MarTech Manifesto

Marketing. Technology. Management.

Content. Code. Corporate.

The creative. The nerd. The suit.

Three different disciplines. Three different domains. Three different clichés. Divided by decades of conceptual and cultural barriers, these tribes have been entrenched in their separate identities.

There were marketing conferences, which technologists didn’t attend. Tech conferences, which marketers didn’t attend. And management, as a discipline, was rarely discussed at either.

These silos sufficed. Until they didn’t.

Digital transformation, the disruptor of so many things, is disrupting that taxonomy too. Because in a world of intensifying global competition, accelerating technological change, and rising customer expectations, that old model of three separate disciplines fails to innovate across them. Yet that is where the most transformative possibilities await.

A new, unified model is emerging to unlock that potential.

Martech.

The narrow view of martech— marketing technology — is that it’s the intersection of these disciplines. A Venn diagram, where three giant circles overlap, but just a little.

Through that lens, marketing technologists are a small but growing group of hybrid professionals who manage that intersection.

They build both brands and systems. They span marketing and IT, bridging those two silos. But still, those departments remain rooted on opposite sides of an organizational chasm.

That narrow view of martech is, as a software analogy, a patch for a program that is woefully outdated. It’s a bug fix for WordStar in an age of Google Docs.

The grand view of martech is much bigger than that.

In the grand view, these once separate disciplines are increasingly inseparable. The three circles of the Venn diagram overlap almost completely.

Marketers embrace technology to deliver compelling campaigns and remarkable customer experiences. Technologists embrace user experience design and growth hacking principles to create products that people love and love to share. Management synthesizes the myriad of elements across them into a cohesive whole, greater than the sum of its parts.

The boundaries blur, and that’s a good thing. It brings the customer into focus.

Managers embrace distributed leadership, giving teams the power to sense and respond to a rapidly changing world. Strategy becomes more bi-directional, a shared vision that adapts to emergent opportunities through continuous experimentation. The brand ideal is made real, and relevant, every day.

This enlightened model of management is owned by everyone. It’s less top-down and more of a living network, swift to evolve in a disruptive environment. It is agile in spirit and practice.

In the grand view, everyone who affects a customer’s experience is — in some proportion — a marketer, a technologist, and a manager. In martech, they are a united tribe, but not a homogenous one. Individuals still bring different talents, experiences, and specialties, and there’s great strength in that diversity.