Tom Fishburne: Brand Camp cartoonist and marketing guy

the organizational bullwhip

In business school, I once joined an exercise called "the beer game".  Not quite as fun as it sounds, but interesting.  Our class piled into a computer simulation lab, and we acted out parts of a brewery supply chain.  We weren't allowed to talk to each other.  We could only place orders and fulfill orders for our part of the supply chain.  You had to guess demand based on the orders coming in.  Everybody else was also guessing, and you tended to overreact.  So, someone overreacting a little at the beginning of the supply chain created a ripple effect that makes you massively off by the end.

I picked up two things. First, that I'm crap at forecasting.  And, second, that there is something called the bullwhip effect, where one action magnifies exponentially downstream, like the cracking of a bullwhip.

I've been thinking there is a bullwhip effect within organizations too.  No one likes change, but of course it's constant in business.  But, when change happens, I've noticed the ripple effect is often harder than the change itself.  Particularly in the immediate chaotic aftermath when everything is up for grabs and people are trying to figure out which way is up.

Anyway, judging by many of the emails I got after my Five Stages of Missing Plan cartoon, I get the sense that there are quite a few "strategic shifts" happening at the moment and people feeling the bullwhip in one way or another. 

shades of green

I picked up a book recently called Shades of Green, which has a spectrum of eco tips for people based on how green they consider themselves, from dark green to light green.

It made me think about the different motivations for people thinking green and I thought it would be fun to play with a few stereotypes.

There’s the classic hippy crunchy granola end of the spectrum, where any form of consumerism is bad and should make you feel guilty. There tends to be a lot of sacrifice involved, which can turn off the vast majority who don’t particularly like how their feet look in Birkenstocks.

On the other end of the spectrum are people buying green because it’s stylish and trendy, like the Anya Hindmarch shopping bag last year. I think this is actually a good thing, because you can reach a lot more people through an attractive lifestyle than through preaching. I think that helping bring green mainstream is better than keeping it niche, even if the motivations aren’t as pure.

And then there’s the group motivated primarily by "greenbacks", who are jumping on the bandwagon because it’s so trendy. That’s where greenwashing comes in, and threatens to muddy the whole thing. Because consumers who feel like they’ve been duped because of shoddy eco claims will think twice the next time, even if they really want to do the right thing.

I played around with this theme a few years ago with this cartoon on organic foods.

the cause marketing brandwagon

I think that cause marketing, when done right, can be extremely positive. I once worked on Yoplait and saw first-hand how powerful their “save lids to save lives” campaign with the Susan G. Komen foundation was in raising awareness and creating donations.

But I’ve been feeling a little cause marketing fatigue lately. I like corporate philanthropy and I think it’s great that more and more companies and brands are embracing cause marketing. I think that business can be a real agent of change.  But, it’s easy to come across as flippant, disingenuous, or gratuitous.

Consumers can see right through it.  If done wrong, it can create a lot more skepticism than good will.  Like this mock ad lampooning Product(Red) from buylesscrap.org.  And the campaign Think Before You Pink.

I think the key is to pick a cause that fits with your brand, that fits with your consumers, and where you are able to uniquely do something that other brands can't.  And, or course, can make a genuine impact.  I think it's OK to benefit financially, but that can't overshadow the event (such as spending much more on advertising than the actual donation).

Probably my favorite ever cause marketing event is the Big Knit, from smoothie-maker innocent. 

I've blogged about the Big Knit before.  They recruit people to knit little woolen hats for their smoothie bottles, which then appear in Sainsbury's all across the UK. The funds then go to a charity called Age Concern to help elderly people during the cold winter months. Last year, over 230,000 hats were donated and put onto smoothies, resulting in a £115,000 donation.

It's quirky, involves the people they are trying to help (who knit a lot of the hats themselves), fits totally with their brand and their consumers, addresses an often under-looked charity, and you absolutely remember that innocent was behind it.

And they didn't run over-the-top advertising that costs more than the actual donation.

creative juice

If you've ever wondered where creative juice comes from (and where they farm creative directors), this video from South West England gives a very clever synopsis.

Thanks to Rodes for sending me this. 

the consumer's dilemma

I took my family camping on a goat's milk farm a few months ago and asked the farmer what he thought about organic farming.  He said that organic foods were a "rich man's luxury".

It got me thinking about the impact of a recession on ethical consumerism.  As consumer's start squeezing their pocketbooks, how will this affect brands with a social mission that also carry a premium?

A friend was visiting from the states last week and mentioned that Target was down, but Wal-Mart was up, which made me wonder how consumers are starting to re-evaluate their shopping lists.  I imagine quite a few are feeling conflicted.

Anyway, I find the "angel on one shoulder, devil on the other" device pretty handy, which I used here too.

truth in labeling

I love going to factories.  Putting on the hard hat and lab coat and seeing where the magic happens.  It makes me feel like Willy Wonka.  Massive humming machines.  Thousands of containers whizzing by on conveyer belts.  Ice cream plants are particularly cool.

