Tom Fishburne: Marketoonist

sxsw talk: innovation lessons from cartooning

(3/18 update: I just replaced the short montage with the full-length talk below)

I’m returning now from a few thought-stirring days in Austin at SXSW. On Friday, I gave a talk on what you can learn about innovation from cartoonists. This is a topic I’ve been evolving since I spoke at conferences in San Francisco and London last year. 

SXSW created a short video montage and I just uploaded a full 17-minute version of the talk below.  it was really cool to see it picked up by Huffington Post and PR Week this week: 

SXSW talk: Innovation Lessons from Cartooning from Tom Fishburne on Vimeo.

I started with the story of Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, arguably one of the most successful cartoonists of all time (and a major reason I started drawing cartoons in the first place). After ten years, Bill quit the strip and largely disappeared from the public eye. I was struck by this quote he gave around that time at a commencement address at Kenyon College: 

“It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.”

Since Bill quit, traditional newspaper cartooning has only gotten worse. If it was difficult then to break through the clutter on the shrinking newspaper page and allow your material to thrive, it’s even more difficult today. Traditional cartooning is one of the most savage markets around. Launching a new cartoon successfully has far lower odds than launching any other kind of innovation. 

Yet there are cartoonists who are bucking the odds and making it work today. In the talk, I described these modern cartoonists as “lead users” that any of us who work in innovation can study. Any market where we launch innovation has similarities to the traditional newspaper cartooning path, in that both are cluttered and dominated by entrenched players. Launching something mediocre that tries to appeal to everyone simply won’t break through the clutter. 

As one of the lessons, I shared the story of xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe, who thrives because he is deliberately exclusive. Unless you’re a Unix programmer, you wouldn’t get the following cartoon because you wouldn’t know that “sudo” is a superuser-level command in Unix programming. This cartoon is not funny to most, but it’s screamingly funny to a few. In fact, when I gave this talk in London, someone in the audience stood up wearing a t-shirt with this cartoon on his chest. 

I think that being deliberately exclusive is one of the ingredients to successful innovation. Who will wear your innovation on their chest?

breaking the rules of traditional retail

Traditional retail can be brutal for a new brand.  I gave a 30 min talk a few months ago about launching the method brand in the UK and how Ocado as an entrepreneurial web retailer helps support challenger brands by questioning the status quo.  

Breaking the Rules of Traditional Retail from Tom Fishburne on Vimeo.

hoping to speak at SXSW: innovation and cartoons

I have been hoping to go to the SXSW Interactive in Austin for years, but have been thousands of miles away in London until now. Now that I'm back in the states, I really want to give a talk there this Spring. They pick their speakers by online voting, so I would love your help.

Please vote for me (and maybe leave a comment) here: http://ow.ly/l3hZ.  They ask you to register, but it only takes a second.

I plan to talk about innovation and cartoons, and it will be loosely related to this talk I gave in San Francisco earlier this year. In the talk, I used cartooning as a metaphor to describe how to come up with ideas and share them with others.  

My talk will also be connected to the sentiment in this "Garden of Innovation" cartoon. Thanks in advance for your help. 

innovation and cartoons: the movie

A few days ago, I posted my presentation from a recent talk on innovation called, "everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons."  My brother-in-law Baird nicely took a video of the talk.  Here's a 25 minute excerpt.  I talk about where ideas come from and how to launch them, using cartoonist and business examples.  Enjoy!

Everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons from Tom Fishburne on Vimeo.

innovation and cartoons

everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons

View more presentations from tomfishburne.

Last week, I gave this talk in San Francisco called "everything I needed to know about innovation, I learned by drawing cartoons."

(I don't like slides with lots of copy, so I recommend reading my notes that I uploaded into Slideshare along with the actual slides.  I'm also hoping to upload a video of the talk soon).

In the talk, I used cartooning itself as a metaphor to describe how to come up with ideas and how to share them with others.

My main premise is that remarkable products are the result of the process of developing the idea and the process of getting it through the organization without suffering the "death by a thousand cuts".

