Overcoming a Rip-and-Replace Mindset and Vendor Reliance

Today, more and more chief marketing officers (CMOs) are trying to navigate the change in customer relationship ownership from being sales owned to marketing owned. To stay ahead of the curve, modern CMOs must fully embrace data integration and analytics to deliver personalized experiences, optimize campaigns for maximum impact, and drive business growth. Furthermore, CMOs across the board are waking up to the transformative power of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to better balance and integrate innovation, creativity and data-driven decisions. Innovating with the pace of change means most CMOs will have to ditch the “rip and replace” five-year refresh cycle mindset when it comes to their marketing infrastructure.

Rip-and-Replace is Slowing Down

The whirlwind race towards complete digital transformation during the initial year of the pandemic coincided with a remarkable surge in MarTech investments, creating a perfect storm of skyrocketing supply and demand.

However, the landscape has since settled down considerably. For instance, in 2020, content management systems were being swapped out at an astonishing rate of 41 percent. Fast-forward to this year, and that rate has dwindled to 11 percent. Similarly, the turnover rates for CRMs, email platforms, analytics/BI tools and other attribution and performance solutions have all been slashed by more than 50 percent.

This shift in the MarTech arena reflects a more mature and considered approach to technology adoption, signaling the need for marketing leaders to reassess their strategies and investments.

Single Vendor Reliance Gives Rise to Monoliths

Monolithic architectures have long dominated the MarTech landscape. These systems, where all the software components were interconnected and interdependent, offered streamlined designs and operational consistency. However, the rapid pace of change, advances in technology, and growing business demands have shown that these architectures are inflexible, difficult to scale, and challenging to integrate with new technologies.

Composability is poised to take center stage for marketing leaders when it comes to technology investments to scale marketing. While many marketers initially viewed composability as the process of constructing their own technology, crafting an API layer, or establishing a platform, it goes beyond the mere act of building custom solutions. Composable digital experience platforms (DXPs) are inherently flexible, able to adapt seamlessly to the ever-shifting landscape of technological advancements, evolving privacy regulations, and the changing expectations of consumers across different channels.

Composable DXPs Done Right 

As CMOs increasingly own the customer relationship and look to optimize customer journeys with revamped digital experiences, they need to embrace composable DXPs that provide architectural foundation and services for developers and practitioners to create, orchestrate and optimize digital engagements at scale.

How can CMOs ensure that composable DXP investments are done right?

• Understand long-term business needs and capabilities needed to grow the business. Define the road map to GenAI adoption based on the strengths of the marketing team.
• Explore packaged business capabilities (PBCs) like content management, personalization, search, translation management, AI authoring, etc., from the composable DXPs to determine components from the existing stack that need to change.
• Determine a migration strategy for existing data and new data sources that will add value to the revamped digital experiences. Decide whether investing in a customer data platform (CDP) that collects data from multiple sources, consolidates it and creates a 360-degree view of the customer is the right investment for the organization.
• Ensure support from IT leadership around security, compliance and seamless integration into the existing MarTech stack to minimize time to value realization.

Adopting a composable approach sets the stage for building a robust and flexible marketing technology stack that can evolve with the needs of the business and the demands of the market. CMOs can continuously assess and upgrade individual components of their stack, ensuring that they remain competitive and agile while supporting engaging digital customer journeys.

Ashish Malpani is senior director, product marketing, digital experience at Progress, the trusted provider of application development and infrastructure software.