Does martech cause the blandization of marketing? | MarTech

Marketers have more tools than ever to personalize, automate and optimize – and yet those same technologies are making our work look and sound more and more similar.

At a recent conference, advisor Steve Fair illustrated this perfectly. He is known for “Post-it Lady,” a woman staring at a wall of sticky notes in a popular Unsplash image that appears on numerous agency websites. Fair showed how many agencies that claim to be different use the same photo.

His point was simple: even a great image can destroy differentiation if everyone uses it. The irony is that the abundance of online image libraries has made agencies more similar, not less. Martech often has the same effect.

Keeping up with the Joneses

Martech introduced numerous innovations to help us personalize and optimize campaigns. I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember the excitement of automatically adding a salutation to a letter or fax.

Today we still personalize with greetings. But does it really help? They are table stakes. Skipping a salutation in an email designed to feel personal will hurt performance – and probably your career prospects. Audience expectations now make personalization a basic requirement, not an optimization tactic. We no longer use salutations to perform better. We use them to avoid falling behind the rest.

Martech goes much further than greeting. We can now include more personalized information in our messages than ever before. But does that actually improve performance – or just help us stay afloat? Adding personalization, such as tailoring content to the recipient’s role, has become the basic price of access. It is no longer a differentiator; it is simply necessary to avoid showing average campaigns.

Dig deeper: how to stop wasting money on personalization

The myth of AI

AI holds a lot of promise, especially when it comes to crafting individualized messages at scale. Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate compelling, unique copy for each recipient – so surely that solves differentiation? No, that’s not true.

I get a lot of AI-generated pitches in my inbox, many from people offering lead generation services. About two-thirds say they are openly impressed by a recent LinkedIn recommendation – almost always my most recent.

The text is usually somewhat personalized, but not convincing. It doesn’t make me any more likely to buy anything, because it’s clear there’s nothing that differentiates these senders or their services from the dozens of other AI-generated pitches I receive.

But can we really differentiate?

Differentiation is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. The problem is that advances in martech technology have led to what I call the blandization of marketing. Everyone is busy implementing the latest features on their shiny new martech tools, which means everyone ends up sounding the same.

Why did we get into this situation? Marketers have access to better tools than ever, yet we seem less able to create campaigns that really stand out. There are two reasons for this.

• First, the rapid decline in martech costs has given many more people access to powerful tools. Simply put, there’s more competition – and there’s not much we can do about it.
• The second reason is that we no longer think about differentiation at all. We think we’re setting ourselves apart, when really we’re just sitting in front of our martech tools and confronted with a series of complex functions and buttons to press. We start pressing buttons and adding features: time-consuming work that makes us feel like we’ve done everything possible, except actually thinking about the campaign.

What should be improvements to campaigns have become the strategy. I often hear clients describe campaigns by explaining which feature of their martech stack will activate, rather than by building a strategy for the audience. We work so hard driving the martech machines that we don’t think about where we want them to go.

And then there are the marketers who completely outsource the thinking to ChatGPT or another LLM. By typing: ‘What campaign can I run to get target group X to buy product Y when Z happens?’ adds no value. These models work by repeating patterns from their training data, so what you get are second-hand ideas – and those discarded campaigns will never set you apart.

More importantly, your boss can also type clues into AI. If they realize that you have already outsourced your work to an AI, they will likely conclude that you can be outsourced too.

Dig deeper: what to do now that the unique is no longer unique

We need a better process

Marketers need to find ways to avoid the distraction of feature-packed martech tools – and that starts with better processes. Many teams already have a process: they write a campaign briefing. But writing a short letter on its own misses the point.

A formal briefing process is useless unless it is carefully thought through first. Marketers need a step-by-step approach that makes them think before they start writing. Too many people jump straight into the assignment, hoping that clarity will emerge. Sometimes yes, but often the result is ultimately aimed at a different goal than the original goal.

The good news is that there are plenty of processes and frameworks to keep that deeper thinking on track. At our agency, we base our strategic planning on the nine-step process outlined by Ronald D. Smith in “Strategic Planning for Public Relations.”

Using this or another solid framework, marketers can think systematically about the situation, the desired change, the audience, and the message. The goal is not to have martech deliver the information, but to ensure the marketer does the deep thinking necessary to build a more effective campaign.

Is this really martech’s fault?

If we agree that there is a problem – that marketers need to think deeper to create campaigns that really stand out among the noise – then it’s time to focus on solutions.

We must also recognize that the fault does not lie solely with martech. It’s with us. As humans, we are easily distracted. Martech vendors deserve credit for building an almost unimaginable set of tools, but our job is to use them—and not be driven by them or become their slaves.

As incredible as it may sound, marketers are fallible. That’s why we need frameworks and processes that help us focus on where we really add value: strategy, creativity and differentiation. When we do that, the real benefits of martech become clear.

Dig deeper: If your value prop sounds like everyone else’s, you’ve already lost