Composability is Not a Strategy, But a Daily Reality
Conventional wisdom tells us why NOT to duplicate features and tools but you’ll find plenty of good reasons to duplicate features. It is not a mistake. It is a best practice. It is by design. Composability seems to be at the heart of the fabric and nature of technology, especially in martech.
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For the 13th consecutive year, the martech landscape has grown. There is no sign of consolidation (yet). The new number of 14,106 marketing technology tools has just been released.
What is the effect of this flood on the martech stacks in the companies?
How can they deal with this tsunami of martech tools?
How do companies deal with it?
The mainstream strategy is to purchase a multi-product marketing cloud/suite. The reasoning behind this looks like this – “We have to stick to one marketing technology solution vendor that covers all the possible marketing grounds. In the past three decades, it worked for the other company functions of Finance, ERP, and Warehousing. The fragmented martech stack simply cannot work.”
~ Conventional Wisdom I
As much as I wish that were true, marketing isn’t like the other departments. The reason is shockingly simple: marketing is a customer-focused department where the system volumes are dictated by the market dynamics (not the company). This is true to a (much) lesser extent for company-focused departments like Finance, ERP, and Warehousing. They largely control the volumes flowing through their systems.
Martech is a different ball game altogether. Marketing is forced to be reactive to consumers’ needs to yield the best possible business results. Finance, ERP, and Warehousing can be more proactive (directive) towards employees and suppliers than marketing in handling volumes.
This conclusion is not only based on decades of experience or gut feeling of many martech practitioners. It is also based on research, recently published in our Martech for 2024 report. Here are four pivotal insights.
- The real role of marketing suites
- Companies use a well-integrated centre platform
- Companies duplicate tools & features by design
1. The real role of marketing suites
Multi-product marketing clouds/suites have been around for a while. They have been sold as “the single source of truth” or “the one tool that replaces all others”. Up until today you see similar slogans and claims on martech vendor websites. The fact that suites often have been sold as such does not mean suites are used as such.
Our research shows that only 4.2% of the 168 respondents mentioned that multi-product marketing clouds/suites are considered the centre of their stack. The extremely low percentage points to the fact companies do not use suites for what they were intended and purchased for. Compared to the high IT investments in suites to cover all marketing areas, that is a shockingly low percentage.
This does not imply suites are not used or useless. It implies that one or two modules of a marketing technology multi-product suite are used as the centre of a stack, e.g. CRM or MAP, instead of all modules in a suite. So if the broad capabilities of suites are not used, how is the rest of the stack done?
2. Companies use a well-integrated centre platform
The idea behind having a multi-product suite is that it does a better job of integrating its modules than integrating isolated point solutions. With a high level of integration, a company has a better view of the customer and reporting capability.
“It is simply impossible for IT to integrate all the tools in a stack. We need a suite that has integrated all modules by default. Suites are more capable at integrating.”
~ Conventional Wisdom II
If we look at the data, we see that 72% of stacks have integrated the majority of apps into the centre platform. They did not use a suite for that. They defined the “centre” of their stack when more than 50% of the stack is integrated into it.
3. Companies duplicate tools & features by design
If the market or suites do not consolidate the martech stack, then companies resort to consolidating the company stack themselves.
“We need to consolidate our martech stack. It makes no sense to have two tools that offer the same thing. Duplication of solutions and features is expensive and hard to govern.”
~ Conventional Wisdom III
The surprising results of our recent composability survey (2024 February/March) show a different reality. From the 168 participants, a staggering 82.7% of the respondents use alternative apps instead of the available built-in features of their centre platform, e.g. SMS messaging.
That percentage is so high it suggests that tools and features are duplicated by design, instead of by accident. The survey results show that features are duplicated in stacks because of better functionality, experience, governance, and lower costs.
Wait a minute, weren’t those all the reasons the conventional wisdom tells us why NOT to duplicate features and tools? Yes, but when asking practitioners you’ll find plenty of good reasons to duplicate features. It is not a mistake. It is a best practice. It is by design.
Companies duplicate features for better
- Functionality – Specialist apps often have a unique functionality depth. For one vendor it is not feasible to build a product that is ‘everything for everyone’.
- Economics – Specialist apps offer affordable pricing plans. When the built-in features of their centre platform have been purchased already the costs of a roll-out (configuring, integrating, and training) exceed the costs of a turnkey out-of-the-box specialist app.
- Experience – The extreme focus of the specialist apps allows them to drive supreme customer experiences due to their hyper-focus on one Job-To-Be-Done.
- Governance – The very nature of marketing is to experiment and adapt to customer needs. Existing use cases and features in centre platforms are affected when the configuration is needed to conduct small experiments. Specialist apps allow for quick experimentation without overhauling business-critical processes in the established platforms.
Build a plug & play martech architecture
All these insights point to Composable martech Stacks.
“Composability” has become a buzzword in martech over the past years. We hear about composable CDPs, Composable DXPs, and Composable ecommerce.
Our take on the concept of the compostable stack is pretty straightforward. It lets you combine things to create something new. Our research shows that the Head and the Long Tail each represent 50% of 1,500 company martech stacks for the past seven years. Both are used as Lego blocks in martech stacks.
If you think about it, especially as a tech nerd, then composability isn’t new to technology. Almost all software today is built by composing programs from code libraries, frameworks, objects, classes, microservices, agents, or API services. Didn’t IT champion the concept of Open Source, inviting third parties to contribute or build components, plugins, add-ons, etc.? Composability seems to be at the heart of the fabric and nature of technology, especially in martech.
Based on our findings in the composability survey 2024 it is fair to state that composability is not a strategy, it is a daily reality. The survey results reveal that composability drives efficiencies, like better functionality, economics, experience, and governance.
What should you do based on these three facts? Hire a martech architect who builds a martech strategy, roadmap, and backlog based on these newly found principles. Ensure there are crystal clear martech guardrails in place about compliance, security, licensing, and on-& offboarding.