Launching a cartoon strip is actually quite similar to launching a new product (except that cartoonists don't have slotting dollars).  Both involve shrinking categories dominated by brands that have been around since the 50's.  It's very hard to break through in a meaningful way.

I walked through my own experience, but also that of Bill Watterson, Matt Groening, Scott Adams, Hugh Macleod, Stephan Pastis, and Tom Meyer to see what insights we can apply to business innovation.

I had a lot of fun with it, and plan to do more talks in this vein.  If anyone would like me to share it at a London venue over the next few months, please just drop me a line.

back to school

Last summer, London Business School created a teaching case on our experience launching the method brand in the UK, as part of their entrepreneurship curriculum.  It was great fun and culminated in my joining a class to hear 80 students debate all of our decisions.

I then went to the front of the class for a good grilling.  I just got a copy of the video and here's a short snippet.  It gives a little color to life in an entrepreneurial brand and some opinions on marketing in general.

This experience brought me right back to my student days, so I thought I'd share an old cartoon about business cases from my student strip.  It cracked me up that business cases all seem to start with some quirky intro to set the mood, often involving an executive staring wistfully out of the window musing a business dilemma.

credit crunch soap opera

I’m just returning from the Marketing magazine credit crunch conference. Thanks for all of your questions (and congratulations to Jeff for winning a Brand Camp book). I’ll post my full takeaways when I’m not feeling quite so knackered from the long day (nothing quite takes it out of you like a day talking through the credit crunch).

The tone was largely optimistic and the focus was on finding opportunities rather than bellyaching. The day spanned quite a wide gambit from how to think about pricing to how to think about adding more value.

I gave a short case study on how method tries to create “value” without discounting. I think method is an interesting case study during a recession because in a way, the whole cleaning category has been in a recession for decades.  Everything we’ve ever done has been to create “value” in the middle of commodity soup (and get consumers to love us enough to send us photos like this handwash recycled as a butterfly)

I’m posting my presentation below in case you find it useful. They asked me talk about sustainability and ethics. I talked about that, and how important it is to us as a company, but I also made the argument that green is not a marketing position. And consumers are reframing how they think of sustainability, particularly if asked to pay a premium for it.

So, I recommended that sustainably-minded brands think about becoming “beyond green” by communicating more than sustainable principles.  Keep sustainable principles at the core, but find other ways to bring brand value.  It can't be the only thing to warrant a premium. 

At method, we try to reframe planetary health as personal health (talking toxic chemicals in the bathtub rather than toxic chemicals in the waterstreams), because it's more directly meaningful to consumers. 

And, you'll see, we do quite a bit with design.

View SlideShare

Brand Camp radio

I had a lot of fun chatting with Zane Safrit today about marketing, brands, and cartoons. Zane runs a weekly radio interview show on BlogTalk Radio. You can listen to the whole interview below. It’s over an hour, so probably more of me than you can possibly stand. But, I’m pretty transparent about what I’ve learned about branding from everywhere I’ve worked, where I think marketing is going, what brands I like (and don’t like), and where my cartoons come from.

jump start your brain

I was excited to meet one of my innovation heroes today - Doug Hall, author of books like Jump Start Your Brain and founder of the famous Eureka Ranch.  The UK Marketing Society nicely invited me to be on a panel at an event called "Doubling your Chances of Success" and Doug was the keynote.  He has been an inspiration to me ever since I read one of his books as a General Mills intern and taped this quote over my desk:

"Don't be afraid to take risks.  Corporations have an amazing array of checks, balances, and safety nets to prevent you from hitting the wall at ninety miles an hour.  Be bold and brash.  Develop a reputation for it."

Doug's message today was that we need to kill the stage gate process entirely and radically retool our innovation approach.  That our our new product hit rate is so abysmal because of our process, and that big companies can learn a lot from little companies (which innovate differently by necessity).  As he put it, "95% of all breakthroughs since WWII have come from small and mid-size companies".

This was good news to me. I gave a method case study, where I summarized our plight competing against big Goliath companies with this factoid: in 2006, our competitors spent a combined $2.8 billion in advertising.  We spent just over $3 million.  We estimate they spent a combined $15 million just on toilet paper, 5X our entire marketing budget.  Gulp.