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 was in Paris over the long weekend for the first time in eight years. It’s my favorite city in the world and my favorite activity is to leisurely people-watch at the outdoor cafés. In France, there’s a lot of talk about the “American McDonaldization” of culture and I was curious to see what had changed in eight years. The…
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I love that George Bernard Shaw quote about the UK and US as “two countries separated by a common language”. I think that the same can be said of functions within companies. And marketers are the worst offenders. I doubt any function produces more jargon and buzzwords each year than marketers (in case you’re wondering, here are the Top 100…
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I’m in San Francisco this week, and was invited by Alice at Clorox to give a talk while I’m in town. My talk is titled “everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons” and one of my themes is the importance of finding a niche. I once heard Mark Addicks, the General Mills CMO, complain that…
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I’ve been thinking about how consumers are spending (or not spending) in this environment. With wallets under lock-and-key, one might think that a premium brand wouldn’t have much of a chance. This is a time when consumers are evaluating where their money goes. With low consumer confidence, there is less that is being spent in general. What is being spent…
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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 came across a Brandweek article called "Enough with the Value Messages Already" and it made me think of the song-and-dance that many businesses are doing to demonstrate value nowadays. The primary knee-jerk reaction for brands in the recession has been to radically drop price (either permanently or through deep discounting). With many retailers ramping up private label "switch and…
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I've been thinking about how the recession is sinking into the collective business psyche. It feels like we're all going through some form of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief (which I like using as a cartoon setup). I've been struck by the resurgence of WWII-era propaganda, like the vintage "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster that suddenly appeared everywhere. I've…
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I stumbled across "recession washing" as a useful expression in this presentation and thought it captured so much of the advertising bandwagon right now. Six months ago, I was at a conference on marketing in the credit crunch and several speakers stressed the importance of showing empathy to consumers. Of course, sincerity is crucial too. Empathy without sincerity can do…
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I think LinkedIn can be a meaningful tool. It just cracks me how many invitations we all get with the default "since you are a person I trust" greeting. Particularly when they come from people we don't actually know. A friend of mine who used to run a high profile investment fund told me he gets 20-30 LinkedIn requests a…
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I've been thinking lately about the entrepreneurial anthem, "it's not the big that eat the small, it's the fast that eat the slow." I once did a field study with Fast Company magazine, which epitomized that sentiment. It was a year after the dot-com bubble popped, and they were facing a big identity crisis. They had been the quintessential handbook…
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Performance reviews can be incredibly dehumanizing. I recently stumbled across this telling depiction from software luminary, Joel Spolsky: First, you gave “anonymous” upward reviews for your direct manager (as if that could be done in an honest way). Then, you filled out optional “self-evaluation” forms, which your manager “took into account” in preparing your performance review. Finally, you got a…
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I think that how you share ideas is just as important as the idea itself. The most revolutionary idea, poorly articulated, will come across as mediocre and humdrum. I've been playing around with this theme lately. I think that many businesses struggle with how to share ideas. We've all found ourselves in the audience in this cartoon, completely uninspired by…
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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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"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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