This one time at brand camp...

Tom Fishburne is the funniest brand manager alive. (Probably the smartest too -- especially when it comes to seeing what really goes on in the alternate universe known as "product marketing".)

Tom just published a new book of his marketing cartoons called "This One Time at Brand Camp". It is good. I mean, really good. It's not just that these are great cartoons (they are) nor that they are timely (Tom's brilliant take on greenwashing is alone worth the price of the book), it's that Tom gets inside the mind of marketers better than anyone I've ever come across... and then draws it out in a way that will be beautifully painful to anyone who has ever wondered "where in the heck did they come up with THAT slogan?"

Anyway, enough words. Here's my Post2Post review:

I had a chance to ask Tom to single out his favorite single cartoon. Here's what he picked, and the story behind it...

From Tom: About 8 years ago, when I first started drawing cartoons in business school, I took a trip to Paris with my wife and stumbled across a gallery filled with cartoons by Jean-Jacques Sempe (who I later learned does covers for the New Yorker, among other things). I had a Wayne's World "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy" moment. They were screamingly funny and poignant all at the same time, but none of the cartoons had any caption or dialog.  He did it all without a single word, just by how he drew it. 

 

Since then, I've thought the highest zen master form of cartooning was where you didn't need to even say the punchline. It's deceptively hard to do.

 

I like this cartoon because (even though it does have a title), all of the humor is in the scene. We've all heard the expression, "you can't cut your way to growth", but most organizations are equipped with cutting tools, not with growing tools. And, if we've ever been passionate about innovation, sometimes you feel like that lone farmer in the center, planting the tree while warily looking at all of the naysayers. But, you do it anyway, even against those odds, because you believe so much in the idea. And every once in a while, the idea blossoms and proves all of the naysayers wrong.

 

In the case of the inspiration for this cartoon, the cutting tools won the round, but I kept at it, and eventually got it to grow.

I love that story. What I love even more is that when I read Tom's book, I marked my own favorite cartoons with post-its. My top choice?

The same cartoon.