Match MarTech with Customer Experience Goals
[MUSIC PLAYING] WILSON RAJ: Today, modern marketing must harness the full capabilities of the business to provide the best customer experience. Delivering on this promise requires a whole new way of operating. Marketing departments need to be rewired for speed, collaboration, and customer focus. It's less about changing what marketing does and more about transforming how the work is done.
Hi. I'm Wilson Raj, and welcome to this episode of Reimagine Marketing podcast, "Match MarTech with Customer Experience Goals." I'm joined by my guest, Scott Brinker, who is the editor of the renowned marketing technology blog called Chief Marketing Technologist, and he's also the VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot. Welcome, Scott.
SCOTT BRINKER: Hey, it's great to be back here with you, Wilson.
WILSON RAJ: Absolutely. I have to say, the conversation that we had-- and again, for the audience, if you're tuning in, you can certainly check out a previous conversation that Scott and I have had around martech, the perils and promises of martech. So check that out.
Again, I think there's so much there that I think we just wanted to unpack a couple more questions around some of the topics we were discussing. So we're ready to roll.
SCOTT BRINKER: [LAUGHS] Let's do it. Martech awaits.
WILSON RAJ: Absolutely. We'll dive in. And most of the audience would know about the marketing landscape. Of last count, we have in excess of 8,000 marketing solutions or applications or apps, right? It's just mind-blowing. You're absolutely right. You once said, homegrown martech is like homemade pizza. I love that.
So given what you've seen in the last five, six years with your landscape evolving and then exploding, what do you make of that statement now? Does that still hold true for you in current build versus buy conversations?
SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah, the whole build versus buy debate, it certainly isn't limited to marketing or martech. But it's interesting, because 10 years ago, for those companies who were really pioneering digital marketing, the truth was there wasn't a lot of commercial technology available for this. And even the technology solutions that were there, I mean, they were limited in the boundaries of what they delivered. And so a lot of the pioneers, particularly for larger companies, simply invested in saying, well, let's build out our own technology to do this.
Now over the past 10 years, as you referenced to the martech landscape, exhibit A, we have a plethora of off-the-shelf commercial martech solutions to draw from. And so that was where I kind of made the remark a few years ago of, like, OK. Well, making your own martech at this point, it's like making your own pizza. I mean, yeah, you could, but why? I mean, you pick up the phone. It's the hot, delicious pizza on your doorstep in 30--
WILSON RAJ: And you can add pineapples on top of it, right?
SCOTT BRINKER: You could if you were, you know, wanting to--
WILSON RAJ: Or not.
SCOTT BRINKER: I'm not going to attack pineapple choices on pizza. [LAUGHS] To each their own. Live and let live. But the reason I actually raised this up in a recent post on my blog is because it's not that simple anymore. And the reason it's not that simple is because there's still truth to the fact that you probably do not want to be reinventing the wheel. You don't want to be building things that from a comparative advantage perspective, it's just much easier for you to buy off the shelf.
But the difference is we are now truly going through digital transformation where companies are not just having pieces of their organization being powered by digital technologies. The whole organization is becoming digital. And the way in which we engage with our customers, our products and our services either are entirely digital. Or even if they have real-world elements, they're now serviced by a layer of digital technologies to support that.
And the truth is at some level, you get to a place where the customer experiences you're building, the digital products you're building, the behind-the-scenes workflows that you create to deliver those products and services. They become unique to your business. You can't just buy it off the shelf, plug it in, and it just automatically-- automagically starts generating profits for you. It'd be nice if we can do that.
And so increasingly, we're having to find this balance of saying, well, let's buy as many of the things as we can as foundational systems. Let's not waste time and energy where we don't have to. But we want to get more and more savvy now about being able to have a layer on top of that that really is the unique secret sauce for our own digital business.
And so I think, yeah, [LAUGHS] maybe you don't want to be having your homemade pizza now, but you're going to have your own candles. You're going to bring your own bottle of wine. You want to put it on your own plate.
WILSON RAJ: You know, I think that's a huge point in terms of that build versus buy debate, right? We just-- I think will still be ongoing, is this notion of from a customer perspective, we have a new tech-infused buyer where digital is pretty much serving up that rich, deeper, more immersive user experience.
In fact, we did a survey on the future of CX called Experience 2030. And one of the things we found was that the consumer, about 70% of them plan to use some kind of smart AI agent to control their immediate environment, their home, even the garage, the lawn. About 60% expect drone or some kind of autonomous vehicle to then deliver their purchases.
