Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.

changing customer needs (2020/10/25 18:17) In this time of change, I’ve been thinking about the gap between a desire to change and uncertainty on where or how to change. The pandemic has been a change accelerant, but the path isn’t always clear. Jeff Bezos has some relevant insights in how he describes Day 1 versus Day 2 thinking. He first codified this idea in the… The post changing customer needs first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. product choice overload (2020/10/11 23:53) From data plans to toothpaste to headache medicine, most categories operate as if more choice is better than less choice. But if you’re actually a shopper with a headache in a headache medicine aisle, the only thing a complicated product assortment will do is make your headache worse. As Scott Galloway put it recently (echoing Barry Schwartz’s 2004 classic, The… The post product choice overload first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. psychographic profiling (2020/10/04 23:14) Psychographics are back in the news as part of the US election cycle, four years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal made the term mainstream. This week, CB Insights published a useful primer on psychographics, which they describe as one of the “dark arts” of social media and internet marketing. Yet psychographics are nothing new; they were first developed in the… The post psychographic profiling first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. flipping the script (2020/09/27 19:52) I once heard Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah advise businesses, “Don’t make your process my problem. Solve for my success, not your systems.” Six months into the pandemic, this strikes me as good advice for brands to think about their COVID response as well. Many businesses continue to follow the same stock script using COVID as an excuse for all… The post flipping the script first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. sales impact of advertising (2020/09/13 20:23) I’ve been re-reading the 1983 classic, “Ogilvy on Advertising” to see how much has changed — and how much has remained the same — in advertising over the years. One constant is the challenge of how to measure sales impact in advertising, and the tension of long-term brand building versus short-term direct response. As David Ogilvy wrote (more than a… The post sales impact of advertising first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. the productivity trap (2020/09/06 23:20) A recent survey from Blind found that 83% of marketing and communications professionals are reporting burnout, the highest of any job function. There are likely many factors at play, but I wonder how much of this burnout relates to productivity anxiety, the pressure to be busy, and the hustle culture in business. The pursuit of constant productivity can actually… The post the productivity trap first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. rise of the customer service bots (2020/08/30 19:15) This cartoon is dedicated to Comcast, the most recent company to show me how far we have to go before we reach conversational AI that can come close to a human voice. The only thing worse than the Comcast customer service bot that greeted me when trying to resolve a technical issue was having to have identical conversations with the… The post rise of the customer service bots first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. business as usual (2020/08/23 23:33) A Gartner study recently reported that more than half (57%) of CMOs expect to see a return to business as usual in the next 18-24 months. It made me think about what “business as usual” even means right now. Some aspects of how we work have changed so fundamentally, it’s hard to imagine that some of these changes aren’t permanent. … The post business as usual first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. evolution of digital transformation (2020/08/16 21:12) We are never finished with digital transformation. In the late 90’s, I worked as a project manager helping build early web sites. For many of the companies I worked with, this was their first-ever web site. One of my clients was a regional airline based in Milwaukee called Midwest Express. I remember big hoopla to celebrate when their web… The post evolution of digital transformation first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne. From Brand Safety to Brand Suitability (2020/08/09 19:17) Brand safety has been high on marketers’ agendas since the 2017 YouTube crisis, when some advertisers found their ads next to terrorist videos. Yet the blunt tool response that followed has brought its own problems. Many brands started addressing brand safety with overly broad keyword blocklists that can penalize legitimate content and make it harder to find audiences, limiting reach… The post From Brand Safety to Brand Suitability first appeared on Marketoonist \| Tom Fishburne.