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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In the 20+ years I’ve been drawing this cartoon series, one evergreen topic I’ve loved exploring is how brands sometimes twist into pretzels trying to appeal to new generations, often with hilarious unintended effects. Advice often comes in the form of a 5-step checklist — or a “one weird trick” — that magically promises to make brands appealing to the…
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“Free Returns” has become the new “Free Shipping,” which is creating a massive logistical headache for retailers, particularly in the weeks after Christmas. This year, shoppers in the US returned 14.5% of the items they purchased, valued at $743 billion. That’s nearly double the return rates of pre-pandemic 2019. One third of shoppers now make returns part of their…
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I’ve been thinking lately about an observation from Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard: “Advertising has a bad reputation as a content crap trap … “In this digital age we’re producing thousands of new ads, posts, tweets, every week, every month, every year. We eventually concluded all we were doing was adding to the noise.” Marc shared this…
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We’re nearing the twenty-fifth anniversary of Seth Godin’s prescient book, Permission Marketing. Published in early 1999, Permission Marketing set the stage for modern marketing. Many of the marketing tools, channels, and technology have changed or evolved in the past quarter-century (although email has surprisingly remained a fixture), but the ideal of Permission Marketing is as relevant as ever. Even as…
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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’ve drawn a number of cartoons over the years on the evolving Chief Marketing Officer role, which is partly a proxy for the ever-changing job of marketing in general. Long gone are the days when CMOs were just in charge of “marketing comms” and marketing was dismissively described as “the coloring-in department.” Today’s Chief Marketing Officer role is almost impossibly…
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One of the mythical holy grails of marketing is to be able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Easier said than done. Despite all the focus on customer journeys, we’re still operating in the dark on what customers are actually looking for, much of the time. Even the latest marketing tech stack…
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We can’t break through the clutter by adding to it. Yet the majority of marketing communication just creates more of the same. I recently caught up with Adam Morgan, founder of eatbigfish, and learned about a project he’s developing to quantify the cost of being dull (and the opportunity to be more interesting). As Adam put it: “Dull is expensive…
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A recent survey from Funnel and Ravn Research found that 64% of marketers fear AI will replace their jobs in the next five years, and three in four worry that AI will impact their pay or value. Whether or not we’re feeling that fear ourselves, members of our teams likely are. That’s a key factor to take into account when…
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Kevin Jordan-Deen, SVP at Colgate-Palmolive, encouraged me last week to re-imagine and re-create a “Share of Wallet” cartoon I originally drew in 2009 during the “Great Recession”. When I drew the original cartoon, I was GM for the recently launched Method brand in the UK. Much of the recessionary marketing climate at the time was centered on belt-tightening, private…
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On Friday, Professor Scott Galloway released ProfG.ai, a “digital twin” trained on his writing and capable of answering questions in his voice. That’s just one of many experiments with different models on how generative AI can impact the future of work. A few weeks ago, BCG released the results of a fascinating Harvard-led study that researched how more…
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In 2005, A.G. Lafley, CEO of the world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, introduced the concept of “moments of truth” to the marketing world. As he wrote in the P&G Annual Report that year: “The best brands consistently win two moments of truth. The first moment occurs at the store shelf, when a consumer decides whether to buy one brand…
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Marketers are the first to get bored by their own marketing. Particularly when a new leader joins a brand team, there’s a common bias in marketing that what will drive growth is to change everything everywhere all at once. Given the revolving door of many marketing roles, the cycle can repeat with each leadership change. While brands need fresh…
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At the Cannes Lions a few months ago, Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar and CFO Sachin Mehra gave a joint talk on the CMO/CFO relationship called “Happy Tension.” Raja described the typical dynamic this way: “It’s shocking that less than 40% of the finance people think that marketers can make sound commercial decisions, leaving the remaining 60% on the negative side. …
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Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly prioritized his work life by classifying tasks as important or not important, and urgent or not urgent. The resulting two-by-two graph became known as The Eisenhower Matrix and it influenced a lot of thinking in work productivity. We generally spend far too much on work that is urgent but not important. As Stephen Covey famously summarized…
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In 1970, a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori introduced the concept of the “uncanny valley.” In designing robots to be more human-like, he observed that people respond positively only up to a point. Then there’s an “uncanny valley” where the “almost-human” design seems creepy and people experience “revulsion.” If you watched the 2004 movie The Polar Express, you may…
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Net Promoter Score (NPS) turns 20 later this year. What Bain consultant Fred Reichheld first introduced in a HBR article in December 2003 is now ubiquitous. The “how likely are you to recommend” question is asked endlessly after customer experiences, large and small. The metric that this question generates is now tracked by two-thirds of the Fortune 1000. …
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I love the analogy of ChatGPT that Hubspot CTO Dharmesh Shah shared at the start of the year: “Netscape was to the Internet what ChatGPT is to Artificial Intelligence. “The Internet existed before Netscape. But the browser helped millions of mere mortals connect the dots on what could be done, and dream of what could be.” As this breakout year…
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Nearly 10 years ago, I drew one of my most popular cartoons that showed a Peeping Tom looking through the window of a living room at a couple. One says, “Don’t worry, it’s only marketers collecting our personal data so they can create more relevant advertising for us.” Third-party cookies have been at the center of the consumer privacy debate…
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“Gen Z had a profound impact on how brands approached their consumer experiences, but companies will need to brace themselves even more for the changes Gen Alpha will infuse… “They aren’t just digital natives; these are digital ninjas, and whether brands are ready or not, they’re coming.” This comment is from Razorfish President Dani Mariano, on the announcement of a…
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“In some organizations, just the expectations of CMOs are just so out of whack with the reality of what a CMO can really deliver on the timelines, and with the resources and with the headwinds that they have… “I think that in some organizations, you’re just being set up to fail, right?” Gartner analyst Chris Ross shared this perspective in…
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