So when you look at these additional interfaces that are going to be coming in-- and they're coming at a fast clip-- the marketing that needs to happen to keep pace with that, yeah, you can't be just building it, right? Or even buying it at the same rate. It has to be sort of an and proposition. Your thoughts on that?
SCOTT BRINKER: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, it's not build or buy. It's build and buy. In fact, this is one of the themes I feel like from the past 10 years to this next decade, it's like these things that we used to think of as dichotomies-- build versus buy or products versus services, or in the marketing world it was suite or best of breed-- this new decade we're in, it's basically none of those are these exclusionary dichotomies. And it's like, oh, well, it's actually build and buy. It's not products or services. It's very often like services supporting products and products supporting services.
And even in the martech land, it's not suite versus best of breed. It's basically platform ecosystems, you know? People have 10 pull systems and then they attach and integrate all sorts of specialized apps around that. And yeah, it's exciting to be in a world where we're looking at it from a more coherent and harmonious--
WILSON RAJ: Yeah, I like that. Balanced, coherent, harmonious. And we're going to come to those dichotomies. Especially we'll deal with this one. But I've got lots of questions on the other one, right? Best of breed and suites.
But then in terms of build versus buy, do you think, Scott, are there some scenarios or settings where maybe one is better than the other, right? Understanding that it's very nuanced, but are there, from a marketing ops perspective or marketing content or planning, are there scenarios where maybe one might be slightly better at least start with?
We look at the mid-sized businesses, for example, right? They're constrained by resources. Can you shed some light there? I'm just interested in your thoughts if there are scenarios.
SCOTT BRINKER: Oh, absolutely. And I think, again, it's really a question of layers. So let's pick a really clear example, which is your website. As a marketer, your actual website content, your information architecture, if you've got some sort of app-based logic on how people sign up for something or engage with it, you're building that. You have to build it. You just can't snap your fingers and open a box and magically the whole website is there. So that is the sort of stuff we have to build.
But then you go to the layer below that and you're like, OK. Well, the actual digital experience platform on which that is built, the digital asset management system that is getting content into it, the underlying web server technology that's managing HTTPS connections, you would have to be out of your freaking mind to be building that stuff at this point, right? I mean, this is all commercial, commoditized solutions.
Leverage the heck out of that and then put your energy on building the things that you can't get off the commercial market. Because again, they're just entwined with what makes your business your business and different from everyone else.
And so I think if you think of that as one clear example, we're seeing that same sort of pattern now elsewhere, you know? I do not want to build my own CRM. I don't want to build my own marketing automation platform.
But I might want to create a little bit of custom logic around, like, OK. We get certain feeds of data from some of our digital touchpoints, and we have our own machine learning algorithm that we think is best to interpret that data to match people to segments. I might actually want to build that little piece, because it's just so unique to my particular business. But then I'm plugging that piece into this infrastructure that's largely commercially available software that I got off the shelf.
WILSON RAJ: Got it. For the audience, this is that huge-- I think it's not so much where we use build, where we use buy. I think that principle around differentiation, at least the way I hear it from you, Scott, is really important.
So anything that gives the brand differentiation, the customer experience edge as it relates to that particular organization, in that particular vertical, for that particular customer segment, it's a build, right? Because that's where your brand DNA probably is expressed.
The other stuff can be operationalized through standard systems. But then the magic is in integrating those two. So I think that's a great way to think about it and to clarify, right? Because there is no right or wrong answer. It's sort of, what's the principle here in terms of using build versus buy?
SCOTT BRINKER: Exactly. Just getting really smart about leveraging what we can from the market, but also getting very strategic about, yeah, what is a unique advantage for our particular company?
WILSON RAJ: Cool. Now, I'm going to add another thread to this principle that you just really nicely just elucidated, and it's one of your favorite topics around low code, no code, right? So where would that necessarily fit into this market? Obviously, it's a build. But then are there also off-the-shelf kinds of stuff that you could do? Where would that come in or fall on the range? Or is it the same principle applies? How do you look at it?
SCOTT BRINKER: No, I'm so glad you brought that up. I think you're absolutely right. So there's these layer of things we buy that just come for us, like pretty much out of the box they're ready to go. But then yeah, you start to add this layer of build on top.
Well, how do you build? Well, in some cases, it's things that really do require an expert software engineer to build a particular microservice or some custom logic in JavaScript that you're going to plug-in.
But increasingly, for a vast number of these things that we need to, quote, unquote, "build," we're actually using no code, low code tools very often in the commercial platforms that we purchase to configure and design and create these components not necessarily with JavaScript, but if I'm sitting at a Workflow Editor and I'm designing, OK, this trigger here, I want this action to happen here. And then based on this decision here, I want these two other things to happen.
