Is martech driving the blandification of marketing?

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

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

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

Keeping up with the Joneses

Martech introduced countless 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’re still personalizing with salutations. But does it really help? It’s 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 everyone else.

Martech goes far beyond salutations. 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, like tailoring content to a recipient’s role, has become the basic price of entry. It’s no longer a differentiator — it’s simply required to avoid delivering average campaigns.

Dig deeper: How to stop wasting money on personalization

The myth of AI

AI promises a lot, especially when it comes to crafting individualized messages at scale. Large language models (LLMs) can generate convincing, unique copy for every recipient — so surely that solves differentiation? No, it doesn’t.

I get plenty of AI-generated pitches in my inbox, many from people offering lead generation services. About two-thirds open by saying they’re impressed by a recent LinkedIn recommendation — almost always my most recent one.

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

But can we really differentiate?

Differentiation is becoming harder to achieve. The problem is that martech advancements led to what I call the blandification of marketing. Everyone’s busy deploying the latest features on their shiny new martech tools, which means everyone ends up sounding the same.

Why have we found ourselves in this situation? Marketers have access to better tools than ever, yet we seem less able to create campaigns that genuinely stand out. There are two reasons for this.

• First, the rapid fall in the cost of martech has given many more people access to powerful tools. Put simply, there’s more competition — and there’s not much we can do about that.
• The second reason is that we’ve stopped thinking about differentiation altogether. We think we’re differentiating when all we’re really doing is sitting in front of our martech tools, facing an array of complex features and buttons to push. We start pressing buttons and adding features — time-consuming work that leaves us feeling we’ve done everything possible, except actually think about the campaign.

What should be enhancements to campaigns have become the strategy. I often hear clients describe campaigns by explaining what feature of their martech stack will be activated, rather than by building a strategy for the audience. We’re working so hard driving the martech machines that we’re not thinking about where we want them to go.

And then there are the marketers who outsource the thinking entirely to ChatGPT or another LLM. Typing “What campaign can I run to get audience X to buy product Y when Z is happening?” doesn’t add value. These models work by repeating patterns from their training data, so what you get are secondhand ideas — and those hand-me-down campaigns will never set you apart.

More importantly, your boss can type prompts into AI, too. When they realize you’ve already outsourced your job to an AI, they’ll probably conclude that you can be outsourced as well.

Dig deeper: What to do now that unique isn’t unique anymore

We need a better process

Marketers must find ways to avoid the distraction of feature-laden martech tools — and that starts with better processes. Many teams already have a process in place: they write a campaign brief. But writing a brief in isolation misses the point. 

A formal briefing process is useless unless thought goes into it first. Marketers need a step-by-step approach that ensures they think before they start writing. Too many jump straight into the brief, hoping clarity will come as they go. Sometimes it does, but often the result ends up aimed at a different target than the original objective.

The good news is 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 any solid framework helps marketers think systematically about the situation, desired change, audience and message. The goal isn’t to let martech supply the intelligence, but to make sure the marketer does the deep thinking needed to build a more effective campaign.

Is this really the fault of martech?

If we agree there’s a problem — that marketers need to think more deeply to create campaigns that truly stand out amid the noise — then it’s time to focus on solutions.

We should also acknowledge that the fault isn’t with martech alone. It’s with us. As human beings, we’re easily distracted. Martech vendors deserve credit for building an almost unimaginable array of tools, but it’s our job to use them — not be driven by them or become their slaves.

As unbelievable as it may sound, marketers are fallible. That’s why we need frameworks and processes that help us focus on where we truly 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

The post Is martech driving the blandification of marketing? appeared first on MarTech.