To Composability and beyond
The characteristics to evaluate Martech
In a seminal article from August 2024, Scott Brinker, editor of chiefmartec.com, challenged the “conventional wisdom surrounding MarTech consolidation”. Contrary to widespread expectations, the anticipated wave of MarTech M&A did not happen. This raised an intriguing question: could an alternative business model, beyond traditional consolidation, emerge to address the industry’s immense complexity?
To answer this question, Scott Brinker introduced the novel concept of “MarTech Aggregator,” a potential game-changer that would combine platform composability and business integration.
Could this innovative intuition stand the test of reality? What advantages could it offer clients over established Big Monoliths or Best-of-Breed products?
In this post, we’ll break down the core principles of platform composability and explore why the MarTech Aggregator could redefine the MarTech industry.
From theory to practice: six defining characteristics of a MarTech Aggregator
In 2020, Gartner predicted “the future of business is composable”. This vision arose in response to the disruption caused by COVID-19 and emphasised speed, agility, orchestration, and resilience.
It also addressed the explosion of MarTech products (over 14,000 as of August 2024) and the frustrations of vendor lock-in experienced by many organisations.
While composable architectures are gaining traction, as evidenced by the growth of composability-focused industrial alliances, they remain challenging to implement due to their technical complexity and their lack of native business integration.
To define MarTech aggregation in practice and distinguish it from architecture composability, we have identified six characteristics to which organisations can relate if they want to evaluate MarTech platforms:
1. Hyper personalised customer experience
2. Improved marketer convenience
3. Automated workflows and dataflows
4. High-quality, enriched, consent-based data
5. Simplified stacks with low total cost of ownership (TCO)
6. Strategic client-vendor partnership
1. Hyper personalised customer experience
Composable platforms enable sophisticated customer segmentation and real-time activation of these segments. By seamlessly integrating data collection with marketing automation, they support progressive profiling and highly personalised offers, significantly improving conversion rates. Additionally, they can repurpose website assets for mailing campaigns, creating contextual and personalised customer experiences.
Client example: Atlantic, a €3 billion French industrial company, manages a fragmented ecosystem of over 5,000 distributors. By segmenting this ecosystem into seven personae and personalising the experience for each persona and distributor, they have achieved a satisfaction rate of 90% to 95%. This result stems from increased efficiency, simplicity and security for distributors.
2. Improved marketer convenience
A composable platform simplifies marketers’ workflows through unified back-office access (via Single Sign-On). Marketers can easily reuse and activate digital assets from one platform component to another by using no-code and drag-and-drop tools. These digital assets include customer data, audience segments, website contents, website products. They can activate these digital assets various channels, including email, SMS, and push notifications.
Client Examples: Kaporal (FR) has increased the efficiency of their marketing team thanks to a unified back office. It facilitates digital interactions with the brand, for example through pre-filed forms. It also helps enrich customer data profiles through iterative and personalised interaction, creating intimate understanding of customer and helping act upon this intent through marketing automation.
3. Automated workflows and dataflows
Integration via APIs and collaborative roadmaps is critical for composable platforms. This allows clients to automate end-to-end dataflows, from data collection and management to multi-channel activation, without creating data silos or investing in unused features.
Client example: Afibel, a French retailer, wanted to remove data silos and improve marketing efficiency. By automating personalisation workflows through efficient integration of product recommendations and marketing automation, they have achieved remarkable results: a 25% increase in engagement rate, a 14% rise in average order value, and a 56% growth in actual turnover.
4. High-quality, enriched and consent-based data
A composable platform must, when necessary, collect high-quality data that is user-consented and reflects the user’s behavior and intent toward the brand. This can be achieved through methods such as personalised quizzes or games. Additionally, this data must be collected and processed in full compliance with local data protection regulations, such as GDPR in Europe.
Client example: the L’Oréal group has industrialised its data collection campaigns across 27 brands in EMEA. By launching 700 GDPR-compliant and consent-based interactive campaigns, these brands have collectively acquired 5.5 million new users, converting 60–70% of them into accounts.
5. Simplified MarTech stack and lower TCO
Composable platforms consolidate multiple components under a single architecture. With pre-integrated APIs and advanced tools like iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), it reduces integration risks and costs while ensuring seamless connectivity with legacy systems like CRM.
Client examples: Kaporal, a French retailer, and SG Armaturen an industrial company from Norway, unified five and seven platform components, respectively. By simplifying their tech stack, Kaporal reduced platform costs by 30%.
Other independent evaluations performed by platform integrators show that a composable platform can deliver 43% savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and 30% faster Time to Market (TTM) compared to monolithic platforms.
6. Strategic client-vendor partnerships
Beyond mere product integration, composable platforms emphasise long-term partnerships by offering flexible contracts, unified commercial terms, and aligned product roadmaps. Clients can adopt capabilities at their own pace, ensuring alignment with internal resources and market demands.
Client example: SG Armaturen (industrial company from Norway) has signed a long-term agreement with the MarTech Aggregator, expecting to save time, cost and risk on their transformation: the MarTech Aggregator and its Partners are acting as a trusted and strategic Partners for this Client.
Overall, over five percent of the Client base of the MarTech Aggregator have shifted to aggregated MarTech offerings in just a couple of months.
To composability and beyond!
Scott Brinker’s vision of the MarTech Aggregator points to an exciting future where aggregation could drive the industry forward.
This framework integrates platform composability with robust business partnerships. This shift from “Software as a Service” to “Service as a Software” (in which software is as easy to procure and operate as a service rendered by a human) opens the door to AI-driven software like AI agents. It also aligns perfectly with Gartner’s vision: composability drives business transformation.
Could the MarTech Aggregator enable organisational change by removing technical complexity from solution design, evaluation and deployment? Could it help enlarge MarTech discussions to non-technical stakeholders like CEOs, CFOs and CCOs? Could it become an enabler of business transformation or a catalysator of organisational change? We’ll delve into these strategic topics in further blog posts
Jean-Claude Pitcho
Jean-Claude Pitcho is a Vice President at QNTM, a group of MarTech companies embracing this shift towards aggregation by offering best-in-class platforms that work seamlessly together to create total customer solutions. These solutions can include data collection, customer data management, customer experience, online commerce, marketing automation and push notifications: everything that is needed to improve conversion rate, top line and bottom line.