You now have all these workflow tools where people are not software developers. They're marketers. They're general business users. But they're able to pull these things together and implement them and launch them. But still, that's building. We're realizing actually there is a much wider spectrum of things we can build and a much wider universe of people who can do some of that building.
WILSON RAJ: All right. Scott, now I want to kind of add maybe just another thread to this build and buy principle. Many analyst firms, they have a taxonomy to describe martech stacks, right? It's very simplified.
You have the system of data or systems of record. And then on top of that, system of insight. Then above that is some kind of system of engagement or delivery. Again, very simplified. I think your 8,000 martech apps would certainly range all through that stuff, right? And then some. And so the question becomes when you think about that build or the low code, no code, is it safe to say maybe for that brand differentiation to occur, more of the build would take place in that system of insight, because it's so specific to that brand?
SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah, it's a good question. I actually think traditionally the biggest area of differentiation is actually the engagement, because the experiences become increasingly unique to the particular business.
But I think you've got a really good point, because as those experiences become richer and the data that we're feeding in from these, we have the opportunity to create models at the insight level that, yeah, just become very specific to our business. And again, this might not be something that people are having to code up in Java or JavaScript, but even having a business user or an analyst or a data analyst person being able to model, say, OK, here's the way I want to organize the inputs from different customer touchpoints into a propensity model for what we want to do with them next.
WILSON RAJ: Absolutely. And that's where I think visualization would come in, right? Not visualization in terms of reporting, but how do you do it in visual analytics, right? Visually analyzing so that business user who may not have all those algorithms can do something, get some business value out of that. That's fantastic.
SCOTT BRINKER: I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir here. I mean, you guys are SAS, right? I mean, there's such an art that people can do with data. And the people who now have this combination of incredible tool sets for this and then they've sort of conceptually got the ideas of how to orchestrate them together, and then we're giving them this wonderful toy store of all these new data sources that are coming in, it's-- yeah. I know a fair number of people who are in the data analyst and data science world, and these are happy people. There's a lot of fun stuff going on right now.
WILSON RAJ: Yep. There's a lot of data to be had there as well. So no, we've talked about that debate between sort of build and buy. There's another big debate. And actually, you talked about it in terms of best of breed versus integrated stack. So again, there's some data, again, I think that was featured on one of your blog posts. It's a report that came out of the UK around data platforms where they talked about what other types of software or data platforms that the business is using.
And I'll just read out the stat here. From a best of breed perspective, it was about 32.5% best of breed. Integrated marketing suite, that's about 10.5%. And then a majority, 38%, was some kind of in-house, custom-built develop and vendor solution, right? And then you have a smaller number of purely in-house, around 15%, 16%.
And so just as that debate around build or buy, integrated or not integrated. Are there also same principles or different principles that can apply to this argument to say, hey, it's not just all here and all there? But what are your thoughts there, Scott?
SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah, this is such a fun topic. I really do think today in the world we are living in, the suite versus best of breed debate is-- it's really irrelevant, because I don't know of any suite at this point in time that doesn't have basically open APIs and ecosystems of people integrating to them.
And when people talk about best of breed solutions, there are very few marketing stacks out there now where just everything lives in its completely own isolated silo. These things are often purchased now based on the integration capabilities that they offer out of the box. So I kind of think this debate is last decade. Yeah, the new decade, it's software. It's APIs. It all works in the cloud.
But I found the stat about the hybrid model, this thing and folks saying, OK, well, almost independent of suite versus best of breed, what we're doing is a stack that has some combination of stuff we buy off the shelf commercially and some combination of pieces that we build that are unique to our business.
And what I thought was fascinating is to be honest, for all the years that people have been asking this question about suite versus best of breed, I haven't actually seen a survey where someone asked the question even of like, oh, well, you're also intermingling some of your own stuff in there too. Which is crazy, because actually, it makes a ton of sense that people are doing this.
And to now finally have at least-- I mean, this is just one survey. Take it for a grain of salt. But to have at least one data point that's like, yeah, actually, a lot of people, a lot of companies are blending these two things.
To be honest, I actually think this is some of the best evidence that digital transformation really is happening. I mean, people have been talking about it for years. It's become almost this hackneyed phrase. But the reality is, hackneyed phrase aside, businesses are becoming more and more digitally driven. The way in which they operate internally is digital. The way in which they engage with their customers or their audience or their partners is through digital.
