The marketing technology ecosystem wheel

Experian — another one of those multi-billion dollar companies engaged in enterprise marketing — released their 2012 Digital Marketer Trend and Benchmark Report earlier this week.

Right up in the front of this hefty 154-page report is a spread on understanding the marketing technology ecosystem — which is clearly the substrate upon which modern marketing is being built. Experian includes a couple of great infographics that help visualize all of the different pieces in that ecosystem:

Any CMO at this point should be able to look at this “wheel” and speak to the marketing technology capabilities that they have in place — or are putting into place — for each segment.

An excerpt from the report’s text associated with these graphics:

Consider how marketers can create the infrastructure necessary to support all the above-mentioned activities. The easiest way to break this down is to deconstruct the marketing technology ecosystem “wheel” into a customer intelligence platform comprised of critical marketing information and key “hubs” of functionality.

Built on a foundation of data, this hosted, end-to-end marketing solution leverages a three-hub approach to capture and integrate data from across channels (integration), understand how to maximize customer value (intelligence), and optimize customer interactions with context and relevance (interaction).

Admittedly, that last bit sounds like a sales pitch for Experian’s specific solution. But I think the concept they’re illustrating is broadly applicable — a core “system of record” platform interconnected with multiple hubs of context-specific solutions. Almost all of the major marketing technologies that would fit into that ecosystem are provided as hosted software-as-a-service.