Some Great Marketing/Business Cartoons by Tom Fishburne

Some great cartoons from Tom Fishburne, a marketer at companies like General Mills, Nestle and home-product manufacturer Method Products, where he currently resides as senior marketing director of Europe. (Their soaps are all over our house.)

He has an interesting blog and a book, This One Time, at Brand Camp:
The second collection (2008) from Tom Fishburne's Brand Camp series. Includes over 100 cheeky marketing cartoons from 2005 to 2008, complete with liner notes on each one, and a forward by Jackie Huba, co-author of "Creating Customer Evangelists." Brand Camp cartoons cover provocative business issues on marketing, innovation, sustainability, design, and management. First drawn on the backs of Harvard Business School cases as a popular student strip and later emailed to a handful of colleagues at General Mills, Brand Camp has grown by word-of-mouth to reach thousands of marketers each week and appears regularly in blogs, web sites, and publications such as Brandweek, Market Leader, and the Asian Wall Street Journal.

I particularly like Tom's 8/24 blog post titled "The Evolution of Marketing":

" Is branding dead and if so, where do we bury the body?"

I definitely don't think branding is extinct, but I do think it's evolved. So, I decided to use the evolution metaphor to play with a couple stereotypes in the noble profession of marketing.

Doctors have Hippocrates. Even lawyers have Atticus Finch. But, ask most consumers what archetypes they think of for marketers and the snakeoil salesman comes to mind.

I think that's because much of the history of marketing and branding has been about concocting a story consumers wanted to hear, even if the story was a wee bit phony. Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, famously quipped: "In our factories, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope."

Nowadays, consumers are often in the marketer's seat. Consumers have always been the best source for what your brand means (not what's on a brand architecture tacked up in the office). But, the power used to be with the marketer to sculpt and shape that message. The question to ask now is no longer how your consumers play back the message you told them. It's what message are they spreading to others."

I get excited thinking about how the power is back into the consumers hands. What an awesome time we're living in.