his job as “adult day care”. He spends a lot of time getting his team to “play nice”. This expression cracked me up and reminded me of the Robert Fulghum essay, “all I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten.” I…
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December is often a time of year when things quiet down for marketers (except for the spike in agency parties). But this year it feels dominated by a whole lot of scenario brainstorming and re-planning. The common theme is how to do “more with less”. I started kicking around cartoon ideas around “more with less” and the metaphor of a drought came to…
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The nice people at the UK Marketing Society asked me to donate a cartoon for their Christmas card this year. So, I came up with this. As I kicked around a few ideas, I realized this cartoon would be particularly relevant this “Black Friday” weekend (the Friday after Thanksgiving in the US and the official start of the Christmas shopping season).…
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I had a cuppa the other day with my friend Ceri and wound up as a hand model on the innocent blog. We have an old-fashioned barter going with innocent, and Ceri dropped off a whole heap of smoothies in their astroturf-covered van in return for some handsoaps. Soaps for smoothies. Not a bad deal. Any way, we also had…
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This week, I'm chairing a conference put on by Marketing magazine on marketing in the credit crunch . They've invited an interesting roster of speakers, including people from McDonalds, Lush, innocent, and my friend Jon Rudoe at Ocado. A good mix of retailers and manufacturers from companies large and small, and promotion-driven to more premium. I'll post some of my takeaways…
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Nowadays, barely a day goes by without hearing the expression "cash is king". I started to wonder, if cash is king, what's the rest of the royal family? I knocked around this metaphor and my mind wandered to playing cards. It's clear that the game has changed, and the winning hand in a recession is going to be different than…
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(A quick groveling note to any retail buyers I work with who may be reading: this cartoon was entirely inspired by anecdotes from other people (my competitors actually). So, please, please, pretty please don't discontinue my products. OK, Partner?) Now that the fearful groveling is out of the way, I've been thinking a lot about retail in the context of…
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I spent a lot of time at the budget table this week, talking through cuts to 2009 spending. As we all debated the merits (and drawbacks) of every possible place to trim costs in our P&L, the image of a pork barbecue diagram suddenly popped into my head, and I scribbled this cartoon on the back of the P&L. All…
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I walked past plenty of Halloween decorations this weekend. But it struck me that the current newspaper headlines feel spookier than any of them. Instead of the same-old ghosts, skeletons, and witch costumes rampant on Halloween, I thought it would be fun to imagine a real fright night for anyone who works in marketing: kids dressed up as the credit crunch, consumer…
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My wife showed me a Grazia article the other day that announced belt-tightening as this season’s eco chic. It told the story of a cocktail party where everyone attempted to one-up each other on bargain purchases. It then described European discount chain ALDI as nouveau fashionable. It made me think about the role of ethical brands in a down economy,…
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