But, the inner workings of a plant always seem like a stark contrast from the persona put across on the label.  Particularly if the brand has any kind of provenance.  Ingredients just don't look as premium when you see them in jumbo totes.  The "family recipe" doesn't seem so homey when it's being blended by a guy wearing a beard net.

A few years ago, I helped plan a Food Network special with Haagen-Dazs, and it was a real challenge finding a way to film in the plant that kept the premium cache.

Anyway, I was listening to a talk by Malcolm Gladwell on TED (I'm totally addicted to the TED talks, btw), and he was tellilng the story of spaghetti sauce in the US.  Actually a pretty riveting story.  At one stage, he talked of one brand connoting the old-world values even though it was really being made in a plant in New Jersey. 

It reminded me of that whole contrast, and made me think it would be funny if a label told the "real" story, from the vantage point of the producer.  Instead of an old-world grandmother stirring a saucepot, a guy in a beard net.

social media in westminster

I joined an interesting social media experiment in Westminster this last week.  An MP named Steve Webb is championing a change to the UK Climate Change Bill to cut carbon emissions in the UK by 80% by 2050 (the current proposal is 60%). 

To try to get the word out, he held a meeting at his House of Commons office with 10 green bloggers to see how blogging and social media could help.  John Grant, who wrote the Green Marketing Manifesto, invited me along, since a lot of my cartoons and blog touch on sustainability stuff.

I think it's facinating to shift gears from thinking about social media as a way to build brands to social media as a way to drive policy.  I thought I could learn a bit. 

We bandied about a number of ideas, and hit on an interesting campaign idea called "Canvass Your MP" (a role reversal from politicians "canvassing you" when they go door-to-door).  Our aim is to mobilize people to actually show up to the MP's office for a face-to-face conversation (rather than an impersonal postcard or petition).  British MPs usually hold open-office time called "surgeries", but it's often not easy to find out when or where.  So, this would involve a central site that makes it easy, and shows which MPs to target.

Just as we parted ways, the House of Commons scheduled the debate to start this Monday (weeks earlier than we thought).  Nothing like a sense a urgency and common purpose to pull an idea together.  Within just a few days, the idea crystalized, people volunteered to pull information on MPs, and someone even volunteered to build a web site that actually launches tomorrow: canvassyourmp.com. 

Steve Webb plans to announce the "Canvass your MP" idea in the House of Commons tomorrow, and there are a lot of feelers out to drive the word across different blogs.  Kind of cool.  I'm finishing up a cartoon or two to donate to the cause.  It will be interesting to see how this idea spreads.

the five stages of missing plan

To everyone at work, I promise I'm not signalling anything with this cartoon (I'm confident we'll make it all up by Q4).

I was thinking of the funny dance we all do in "meeting plan" (hitting your volume targets). Whenever you're off, the easiest thing to do is blame the plan itself and whoever committed to it in the first place (which is particularly funny when it was you). 

There's a lot of nuance around timing and when and how to communicate that you're off plan.  The process reminded me of Kübler-Ross' "Five Stages of Grief". 

I first riffed on the "Five Stages" in 2001 in this cartoon as part of my Sky Deck series, when I was interviewing for jobs in b-school.

emotional brands

My friend Eric likes to say that there are no low-interest categories, only low-interest brands (which is why he looked to household cleaning when he decided to start method). 

On every brand team I've joined, we've spent some time "climbing the benefit ladder" from product benefits to emotional benefits, trying to mine some emotional insight that will cause consumers to give our brand their undying loyalty. 

I've always enjoyed these sessions, but also find them really funny.  It's just so rare in the business workplace to talk about emotional issues at all.  There's something ridiculous about sitting around a corporate conference table talking about the guilt experienced by a time-stressed mother of three.  And why this guilt can only be sated by our brand of frozen broccoli-with-cheese-sauce.

I've been thinking about emotional brands lately, and it inspired this cartoon. 

It also reminded me a bit of this cartoon I drew a while back on brand loyalty.

the wizard of ad

I recently joined a group called the Marketing and Sustainability Steering Committee, which is trying to come up with standards for green marketing in the UK.  The UK Marketing Society asked me to me their delegate, which was nice.

On Friday, I met everyone else for the first time (kind of an eclectic mix of non-profits, academics, and agency people -- surprisingly I was the only one from the brand side).  Someone in the group was talking about company transparency, and how reluctant many companies are to reveal their inner workings.  The traditional approach is to concoct a persona via advertising and point to that instead.

Yet, more and more consumers seem to be looking for the company behind the curtain.  They're no longer as swayed by the concocted brand image of advertising.  Instead, they want to know who's behind the products they buy.

I found myself scribbling cartoons of Dorothy and Toto in the margins of my notes.  I'm sure the guy next to me was wondering what was wrong with me.  I hope I get asked back.