How did I ever fail to come across Tom Fishburne?


For a long time I wrote a column for Marketing – in fact some people think I still do, although I stopped well over a decade ago.

Anyhow, I was replaced by Mark Ritson, a very perceptive commentator, much better looking than me, with lots of hair – and a business school professor, which didn’t stop him talking a lot of good sense.

He recently wrote a very good piece called “Hoodwinked by the Emperor’s New Tweets”, which in turn was brought to my attention via the brilliant cartoon above left.

Mark wrote, “Most brands don’t have the newsworthiness, broad appeal or dynamism to have any chance of making Twitter work for them.” This all reminds me of the days when lots of fools were conned into thinking customers wanted to have “relationships” with their boring products. Who wants to make love to a bag of crisps?

That is by the by: I just think Tom Fishburne is wholly admirable. And that’s all from me today.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

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