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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John Grant prompted this cartoon idea recently when he shared an anecdote that a client had posed this very question to an agency John knew. This is the end result of many companies and brands treating sustainability solely as a marketing benefit, not as an underlying business practice. For years, many companies have given their agencies "green briefs" to find…
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I’ve had price promotions on my mind lately. With bad news on the doorstep, there sure is a lot of pressure to start discounting like crazy. Consumer confidence is shaken. Whole Foods is down. Wal-Mart is up. Every retailer meeting I’ve been to lately seems to include a discussion on increased frequency and depth of promotion spending to address the…
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Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell asked me to share the “marketing mix” for method in my recent interview with them. And I’ve been in the throws of 2009 marketing planning lately. So, I’ve had “marketing mix” on the mind, which always makes me think of a mixing bowl for some reason. I’ve worked with large traditional brands and small challenger…
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The other day on the tube, I saw an ad for a new 50% recycled range of pens from Pentel. It showed a photo of a polar bear stranded on melting ice. Next to the polar bear in distress, there were cartoon ice bergs and ice caps drawn by Pentel pens. The implication was that buying these pens could help…
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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.
This cartoon was inspired by a question from Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell. Jackie and Ben are interviewing me as part of the Post2Post blogging book tour I’m doing this week. They asked: ” Is branding dead and if so, where do we bury the body?” I definitely don’t think branding is extinct, but I do think it’s evolved. So,…
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With the credit crunch brewing, there’s a lot of pressure to ramp up your price promotions. There certainly is a short-term argument (sales are down, consumers are increasingly price-sensitive, and price promotions are a predictable way to drive volume). But, in the long-run, I think it can start to train your consumers to only buy you on deal (like the…
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We all work in a fishbowl. I was thinking about how my favorite brands are marketed from the inside out. There’s a philosophy at the core that becomes ultimately reflected through everything they do. These brands view everything as marketing and everyone in the company as working in marketing (even if they work in the mailroom). When consumers poke and…
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I’ve been reading a book on Steve Jobs called “Inside Steve’s Brain” by Leander Kahney. Really interesting distillation of some of the Apple magic. I was struck by the product development process, which is cross-functional in the extreme, with designers, engineers, marketers, and programmers all involved early and in a very connected way. The book contrasted this with a typical…
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For father’s day, my girls gave me a bright yellow t-shirt that says "Mr. Perfect." I felt pretty darn special. The next day, I took them to the park and saw a couple guys wearing "Mr. Perfect" t-shirts. "Wait a minute," I thought defensively, "I thought I was Mr. Perfect." Suddenly, I started noticing the Mr. Men / Little Miss…
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I’ve been hearing so much gloom and doom lately about the recession. And how it spells disaster for marketing in general and premium brands in particular. Consumers aren’t shopping as much, they’re only looking for value, blah, blah, blah. It’s obviously true that consumers change behavior during a recession (just look at Wal*Mart’s performance versus Target recently). But, I…
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In business school, I once joined an exercise called "the beer game". Not quite as fun as it sounds, but interesting. Our class piled into a computer simulation lab, and we acted out parts of a brewery supply chain. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other. We could only place orders and fulfill orders for our part of the…
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I picked up a book recently called Shades of Green, which has a spectrum of eco tips for people based on how green they consider themselves, from dark green to light green. It made me think about the different motivations for people thinking green and I thought it would be fun to play with a few stereotypes. There’s the classic…
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I think that cause marketing, when done right, can be extremely positive. I once worked on Yoplait and saw first-hand how powerful their “save lids to save lives” campaign with the Susan G. Komen foundation was in raising awareness and creating donations. But I’ve been feeling a little cause marketing fatigue lately. I like corporate philanthropy and I think it’s…
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I took my family camping on a goat's milk farm a few months ago and asked the farmer what he thought about organic farming. He said that organic foods were a "rich man's luxury". It got me thinking about the impact of a recession on ethical consumerism. As consumer's start squeezing their pocketbooks, how will this affect brands with a…
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I love going to factories. Putting on the hard hat and lab coat and seeing where the magic happens. It makes me feel like Willy Wonka. Massive humming machines. Thousands of containers whizzing by on conveyer belts. Ice cream plants are particularly cool. But, the inner workings of a plant always seem like a stark contrast from the persona put…
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To everyone at work, I promise I’m not signalling anything with this cartoon (I’m confident we’ll make it all up by Q4). I was thinking of the funny dance we all do in "meeting plan" (hitting your volume targets). Whenever you’re off, the easiest thing to do is blame the plan itself and whoever committed to it in the first…
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My friend Eric likes to say that there are no low-interest categories, only low-interest brands (which is why he looked to household cleaning when he decided to start method). On every brand team I’ve joined, we’ve spent some time "climbing the benefit ladder" from product benefits to emotional benefits, trying to mine some emotional insight that will cause consumers to…
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I recently joined a group called the Marketing and Sustainability Steering Committee, which is trying to come up with standards for green marketing in the UK. The UK Marketing Society asked me to me their delegate, which was nice. On Friday, I met everyone else for the first time (kind of an eclectic mix of non-profits, academics, and agency people…
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I just started reading John Grant’s Green Marketing Manifesto, a thought-provoking book on how marketers like us should approach the green marketplace. I’m only 56 pages into it, but I recommend it and the accompanying blog too. We’re at an interesting turning point. Greenies and marketers used to be diametrically opposed, because the traditional eco mantra was "consume less" and…
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I came across an article on the environmental ills of outdoor media: lots of paper, lots of fuel to drive to media sites, toxic glues, etc. The next time I rode the tube, I was struck by how many outdoor ads were touting some environmental benefit. I put the two together and it felt very ironic, and inspired this cartoon.…
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