And as part of that, they end up creating pieces of software and they end up using a whole bunch of other software. And we've now got data that, yeah, quite a few companies are now at that state. It's great. I love it.
WILSON RAJ: It's really positive, you're right, because this is actually real proof around-- it's concrete. You can see this in terms of, it's not just an airy concept around digital transformation, right? There is hybrid. We are actually coding. We're also using best of breed in scenarios that would then help them differentiate, but also reduce costs as they get maybe more integrated suites for that efficiency. So it's fantastic.
Now, you did something also-- you went beyond this, right? Beyond just best of breed and integrated where you made some connection to, as an analyst, Ben Thompson. He has a website called Stratechery where he had very interesting thoughts around aggregation theory, which there's a lot to it. But sum it all up, it's just a completely innovative way of thinking. Rather than sort of stacks or vertically integrations, it's sort of solving customer problems in a very unique way. So can you speak to that and how that applies to integrated and best of breed?
SCOTT BRINKER: Sure. Yeah. This is an observation that I've been sort of slowly becoming aware of over the past year, which is for these martech stacks-- in fact, not just for martech. But again, let's think more broadly for the entire business stack.
There are increasingly these products that were designed to thrive with a heterogeneous stack, right? I mean, for years, we had this thing of, oh, well, the way you solve the challenge of all these different software apps is you try and consolidate them all into either one suite. Or if not that, you try and get one product that acts is the absolute center of gravity for everything else.
And as much as that vision is wonderful and it works in certain contexts, for the overall business, there's just too many things happening. It's just-- there's too much innovation and too many products.
What we're finding now is there's a set of these technologies that are saying, OK. What if you were going to have a heterogenous stack as the new reality, that this was just the world we were going to live in? There are challenges to that, right?
There's challenges of, how do we make sure we're getting the data to some sort of unified core? There's challenges of, how do we manage work flow across these apps that are created by different developers? There's challenges from identity access management and control perspective. There's challenges from a data governance and privacy aspect.
Those are real challenges you have when you have a heterogeneous stack. But what if we started to build products that that was their mission in life, was to be able to say, oh, I mean, let's pick something like data governance and privacy compliance. There are now these tools out there. I mean, there's actually a whole little category of them.
Companies like OneTrust and DataGrail and all these folks that basically their mission, say, whatever different apps you have, we will connect to your different apps, to your different databases, and we will provide a layer on top of that of the auditing capabilities, the monitoring and visibility capabilities that you can actually enforce good privacy compliance without having everything unified on just one single app. And there's a ton of these.
And so I kind of feel like, yeah, this is where that connects to Ben Thompson's aggregation theory, is he's looked at a number of these models out in the market with things like the dynamics of Facebook and the iPhone and stuff--
WILSON RAJ: Google, Googler.
SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah, of how you have this sort of aggregator that serves as a way of matching supply and demand where the supply and demand might be very heterogeneous on either side. And sort of the value of that aggregator is to match the two together to help them unlock value from each other.
And then in a really weird way-- and I know this is-- I'm, again, super nerdy with this stuff. This was one of my more nerdy posts, so thank you for [LAUGHS] calling me out on it. But you know, in many ways, these products that are working across the martech stack or across the broader business tech stack, they're kind of almost serving as aggregators within the systems of data of our own businesses. So kind of the dynamics of software are continuing to evolve in front of our eyes.
WILSON RAJ: Right. It's so awesome to geek out, because I do encourage the audience, especially not just marketers, to actually take a look at this post-- we'll definitely add that to our show notes-- because it's a philosophical approach to how we look at integration. It's aggregation and solving a really key customer issue, whether it's privacy or personalization or loyalty, but I think it's worth a dive there.
I want to shift gears to something else. We talk about martech and marketing ops, and that's certainly a key driver of today's modern marketing organization. And this layer of function typically sits between-- on the top we have the marketing vision and strategy, and on the bottom you have on-the-ground marketing and CX delivery, right?
So how do you rationalize this? And you have your new rules of how marketing of five rules-- again, the number five. Can you walk through those five rules of how the marketing tech and operations connects with strategy and with execution and that framework there?
SCOTT BRINKER: Yeah. Wow. This number five. We were talking about this in our previous episode.
WILSON RAJ: It keeps popping up.
SCOTT BRINKER: Your five trends, my five trends, you know? There was packing, and this vaguely reminds me of something Monty Python Holy Grail skit around--
WILSON RAJ: There you go. We'll bring out the coconuts.
