Scott Brinker

At many companies — but not all — their martech stack has become too complex. Aside from the anecdotal evidence that I frequently hear on LinkedIn and Twitter threads, Gartner’s most recent Marketing Technology Survey frames the problem quantitatively: on average, the 324 enterprise marketing technology leaders they surveyed reported that only 42% of their martech capabilities are being used. That’s down from 58% utilization in 2020. You only need two points to draw a …

When is a martech stack too complex? Continue Reading »

One of the perennial criticisms of the martech landscape is that “most of these products all do the same thing.” Send an email. Render a web page. Analyze some data. This criticism has grown louder in proportion to the growth of the landscape. With an increasingly exasperated tone, people ask, for example, “What’s the point of hundreds of CRMs or marketing automation tools? They’re all just storing the same customer fields and mail merging them …

Why there are 10,000 martech products that “kinda all do the same thing” (but not really) Continue Reading »

Jay McBain, formerly of Forrester and now with tech analyst firm Canalys, is the world’s leading expert in partner, channel, and ecosystem technology. Where I’ve gone broad with the martech landscape, Jay has gone deep with his own ecosystem tech landscape. He recently released his 2022 Channels Ecosystem Landscape, shown in the image above but discussed in more detail in his accompanying release write-up. I first came across Jay’s work with his 2017 landscape, where …

Channel, partner, and ecosystem tech is one of the hottest categories in martech today Continue Reading »

In 2019, I hypothesized that we were on the cusp of a Second Golden Age of Martech. The defining characteristic of this new era was a shift from dichotomies to convergences: From suite vs. best-of-breed to integrated platform ecosystems From software vs. services to blended delivery models with both From build vs. buy to customization on top of commercial platforms Instead of being forced to choose between X or Y — which was never fun …

The 2nd Age of Martech has arrived, and it’s all about convergence in ecosystems Continue Reading »

Over the 11 years that I’ve been publishing the martech landscape, as it mushroomed from ~150 solutions to ~10,000, I’ve seen many people react to it as an anomaly. “What is it about marketing that spawns so many software apps? Surely no other profession has to deal with such sprawl!” To which software review site G2 responds in this article, “Hold my beer.” While there are certainly dynamics specific to marketing that feed the frenzy …

Think the martech landscape is big? Here’s the size of the software industry overall Continue Reading »

My friends at MarTech.org recently released their latest Martech Replacement Survey 2022, where marketers shared which apps they’ve replaced over the past 18 months, what their primary motivation was in doing so, and what were their most important factors in choosing the replacement solution. Marketing automation (24%), CRM (23%), SEO (23%), email marketing (22%), and work/project management (19%) apps were the most frequently replaced. As I highlighted in blue in the chart above, the #1 …

Marketers keep replacing major martech apps, integration #1 factor for replacements Continue Reading »