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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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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“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 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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This cartoon idea came mostly from the play on words in the title. It just cracked me up to think of someone having a crisis with their brand identity. Marketers tend to write brand positioning statements as if the brand was the single most important thing in the consumer’s life.
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So many brand cross-promotions wind up feeling a bit shallow and opportunistic to me (embarassingly including a few from my past). Plus, there's always that funny, slightly awkward conversation when two brand managers first feel each other out to do a promotion. It got me thinking of it all as a kind of singles bar.
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This cartoon idea sprang fully formed from a New York Times piece on the ridiculous lengths that some brands are going to be considered for the Home Depot Eco Options promotion (including, yes, a brand of electric chainsaw). It’s a good example of some of the outlandish greenwashing we’re all starting to see. And, how the issue is not as…
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The inspiration for this week’s cartoon came courtesy of Satyam Viswanathan, who works in brand management in India. I just love getting emails like his from other parts of the world. It goes to show that dysfunctional marketing shenanigans are universal.
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Have you ever experienced customer service so unsettling that you had to write a letter about it? Well, my therapy was this week’s cartoon. I won’t go into details (it’s too painful to relive in full), but I think that "vonage" should be a new verb in Webster’s to denote a really bad customer service experience (as in, "Arggh, I’ve…
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