Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

Marketing Change Agents

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

Marketers are frequently the biggest agents of change in a business.

Inside marketing teams, there’s a constant drumbeat for change, particularly when new members join the team. In my first marketing job, junior managers rotated to new brands every 12 months. Each new assignment brought fresh energy to make a mark on the brand. Higher level marketers rotated less frequently but pushed for higher level changes.

In general, new CMOs are often the biggest change agents of all.

From new packaging, to new campaigns, to new agencies, brands are constantly evolving. In some ways, the openness to change in marketing is healthy. Businesses overall can get stuck in a rut.

But what’s gets lost in the revolving door of marketing newness is the power of consistency. Marketers get tired of our marketing long before consumers do. In many cases, constant change just makes it harder for consumers to recognize our brands.

System 1 released a study last month proving that “consistency compounds creativity.”

They tested brands in the UK and US on 13 measures of “creative consistency” (from positioning to distinctive assets to agency tenure) and mapped against brand and business outcomes. They found:

“Not only were the most consistent brands more likely to produce better ads (3.3 stars on average vs 2.8 and 2.6 for somewhat and least consistent brands, respectively), but those in the top 20% for consistency generated more very large brand effects and very large business effects than those in the bottom 20%, including reporting twice as many incidences of profit gain.”

As Contagious recapped the System 1 study:

“It challenges the idea that brands need to be fearful about ad wearout. The creative success of good ads that are allowed to wear-in continues to grow.

“It also emphasises the importance of identifying and committing to long-term brand platforms. Brands should be wary of abandoning a successful brand platform if the concern is merely a fear that people are getting bored of seeing the same work.”

Total Ann-archy at B2B Marketing Forum

I loved meeting so many of you while speaking at MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston last week — particularly getting to hang out with Ann Handley again, who has been putting on this signature event for over 15 years.

Here are a few photos. It was great to finally meet Mark Schaefer in person, whose work I’ve followed and admired for a long time.

Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning. And please recommend me as a keynote speaker to friends or colleagues.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a cartoon from 2013 in the same vein of this week’s cartoon.

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

1. Bring me into your company to speak

2. License cartoons for presentations or more (if a picture tells a thousand words, a marketoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides)

3. Forward this newsletter to a friend with an invitation to subscribe: marketoonist.com/newsletter.

4. Buy my latest book

5. Collaborate with me on cartoons for marketing, culture change, or thought leadership

6. Just hit reply and say hello

About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.