Every profession has its vernacular, the insider lingo that serves as both a shortcut and a sort of secret handshake. Acronyms and abbreviations are often the epitome of such jargon, inscrutable to those outside the club. (“Fix the DNS with the new IP for your SaaS CRM ASAP — think of the SLA!”)
But some rare abbreviations bring grace and beauty to an otherwise jumbled stack of industry terms. One of my favorite has always been “marcom” — leave it to marketers to elevate the rather bland label of “marketing communications” into something sleek and sexy. When you’re asked what you do for a living at a cocktail party, “marcom” is an answer with great magnetism.
In that spirit, I’d like to nominate “martec” for “marketing technology“.
I may not be the first to suggest it, although a Google search for “martec” and “marketing technology” returns only 78 results at this time. Most of them appear to belong to one or more companies named Martec — although the one at http://www.martec.com is an engineering firm that does things such as scientific modeling for building navy ships. Guess martec could also stand for maritime technology, but hey, that’s a tiny niche in comparison.
I prefer “martec” over “martech”, because martec has 6-letter symmetry with marcom and because it sounds less techy. In the marketing/technology hybrid, I believe the scales should tip towards marketing. Martec must live under marketing, not IT.
Martec is also nice because it’s short, especially in domain names, such as www.chiefmartec.com. But before I overrationalize this suggestion (too late?), let me simply suggest trying it on for size. Martec professionals. The martec group. A martec agency.
At the next cocktail party, “What do you do?”
