According to Forbes Magazine, Chief Marketing Officers will spend $32.8 Billion on marketing technology by 2018, reaching a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4%. From 2014 to 2018, marketing technology spending will reach $130B for the 5-year period.
While I was Microsoft, I saw several big technology waves, the rise of personal computing, the advent of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and of course the .net vs. java development wars to name a few. In each of those waves, technology was being applied to a specific dimension of a business model. For example, in the ERP wave, we saw the consolidation of a number of discrete systems into a single holistic software platform. Think SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle financials as examples… Companies had invested in a variety of software systems to manage Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and General Ledgers, those systems were not integrated and didn’t easily work together. The “integration” was done with spreadsheets and human intervention. So, the large software companies put together Suites that met the needs of the finance departments.
Flash forward 20+ years, the explosion of computing power, social media, and the wide variety of hardware platforms has marketers struggling with how to keep up with changing customer expectations. Marketers are spending money on technology for sure… but they lack a consolidated platform, similar to the ERP wave. As many of you have seen many customers choose industry-leading software, not often considering the benefits of thoughtful and well-articulated application architecture. This happens for many reasons, but principally in large enterprises, there are different marketing teams for each channel, and they all have their own budgets.
The practical challenge of this approach is that it makes it nearly impossible to deliver a consistent and coherent experience to customers across different channels. In one system you may be a valued customer and in another, you may be unrecognized as a customer at all. I recently had a meeting with one of our clients and I complained that I was receiving email solicitations to open an account in spite of the fact that my personal accounts are already with this client. As you would expect they explained that there were different teams and different systems. A silly and expensive problem to be perpetuating to a “valuable customer”.
John Kottcamp and I began discussing this problem many years ago. It started with the idea of closed-loop marketing where a customer would be understood across all the software systems. Over time we have continued to evolve our thinking and strategy for building what we call the Enterprise Marketing Platform. John can correct me, but this must be the 15th version of this “Markitecture”. Take some time to review the attached slide deck and familiarize yourself with the concepts and strategy. One of the keys to Tahzoo’s success is our ability to assist our clients in designing and building integrated marketing platforms based on best of breed choices in each category. We are still many years away from an ERP like software solution for Marketers, my guess is at least 5 to 7 years, in the meantime, there is plenty of work to do assisting our clients.
Tahzoo will be the thought leaders on how to implement and leverage an integrated platform to deliver personalized and contextually relevant experiences. As you think about your clients and how Tahzoo can assist them, this is an important area for us to start the dialogue. We have the technical expertise and the engineering rigor to tackle the needs of the Fortune 500. If you think your client would be interested in a thoughtful conversation on the future of marketing technology, reach out to John, David Sterenberg, or me… we love talking to clients. In the meantime, John is going to continue to drive this dialogue within the company, there are a series of webinars in the works. Please feel free to contribute your thoughts and ideas.
Let’s go be great!
Brad