Every week Tom Fishburne aka Marketoonist comes “around the corner” with a new caricature. As a long-time observer of the marketing and strategy scene, he always manages to get to the heart of the scurrilities, perversions, peculiarities, craziness and niceties in our profession or industry.
The cartoons are selected by us and sorted chronologically descending. So the most recent one is always to be found at the top. 🙂
11.06.2022: Not only for product innovations, but also for innovations for processes or communication
“When ideas,” Tom writes, “run the organizational gauntlet, they can be pruned, truncated, shaped, and diluted beyond recognition. Along the way, they can lose the essence of the idea. They can lose their distinctiveness and their raison d’être.”
Developing and accepting the new is a cultural issue. Who ultimately decides? Does anyone get a say? If so, who? How much influence on the idea is allowed.
In the end, the idea generator (f/m/d) is usually frustrated and the basic idea is softened and only mediocre.
08.05.2022: Demigod in white, egg-laying sow or what is she/he really.
It’s crazy this glorification. Especially since it is always better to think “no ranks, no titles”. The principle successfully introduced by Gore (GoreTex) proves that this name-giving is not absolutely necessary. Or as J.W. von Goethe put it to Faust: Names are smoke and mirrors!
28.03.2022: What do boring loyalty/customer retention programs have to do with unnecessary data collection?
In 2001, I was brought to Breuninger to relaunch the customer card, dust it off and realign it. So I know what works and what doesn’t work. And a lot is possible. It just takes courage to be unique.
A fifth or sixth program that is not really different from any other. Nobody needs that. Instead, a few advantages that benefit the customer and seem so attractive to the non-customer that he “needs these advantages”, then it works. Desirability and exclusivity. Exclusive does not mean expensive, but exclusive means that one person gets it and the other does not.
27.03.2022: everyone wants a viral video, only who has the luck … and also still mind to it?
14.11.2021: Less is more, a question of selling
An excellent salesperson can always think of something that changes the price/performance ratio to the “positive”. Whether “less is more”, costs have increased, …
21.06.2021: Estimate your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)!
Very few companies use the topic of customer value for budget optimization and sales management. A study that Tom picks up on proves this. Whereby he addresses the CMOs, I even think more of the Chief Sales Officers. But ultimately, it’s a topic that belongs established throughout the company. Whether CLV is the right approach? No. It’s about estimates and forecasts for the next one to three years max. Everything else is crystal ball. For assessing a value proposition (in combination with the customer contribution margin), that’s quite enough. More is not needed, but also not less.
The effect:
We have done some projects with effects of up to 20% increase in sales and 3-5% more contribution margin on company level. Entrepreneur heart, what more do you want.
01.06.2021: Back to normality?
Almost everyone would like to see the Covid-19 restrictions come to an end. But is that then a return to the old normal? Certainly not. Hopefully not. After all, it’s not just some negative things that have happened. There have also been some innovations that many people no longer want to miss.
In this respect, it would be fatal if the old way of thinking were to take hold again.
01.05.2021 The Status of Digtal Advertising
Not entirely surprising is the result of a study:
“PwC found that half (49%) of digital ad spend is siphoned off before it reaches publishers. It looked at spending on agencies, demand exchanges, supply exchanges and a range of ad tech providers. Most alarming, however, is that 15% of digital ad spend, or one-third of the spend that is siphoned off, is a complete mystery. Even when audited, PwC could not track where it went.” Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Anyone familiar with this account knows that vast amounts of money and information are seeping away here. Who really has an overview. No one.
Sure, Tom Fishburne has the silodenke on his mind again. It is also something of manifested. Many complain about it, but hardly anyone has the courage to tear down these walls in his head. It is better to leave this church tower thinking behind. But, those who had the courage to tear down these walls are very happy. And not only the managers, but also most of the employees. An extremely large amount of new energy is generated. And the employees – and above all – the customers feel this!
The topic of Psychographic Profiling must unfortunately be viewed very critically through the work of Cambridge Analytica and the US elections in 2016.
In my student days at the end of the 90s and also some years later we were on the road with the thesis: We can collect this psychographic data for 3% – maybe even up to 10% – of the target group. And then there is always an attempt to extrapolate this data to the entire target group. But that usually did not work out very well.
In the meantime, social media and other data points (allegedly up to 4,000 to 5,000 per person in the USA) have made the data volumes much more extensive and accurate. In this respect, there are two sides to it. The mathematical-statistical side: You can calculate and forecast much more accurately with the data. The ethical side: It is also possible to misuse it much more.
The best of Marketoonist Tom Fishburne
This must be observed. Therefore the cartoon is funny, but it could also make you laugh.
The best of Marketoonist Tom Fishburne
Laughing is healthy, especially if you can laugh about your industry and yourself.
Those who want to laugh even more will find their complete collection here.
Here are more articles, which are on the portal with graphical support from Tom:
- News from Marketoonist: The best of 2020
- Marketoonist Tom Fishburne- The best of 2019
- Best Cartoons by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne 2018
Note: This is a machine translation. It is neither 100% complete nor 100% correct. We can therefore not guarantee the result.
