Tom Fishburne's Recent LinkedIn Posts

“B2B Marketing and the 95:5 Rule” - new cartoon and post: In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute introduced the 95:5 Rule, a simple but powerful concept that challenged conventional thinking in B2B marketing. In his research, John showed that up to 95% of buyers are not in the market in any one time (and perhaps won’t be for months or years). As he put it: “This is a deceptively simple fact, but it has a profound implication for advertising. It means that advertising mostly hits people who aren’t going to buy anytime soon. And in turn, that tells us about how advertising works: it mainly works by building and refreshing memory links to the brand. These memory links activate when buyers do come into the market. So, if your advertising is better at building brand-relevant memories, your brand becomes more competitive.” This runs counter to the short-term pitch approach taken by so much of B2B advertising — trying to drive immediate marketing leads. Marketers can’t push out-of-market buyers to buy now, and only 5% of buyers are currently in market. As Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo wrote about Dawes’ work when they led the B2B Institute: “Effective marketing increases future sales in future buying situations. How? By increasing the probability that the brand comes to mind when the buyer goes in-market. Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought. You can’t push buyers down a funnel, but you can, to quote Professor Jenni Romaniuk, ‘catch buyers as they fall’.” This framework also expands the remit on B2B marketing to be a heckuva lot more exciting than it is often perceived. It’s not just about features and benefits and driving qualified marketing leads. It’s about long-term brand building. I often think about a quote Eric Ryan shared when we worked together at Method: “There are no low-interest categories — only low-interest brands.” >>> Sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter (link in bio). #marketing #cartoon #marketoon Marketoonist

“Market Research Pitfalls” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gkShm_Q2 Early in my marketing career, at General Mills, we used to hold focus groups in a Minneapolis suburb called Eden Prairie. I once overheard a couple of our agency partners jokingly refer to this focus group ritual as going to see the “Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Whether new products, campaign strategy, or ad creative, the Oracles of Eden Prairie had major sway. Focus groups (and all the rest of our market research tools) were imperfect, mysterious, expensive, and seemingly took forever, but they were the best we had at the time. Market research is one of the areas of marketing most ripe for change, and where we’re seeing some of the most exciting potential impact from new technology, including AI. Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director at Mars, describes some of the common frustrations with market research: “In today’s world, you don’t have the time or the luxury to measure creative and to make decisions in three months, everyone screams that you need decisions today.” Sorin led a team at Mars that created an analytic tool called ACE (Agile Creative Expertise) that measures audience’s emotional reaction and attention to ads to predict effectiveness in driving sales. Evidenza, founded by Peter Weinberg, Jon Lombardo, and Brian Watroba, is taking market research even further. They’re pioneering the use of synthetic data to create AI copies of customers. Their platform creates digital personas that marketers can interview about just about any burning question in real-time. Adweek reported that Toni Clayton-Hine, CMO of EY, ran a fascinating test of Evidenza versus traditional market research. They fielded their annual brand survey — asking executives at large companies to share investment plans and thoughts on EY — both ways. What typically stretched six to eight weeks took Evidenza a day or two, with the same results. Toni said, “It was astounding that the matches were so similar. I mean, it was 95% correlation.” Ad agencies like Pereira O’Dell, Supernatural, and Media.Monks have also started to experiment with AI-generated focus groups. This is a new age for the Oracles of Eden Prairie. >>> For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gkShm_Q2 To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gteDRRTd #marketing #cartoon #marketoon