For more than a decade, companies have been heavily investing in marketing technology (Martech) to better target customers, automate campaigns, and optimize performance. Yet, a recent Harvard Business Review study highlights a troubling reality: most of these investments fail to deliver the expected results. Marketing departments end up with costly, fragmented, and often underutilized stacks.
Martech: A Seductive but Poorly Exploited Promise
An Explosion of Solutions
Automation tools, advanced CRMs, customer data platforms (CDPs), predictive analytics, generative AI, chatbots… every year brings new promises.
But this abundance creates a problem: marketing leaders accumulate tools without a unified strategy. According to HBR, more than 70% of CMOs admit to using only a fraction of their software’s capabilities.
Complex and Redundant Stacks
Most companies build their martech stack through successive additions: a CRM first, then an emailing tool, later a CDP to consolidate data, and so on. The result is a patchwork that’s hard to integrate.
This complexity leads to:
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Functional redundancies,
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Rising licensing costs,
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Interoperability issues between solutions,
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A lack of overall visibility on performance.
Chronic Underutilization
The study reveals a key figure: only 42% of marketers say they use the advanced features of their tools. In other words, more than half of martech budgets are wasted on dormant capabilities.
The causes are multiple: lack of training, high staff turnover, absence of governance, and even a cultural bias—the temptation to “own” the latest technology rather than maximize the existing one.
Why Marketing Tech is “Broken”
The Myth of the Magic Solution
Many companies see Martech as a magic wand that can solve structural problems: lack of customer knowledge, absence of a clear strategy, organizational silos.
But technology cannot compensate for a flawed strategy. As HBR points out: “Investing in Martech without transforming the organization is like putting a Formula 1 engine in a city car.”
A Skills Gap
Mastering a martech stack requires hybrid profiles: marketers comfortable with data, data scientists attuned to business challenges, technical integration experts. Yet these talents are rare and expensive.
As a result, companies buy solutions they cannot fully exploit. Nearly 60% of CMOs believe their teams lack the skills needed to get real value from martech.
Weak Governance
Often, no one is truly responsible for ensuring stack coherence. Marketing leads tool purchases, IT manages integration, and operational teams use them only partially.
This lack of governance creates silos: each team adopts its favorite tool without coordination, multiplying inconsistent data flows and fragmenting customer insights.
The ROI Attribution Challenge
Another major hurdle is proving the real value of Martech. Traditional attribution models (last-click, multitouch) are showing their limits, while the gradual demise of third-party cookies complicates things further.
As a result, many executives are starting to doubt the ROI of their multimillion-dollar Martech investments.
Consequences for Businesses
Budget Waste
According to HBR, up to 40% of Martech budgets are currently misallocated—representing billions of dollars wasted annually on unused licenses or incomplete integrations.
Loss of Competitiveness
While some companies waste energy managing inefficient stacks, more agile competitors are making full use of a few well-integrated tools. Poor Martech usage has therefore become a competitive disadvantage.
A Degraded Customer Experience
When tools don’t communicate properly, customers receive inconsistent messaging: redundant emails, poorly targeted offers, broken journeys. At a time when personalization is key, this can severely impact loyalty.
How to Make Marketing Tech More Effective
HBR’s study doesn’t just paint a bleak picture; it also suggests several levers to “fix” Martech and finally extract real value from it.
Recenter Martech on Strategy
Before purchasing a new tool, companies should ask:
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What customer strategy do we want to implement?
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How can technology support this strategy?
In other words, marketing vision should drive martech choices—not the other way around.
Simplify and Rationalize the Stack
Instead of piling on solutions, businesses should regularly audit their stack to eliminate redundancies and identify truly useful tools. The goal: a lighter, clearer, and easier-to-manage ecosystem.
Some opt for integrated platforms (HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe), while others prefer a best-of-breed model with strong emphasis on interoperability. In either case, coherence is key.
Invest in Human Capabilities
SaaS tools generate no value without experts who know how to use them. This requires:
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Training existing teams,
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Hiring hybrid marketing/data profiles,
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Building a data-driven, experimentation-oriented culture.
Establish Clear Governance
One role or team must be responsible for stack coherence—often embodied by a Chief Marketing Technologist or a dedicated Martech management team.
This governance ensures:
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A unified data vision,
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Better communication between IT and marketing,
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The ability to measure real tool performance.
Define Clear ROI Indicators
To regain executive trust, SaaS tools must be tied to concrete business outcomes such as:
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Lower customer acquisition cost,
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Higher conversion rates,
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Improved loyalty,
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Revenue growth.
This means going beyond purely technical KPIs (open rates, number of leads) to measure real business impact.
Martech Trends Redefining 2025
Beyond current solutions, several trends are shaping the future of Marketing Technology:
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Generative AI and intelligent agents enabling automated content production, real-time personalization, and virtual assistants for marketing teams.
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The rise of first-party data supporting transparent, responsible customer data collection in the post–third-party cookie era.
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Ecosystem unification with platforms managing the entire customer journey—from acquisition to retention.
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Ethical and sustainable martech integrating privacy, digital sobriety, and transparency concerns.
Conclusion: From Tech to Strategy
Martech is not doomed. But it can only create value if companies embed it into a strategic, human, and well-governed approach.
The key is not to own the largest stack possible but to build a simple, controlled ecosystem aligned with marketing strategy and driven by skilled teams.
As HBR reminds us: “Marketing tech is not broken because it’s useless. It’s broken because we forgot that technology is a means, not an end.”
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