By Eddie Gonzalez, Chief Strategy Officer, Razorfish
Marketers are spending more on technology than ever before—AI, automation, analytics, CRM, identity, and beyond. Each new platform arrives with the same promise: faster to scale, smarter automation, more flexibility, better performance.
But those promises rarely materialize. The tools themselves aren’t broken; the way we use them is. Too many platforms are implemented without a clear business problem to solve, over-engineered with layers of complexity, and ultimately underutilized. According to Gartner, marketers on average use just 33% of their martech stack’s capabilities.
The result? A costly cycle of adoption and abandonment—each new system implemented under the illusion that this one will finally unlock transformation. Instead, teams retrain, re-integrate, and re-adapt, while budgets balloon and impact plateaus.
It’s time to break the pattern. The smartest marketers today are shifting focus from chasing platforms to solving problems. When you start with the business challenge—not the technology—you make better investments, unlock faster value, and build solutions that actually scale.
Evaluate tech through a business lens.
The technology landscape moves fast, and it’s easy to believe the next tool will be the one that changes everything. But before you invest, ask a simpler question: What outcome are we trying to drive?
That question—and the potential solution—shouldn’t live inside one department. Real opportunities often emerge when teams look across silos to identify overlapping challenges or underused capabilities already in the stack. Many organizations don’t have a tech deficit; they have a utilization problem.
Instead of defaulting to “new is better,” anchor your evaluation in business impact. When you start with the problem, not the product, you connect your martech investments to the metrics that actually matter: growth, efficiency, and customer impact.
And here’s the nuance: it’s not just about getting more from your own platforms. Today’s ecosystem is filled with best-of-breed, AI-powered “micro-apps” and plug-ins that can enhance existing systems instead of replacing them.
To stay focused:
- Choose complementary solutions that extend or amplify your core capabilities, rather than fragment them.
- Ensure integrations are clean and measurable—via APIs, shared data flows, and unified workflows.
- Prioritize tools that address specific, high-value business gaps, not hype cycles.
By layering adjacent solutions thoughtfully, marketers can maintain a lean core stack while still experimenting and scaling quickly. The goal isn’t to buy “the next big system,” but to architect around business-driven outcomes—across both your primary platforms and the ecosystem that powers them.
Unlock true value realization.
Adoption does not always equal value. The real return on martech investment comes from how well it’s activated, integrated, and aligned to evolving business goals. “Value realization” isn’t a one-time event; it’s a discipline. It requires a roadmap that extends beyond onboarding to one that includes user enablement, cross-platform integration, continuous measurement, and optimization.
One of the biggest traps is buying a large platform, planning a 12-month “big-bang” rollout, and waiting for the end state before measuring ROI. Instead, apply rapid application development (RAD) principles: deliver small, high-impact use cases in 30-, 60-, or 90-day cycles. Each win builds confidence, creates momentum, and de-risks the overall investment.
It’s not enough to “turn on” a platform. The question is whether it moves the metrics that matter: incremental revenue, lower customer acquisition cost (CAC), higher customer lifetime value (CLV), faster time-to-market, or improved operational efficiency. When you align activation and optimization to these outcomes, technology becomes a growth engine, not a cost center.
Technology is transforming marketing in extraordinary ways. But before you invest in the next tool, invest the time to define the problem. Tech stacks are enablers—not strategies. The marketers who love the problem, not the platform, are the ones creating sustainable, scalable value.