SCOTT BRINKER: [LAUGHS] Exactly. All right. So what is my favorite color in martech? So yeah, I mean, part of what I realized is in this whole new rules of marketing technology and operations is that a lot of marketing operations leaders were really being put in a position where they had to balance these things that seemed-- I mean, just opposing by their very definitions.
And the two examples I have were like, OK. We have all this demand to centralize. We want to centralize our data. We want to centralize brand control. We want to centralize privacy management. All good things.
But at the same time, there's all this demand to decentralize, to empower more teams at the edge of the organization to be able to build things faster, to be able to self-serve there needs, to be able to experiment. And so you're trying to, as a marketing ops leader, like, OK. Well, how do we do really good centralization and really good decentralization?
And then the same thing is on a different access here about the balance between technology and people and humans, right? On one hand, hey, how do we leverage more technology? How do we leverage more automation? How do we leverage AI?
But at the same time, how do we make sure that our brand is not just for customers, but even our own internal employee experience? That we have a soul, that we have-- we're able to connect the humanity to it in a way that people relate to it and relate to us, and that there's empathy to this.
And again, this is something as a marketing ops leader, right? You are trying to optimize the technology side. But the really best marketing ops leaders are also the ones who are so attuned to the human impact and the human touchpoint there.
And so yeah, I put those two things on a grid and we sort of went around the circle of like, OK. These are the different aspects of what it means to be able to deliver that. And then right at the center of that, the fifth rule was, OK. You're going to map this out, and you're going to have your ideas of how you think it should be done. This is great.
The next final rule is just be prepared for continuous change, because the way in which you do this today, next year, you're going to need to do things differently. Two years later, different again. We just kind of have to embrace continuous change as our new reality.
WILSON RAJ: Absolutely. And that's what I love about some of this thinking that you have. They're not just independent rules, right? It's balance. We live in a very complex world. And so these rules, while at first blush they seem like paradoxes-- wait a minute. Centralized and decentralized? Yeah. Access to data is centralized. Access to intelligence is centralized.
But what's decentralized are the experiences, the emotions as it relates to-- so the journey or moments of truth. And then in terms of having that agility at the core.
And of course, AI versus humans, right? What can we automate? What can we make it on scale? And then what are the things we can bring? That sort of judgment, creativity, empathy, emotion, et cetera. So I think thinking of it, again, in terms of a more holistic nature is key. And again, we'll have those notes there for our audience to ponder over and then hopefully reimagine marketing.
Just as we wrap up here, next couple of minutes, so Scott, you're a prolific thinker and a writer. What's next for Scott Brinker here? What upcoming topics very quickly are you kind of researching or pondering that you can share with this audience so that we may look forward to talking about it at some other podcast?
SCOTT BRINKER: Wow. You know, because I've become known for that martech landscape, every now and again people send me landscapes that other people created for very different industries. And a couple years ago, someone sent me this landscape of somebody who created a landscape of something like thousands of craft beers, and the producers of craft beers and how they all fit together. And I'm like, oh my goodness. I chose the wrong industry. What was I thinking? [LAUGHS]
WILSON RAJ: You're going to be the landscape guru.
SCOTT BRINKER: [LAUGHS] So like, yeah. When I think about what's next I'm like, hmm. [LAUGHS] Yeah. Maybe there's something beyond martech. But yeah. OK. Now in the martech side, I would say the topic that I am most interested in at the moment is this journey from big data to big ops.
And we talked about this earlier, the reintegration of marketing stacks and marketing ops into a fabric of the broader, entirely digital organization. I think we are really entering uncharted territory in, how do we run this? I mean, it's not just the systems architecture perspective of it.
It is the management approach to this. How do we collaborate in this world where we can just do so much and everyone can all do so much? But as we're doing this all in parallel, keeping the right things synchronized, keeping the right things open for experimentation, aligning operations standards across all these different contexts.
This is a big, huge, wonderful, very challenging, exciting mission for us to undertake. And so yeah, I'm just really fascinated and starting to peel away at the dynamics of how that evolution is happening.
WILSON RAJ: Well, Scott, it's been a pleasure. We can't wait to see what you uncover from this next big idea that you're looking at, big data to big ops. It was a great spot to wrap up this discussion. Again, I want to thank you, Scott, for being on the show.
SCOTT BRINKER: Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to chat with you, my friend.
WILSON RAJ: You too. You too, Scott. We'll do it again. Well, that's this week's episode of the Reimagine Marketing podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, be sure to head on over to sans.com/reimaginemarketingpodcast, all one word, to join the conversation and to discover more fun content. You can certainly subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast platforms. And don't forget to join us for another episode. And as always, thank you for listening.
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