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 drew this cartoon thinking about some of the debates I’ve seen about squeezing just one more product benefit on the front of a package. Insisting on too many benefits front-and-center cuts back the impact of any one. It’s often hard to agree to the lead benefit, so products become the result of a peace treaty. Also, many benefits have…
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I’ve been thinking lately how communication can sometimes get a little squirelly inside companies. Something gets interpreted out of context and then passed along down the line just like that telephone game we all played in kindergarten. I think this gets even worse with geographical distance. I worked at a company once with the R&D center a full 5-hour drive…
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Just off a plane after a whirlwind week back in San Francisco, so a little bleary-eyed, and haven’t been great at updating the blog lately. I took a bunch of marketing photos while in SF though, and hope to post some of the them over the next few days. I jotted the pencil sketch of this cartoon on the…
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This week, we moved to a new flat in Richmond (a little further down the Thames from central London), and discovered that it has a great local farmer’s market. I’m kind of a farmer’s market junkie. I like to chat up the people working the stalls and I’m always amazed by how passionate and enthusiastic they are about what they…
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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.
‘Tis the season to make resolutions. Including many that fall quickly by the wayside. It’s only human of course. That’s why gym memberships try to lock you into a long contract. Something about the idea of brands/products making resolutions just like the rest of us cracks me up. Particularly, since marketing is full of same foibles that we all share.…
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A few days ago, I met the head of sustainability for a British retailer, and he said he was conflicted about carbon labeling. There’s a big push here to add a numeric carbon footprint to all consumer products (starting with a big announcement from Tesco last year). It seems like a good disclosure in spirit, and the sheer effort to…
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Obviously, not all retail partnerships work like this. But, I do feel like the typical starting point can be pretty adversarial. And the balance of power is definitely with the retailer. I was in a retail meeting recently, and the category director explained how they tier the meeting rooms. "The little ones by the lobby are for people we don’t…
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When I heard Doug Hall speak recently, he talked about challenge of launching new products in companies with deeply separate functional silos. It can take a peace treaty to get a product through this system, so the "safest" products win. Too often, I think, it ends up like this cartoon, with too many puppeteers at odds. And the consumer gets…
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I’m giving a little talk to a group of marketers at Pepsi tomorrow. When they originally asked me to speak, we talked about one of the dilemmas of innovation in a large company. Senior management want to be included in the decisions, but they don’t have enough time to really be in the loop. By the time they have a…
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I haven’t worked in a public company for a while, but I definitely remember that fish bowl feeling. I was emailing with someone recently about public CPG companies, and the growing sense that innovation is just as important to Wall street as it is to consumers. "Street cred" was used to describe the intent of more and more NP initiatives. …
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Thanks to my friend Clint for sharing the term "focus group diva". It instantly connected with me, because I’ve witnessed (and sadly exhibited) this behavior many, many times. As Clint explained it: "I earned my ‘focus group’ diva nickname by having our lunch delivered to the facility from an hour away. The group was in Detroit, and there is a…
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It’s my cartooniversary this week. I thought it would be fun to take a little cartoon walk down memory lane and post some of my personal favorites. But first I want to thank my fabulous wife, Tallie, for being my cartoon sounding board, collaborator, editor, coach, reviewer, friend, advisor, accountant, conspirator, ego-stroker, sales rep, muse, and consoler continuously all these years.…
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I met Doug Hall at an event last month and he skewered the entire Stage Gate process as "the primary cause of the 86% decline in US innovation success rates over the last 20 years." He called it an out-dated "command and control" process and said that the innovation process needed as much of an overhaul as Japanese manufacturing after…
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Another cartoon on the theme of greenwashing. I came across this article in Ad Age about companies getting caught by consumers committing "green murder". It talked about marketers putting out "green briefs" to agencies to find something worth talking about their environmental impacts without actually changing anything. In this rush to reposition everyday brands as environmentally-friendly, there seems to be…
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I recently heard the expression, “you can’t cut your way to top-line growth”, and it prompted this cartoon. I’ve certainly felt at times that more companies are equipped with “cutting tools” than “growing tools”. Also, the typical Stage Gate process seems better designed for trimming rather than for boosting ideas. I also think that companies often put all of their…
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I find many eco labels incredibly confusing (and I’m probably a lot closer to them than the average consumer). Because there are few regulatory standards, there seem to be a lot of “eco labels of the week”. Even the standard ones are confusing, as you can see when the Vegan Society recently withdrew its certification from Ecover, because they consider…
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This is on a similar theme as an earlier cartoon I drew in July. I have to remind myself sometimes that my brand is not the most important thing in a target consumer’s life. I think a lot of brand positioning statements are written as if the consumers are constantly thinking and obsessing about the brand. When I hear the…
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This cartoon was partly inspired by my chat with David Taylor. He introduced me to the wonderful phrase, "brand ego tripping", which is when a brand team gets a little too full of itself and forgets why consumers liked the brand in the first place. A brand ego trip can be dangerous, because it can lead to ill-fitting brand extensions…
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I took my four year old daughter to the Natural History Museum recently and we had an entertaining chat about evolution. As you can imagine, she had some very funny questions. And she’s convinced her little sister might be a little more closely related to a monkey than she. Anyway, it got me thinking about branded products, and how most…
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This week was a big cartoon milestone for me. My email subscriber list for Brand Camp surged past 3,000. Really exciting. When I started Brand Camp, I just emailed it to the 30-odd Associate Marketing Managers in my class at General Mills, and the list has just grown on it’s own since then. This cartoon was inspired by the perfectionist…
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