For many marketers 2020 and beyond has changed almost every part of their job. From moving to an overwhelming amount of digital marketing to engaging customers via virtual meetings, the workflow and engagements of marketing have changed forever. Although, many transformations have been made the array of sophisticated technology solutions available to help marketers has flourished. The technologies have help to create stronger campaigns and relations with customers. We meet up with Scott Brinker who published the Marketing Technology Landscape infographic to get his take on the state of marketing.
Video Transcriptions
Harry Brelsford
Hey nation nation, Harry here. This is a special treat Scott Brinker of Chief martech out of the Boston area. How you doing? Scott?
Scott Brinker
I’m good, Harry, great to be here with you.
Harry Brelsford
Look Great. Yeah, I just I, for many, many years have loved these types of charts and our mutual friend Jay McBain at Forrester introduced us and let me just hand it over to you what, what’s your life story? How did you get to 8000 logos on a ecosystem chart?
Scott Brinker
Where Where did I go wrong in my life that led me to like place 1000 logos on a slide? Yes, that’s a great question. Well, I think the short version is, I sort of grew up as a software engineer, but very entrepreneurial, eventually ended up doing entrepreneurial software engineering things with marketers, as my clients, and then got very excited about what marketing was doing, and just slowly over time, found myself at that Venn diagram overlap between the worlds of technology and software in it, and marketing and Yeah, sort of the, you know, revenue operation side of businesses. And so yeah, maybe about 15 years ago, or so started getting really serious about that. But, you know, it’s a very niche audience. And then yeah, you know, just through the nature of where things have been going with the world becoming fully digital, is, yeah, marketers suddenly got really excited about technology and technology, people got increasingly interested in like, hey, wow, you know, like this whole marketing engagement thing. There’s, there might be something here. And so yeah, one way or another, I’ve been kind of at that intersection,
Harry Brelsford
including the marketing budget.
Scott Brinker
This is true. Yes.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, a couple questions. I shared with you in a discovery call. Many years ago, at SMB Nation, we’re an integrated media and events company at our core, when we thought about providing marketing as a service services to our readers, the managed services providers, because these MSPs, aka computer guys, they don’t like to market. Right They that’s, that’s not a natural act. So you know, we’re going to do your tweets, we’re going to do your newsletter, we’re going to do your post. And I looked at a similar chart, the loom escape for social media marketing, and here’s how I used it. And I’m going to get to a question was when I hit that pitch deck to MSP is that we have this monthly marketing service where we just do it for you look at this ecosystem chart, and how complex it is. And we kind of know what logos we like to work with. So let’s just say MailChimp, Hootsuite, you know, there’s, there’s some tools we use to automate the marketing. And I said, or, you know, you can do it on your own, right. I mean, I’m, I’m a number of years into this world, and you’re willing to take this chart and go test all the products. Now the question, how do people use your chart?
Scott Brinker
Well, actually, for many years, a number of them use that the exact same way you were using the loom escape, which was to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt it like you don’t want to have to deal with this. Right? Um, you know, I think, you know, this chart, I mean, obviously, you can see, like, by the time you get to 1000s, of logos, you know, microscopic size, there is no direct utility value to this. Yeah, really been a conversation starter, it’s people, to be honest, haven’t even like, fully recognize just how diverse and massive, you know, the technology ecosystem around the marketing profession, in the marketing industry has become, and usually when people see this for the first time, yeah, it’s like, you know, their mind blows. And that’s actually kind of a good thing. Because the reality is marketing has changed dramatically, like the technologies around this, there’s so much happening. And I think first step is to recognize it’s a really big world out there and to start to think about like, okay, given that, you know, how do I develop some of the capability, you know, either within my own company, or with the partners we’re working with, to make sure that yeah, we are taking advantage of what’s happening here, you know, for what’s relevant for our business.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, but when I shared with you, and I’m a mirror student, trust me on these ecosystem charts, but in the emerging cannabis technology or Canna tech field, and I published it in marijuana venture magazine. And the feedback I’m getting was was a couple fold one was just sort of the wow effect that you alluded to. Wow, I didn’t know this industry was so big. Number two was the ISVs and destes and OEMs that were in the different buckets. They were curious now they can start to size up who they perceive they compete with, right As an analyst, I made 15 buckets, and I put logos in the buckets. And it just brought insight to them to start thinking a new, especially overseas ISVs from Japan and Germany, in particular that are entering this market. And that’s not a natural act for a Japanese company. Let me tell you. So there was a little bit of that. And then the third one, is investors trying to size up the landscape has your chart, fallen into that investor category before where there may be a PE firms coming in? And they’re just trying to size it up?
Scott Brinker
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. I would say about five years ago, like, right, when we were crossing into the 1000 to 2000, you know, companies represented on this map. In some ways, that was almost a peak interest, you know, a VCs and PE, folks, it was at this point in time, most of them have kind of like, Yeah, I mean, again, the scale of this map is such that, you know, generally speaking, they’re looking for more finer grained analysis, you know, a particular categories. But, yeah, you know, there’s a lot of value, to just providing some sort of taxonomy to the market to just say, Okay, here’s a way to think about it in these buckets, and that the categories are never perfect. And we can always argue about boundaries. But at least I have some sort of model that we can have a common language, and we can start to see some of the structure, you know, in an emerging industry, I think there’s a lot of value to that.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, yeah. No, you can always count on feedback when you publish one of these things. Let me tell you, well said, especially the logos that we missed, we Yes, I’m
Scott Brinker
familiar with this dynamic as well.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, absolutely. Hey, final question. And, you know, let’s stay in touch. That’s cool. That’s cool. It’d be fun when you maybe you’re doing an update or have a more specific circle or bucket, we could double click at a future date into that. But the final update is something I’m going through with my chart here with the into 2021. There’s been a fair a reasonable amount of consolidation in the kana tech space. And that’s not a surprise. So now, there’s the mechanics and myself and Ginny, we got to figure out okay, now, you know, where do we take that logo out? And we use the new parent logo, like a current other? You know, do you get into some of that with consolidation, and in bankruptcy and new entries? Yeah,
Scott Brinker
absolutely. And we track that pretty closely. So yeah, if one company acquires another, we’ll just go to whatever the logo is of the acquired entity with, with some exceptions, like some cases, like if a PE company, like acquires a firm, but they’re still basically for all practical purposes, that firm is just still doing business as its own brand, then it’s like, we just leave that in there. Because you know, that’s sort of how the rest of the market thinks of it. But if it is a true consolidation of multiple companies being combined into one brand, than Yeah, yeah, we try and keep that updated.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, yeah. And I just a close on this, the top of mine, one was Tech Data merged with cynics over in my world of infrastructure, and it fairly large merger. And their logo is a dual logo, TD Synnex. So they’re keeping the dual branding. So that’s kind of just kind of interesting.
Scott Brinker
As you know, it almost by accident, you end up with like, a PhD study, and like, you know, logo naming company naming how do people do branding? Like in a market of 1000s of vendors, how do you make your logo and name and yeah, yeah, it’s an art form unto itself. Apparently, I’ve come to appreciate.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. Well, sir, thank you for your time, folks. You can go see the work that Scott’s doing over at Chief Mark tech.com. I thank you and Happy Holidays, since we’re approaching the holidays, and we’ll talk to you next year.
Scott Brinker
All right, sounds great. Happy holidays. Best wishes for 2022 There we go.
