“Keep in mind this Steve Jobs quote: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” And Henry Ford, who said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Innovation is often achieved through non-linear leaps.”

To me, an old school marketer, these both speak to physical product, #1 of the OG 4 P’s of marketing 🙂 I think B2B companies especially, can feel like their tangible product – sold by touch and feel and personal selling – can’t benefit from newer on-line ways to promote and communicate to customers. It’s too abstract, beyond e-commerce, which everybody gets.

I’m a freelance writer, long fascinated by Martech from its infancy. I tried for years to get my employer, who needed one desperately, to get a CRM. Painful, I gave up.

Great post!

Joan Kent

Keep up the great work on the blog and graphics.

– Adam

As a guy that has a history as a system administrator, programmer, philosopher, lawyer, marketing agency principal and chief marketing officer, this post echoes ideas that I’ve had since the early 2000s. Both technology and marketing are (in their most basic forms) communication vehicles…one being the vehicle the other, the map.

As you’ve described it, the convergence of these three crosses the spectrum of the brain. From the logical linear processing of the left side and the creative, processing side of the right, the ability to multi-process does not lead to a dead end. Rather determining destination, execution and tactics allows for continual refinement.

Years before Marissa Mayer stepped into the spotlight at Yahoo, I was fascinated by her undergraduate field of study at Stanford linguistics, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and computer science classes. Merging these disparate fields meant understanding the tools and effects of technology.

This is a very valuable skill, yet organizations do not have an understanding for the rare find of the humanities technologist. It will become increasingly important.

I’d be very interested in that Enterprise Architecture best practices discussion as well. We marketers have a vast array of tools available to us today, as highlighted in Scott’s latest chart. How all these applications integrate and interoperate together in the backoffice, or cloud is a major stumbling block for many organizations. Startups are often able to avoid some of the challenges that more mature businesses with legacy on-premise IT infrastructures are faced with. So yes, please let’s have that discussion.

Hi, Henk — thanks for the comment. I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts from an enterprise architecture perspective.

While this “collision” is unlike anything that marketing has had to deal with before, it is good to note that it’s certainly not a standard playbook from the IT side either. There’s a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience in technology management that IT professionals bring to bear on this challenge — for instance, what “enterprise architecture” is and why it’s so important. But from that foundation, something new must be synthesized.

If ever you’d be comfortable sharing some of the “best practices” that you’re discovering in your work on this mission — what an acceptable reference architecture looks like from your view — I’d love to do a Q&A with you for the blog about them. I’m sure many other readers would benefit from what you’ve learned.

Godspeed!

As an enterprise architect, I first commend you for your insights into technology and marketing aspects . I have been working through a number of reference architectures to support digital marketing and in most of these endeavours ran into the same “traditional IT architecture will not work here” wall each time.

This “awkward collision of marketing and technology” as you stated is a serious challenge for architects, because we are dealing with a new revolution, rich and diversified applications landscape and still very immature consolidated suite of products. This ICT and marketing “language and cultural divide” makes it extremely difficult to put the marketing genie in the proverbial architectural box. I have learned that I need need a lamp instead of the box so to speak.

Your articles and references into the marketing revolution/collision as it unfolds has been invaluable for me to build a more acceptable reference architecture that will support this digital marketing and technology collision of two galaxies.

Thank you for this very beautifully articulated debate and information you bring to the table.

Cheers,
Henk

Thanks, Robert — first for covering this topic in your podcast with Joe (including the very kind compliment at the start of that segment) and for taking the time to chime in on this post. And, while I’m at it, for all the great support you’ve given me and my blog for quite some time. I really appreciate it.

I had a feeling that we actually did agree on many of these points — I almost wrote that at the end of the post, but I didn’t want to presume. However, since some of the remarks in your podcast did reflect concerns that I know others have had with the often awkward collision of marketing and technology, it seemed like a good context for engaging in a little debate.

And to emphasize: I completely agree with you that it’s humans who must drive the creation of great customer experiences with technology as their brushes, paint, and canvas.

Indeed, I have romanticized the marketing technology ideal above. Technology strategy and management is hard and often messy. And I think we both agree that it’s better for marketers to take small steps that they can handle well rather than letting dreams of technology nirvana get too far ahead of their abilities. The important thing, I believe, is to keep making forward progress: marketing is unlikely to be less entwined with technology in the years ahead.

Funny enough, I actually find the situation somewhat analogous to content marketing and the mission of the CMI. Great content marketing is incredibly important. But it’s also actually hard to do well — and I’m sure you’ve seen many cases where people’s ambitions for trying to do too much, too quickly results in a content quagmire. But even though it’s challenging, marketers can’t afford to ignore it or take too much of a “hands off” approach by outsourcing it wholesale to someone else. It’s a big part of what modern marketing is all about.

And so a little romance is probably good to inspire people to embrace these new opportunities. But like any romance, there’s more to it than wine and roses. 🙂

Thank you again!

This is such a wonderful post…. Your subtle (but very important) nuanced change in the intertwining of the two is right on the money in my book… and you’ll get no argument from me there…. I would agree – even if I didn’t elucidate it as well in the podcast…

I guess the only point I’ll take at all is where you disagree with my assessment of technology…

If i’m “trivializing” it… you may be romanticizing it a bit… 🙂 Any company can invest in – and too many over invest – the promise of “experience” creating technology. The challenge is that capability alone does not actually compel a consumer to become a lead, to purchase or to evangelize the brand… Only we (as humans) can actually create the experiences that, facilitated by great technology, can produce the value that consumers find attractive enough to engage with.

And that’s really my point about marketers stepping up and making sure that they first understand what they’re trying to do. A chainsaw in my hands is nothing but a useless and dangerous weapon – whereas in an artist’s hands it becomes a thing that creates beautiful ice sculpture and in a lumberjack’s hands becomes an efficient means to produce lumber… Technology, by its very definition, is but the application of tools to solve a problem.

Of course I agree with you and think that marketers should be aligned with technologists who can inspire the marketer with the capabilities that new innovations bring…. But too often that “shiny object syndrome” can blind the marketer into thinking that the giant shiny new platform (or capability) is important – when it’s actually not. So – IMHO – strategy first (inspired by the capabilities that innovative technology *might bring*) and then application of the technology to solve the challenge.

Keep burning my friend… This was a really good one!!

Cheers,

~rr