Martech: Cisco, Philips, and Microsoft Reveal Their Marketing Strategies and Tools
About a month ago, the 2020 edition of the renowned "Marketing Technology Landscape" was published by chiefmartech.com, a leading site in the Martech space. We dedicated a full article about the key takeaways from this edition.
Alongside this landscape, which maps out all the global vendors offering technologies for marketing professionals, the Stackie Awards event takes place.
The principle of the Stackie Awards is simple: marketers who wish to participate submit a single slide to the chiefmartech.com jury, illustrating their entire stack—i.e., all the tools used by their organization to implement their marketing strategy. The infographic presented should help conceptualize the marketing strategy and customer journey, as well as the use and role of technologies.
Examples of "Marketing Tech Stacks"
The origin of such illustrations and this movement likely lies in the "developer community," which embraces the Open Source spirit—access to source code and free redistribution that allows for the creation of derivative works. The site Stackshare, "Find the right developer tools and the companies that use them," is a perfect example.
It's no surprise that this Stackie Awards contest initially attracted marketing and digital departments from tech companies (Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft). However, starting with the 2019 edition, we saw organizations from various sectors tackling the subject (food brands, restaurant chains, postal services, caravan sellers, and even weather channels).
Analysis of Marketing Tools from Two Companies
Take the example of Sargento, an American food brand known primarily for its cheeses. This is a prime example of how marketing technologies are used within a consumer goods brand. We'll analyze their 2019 visual and stack, shown below. Using their brand universe, Sargento's teams have effectively staged their stack in four steps:
- Plan Your Meal – digital media and audience strategy
- Create Your Dish – content development
- Activate Your Taste Buds – plan execution
- Measure Your Skills – measurement and performance
Lastly, they intelligently highlighted the relative percentages of teams involved at each stage—Marketing, Insights, Creative, Ecommerce, and Sales.
The example of Airstream, a caravan manufacturer, is also very interesting. Note the evolution of their visuals between 2019 and 2020!
First observation: the number of tools used has increased! Second observation: the company maintains its five-point customer journey vision:
- Plan
- Create
- Engage
- Sell
- Measure
Each tree represents a Martech tool in their stack. One clever aspect of their visualization is illustrating the time spent on each tool by their teams by the size of the tree: low, medium, and high. This reveals which tools are central and core to their business and which are less so. Participants do not hesitate to highlight the changes from one year to the next, thus showing iterations aimed at achieving an ideal stack.
Why Illustrate Your Martech Ecosystem This Way?
Here are some arguments in favor of this type of representation. This exercise:
- Forces inventory work: How many technologies are used and for what purpose? What strategic objectives do they meet?
- Provides a unified view of the technologies used within a global group (across departments, divisions, countries, brands…).
- Allows for "cleaning up" and avoiding surplus (Are all tools well utilized? Are there redundancies?). Does the organization have the confidence to display its stack?
- Makes it easier to identify gaps and think systematically in case of tool changes.
- Offers value for all internal teams (demonstrates the role of technologies, and therefore simplifies evangelizing employees).
- Demonstrates maturity on the subject. It's often a great point for employer branding (a stable stack and a strategic approach to the subject), enabling coherent external communication, and likely better interactions with candidates and various vendors.
As you can see, there are many arguments to illustrate the benefits of this mapping exercise, which involves putting your marketing strategy in perspective with your tools and resources.
The maturity of companies on these topics continues to increase. We look forward to seeing the first French companies take on this exercise. At Saas Advisor, we are engaged in this type of approach with our clients, aiming for more transparency and simplification of the Martech universe.
Interested in these tools? Want to learn more?
Want to read more on another topic?
Check out our article on SaaS Management tools.
