What is Martec’s Law?

At its core, Martec’s Law observes that technological progress follows an exponential curve—think Moore’s Law, where computing power doubles roughly every two years, or Metcalfe’s Law, which shows how network value grows exponentially with connections. Social media’s rapid evolution is another prime example: what started as simple platforms has exploded into complex ecosystems that reshape how we communicate and market.

In contrast, organizations evolve much more slowly, on a logarithmic scale. This isn’t just about size or bureaucracy; it’s rooted in human factors like established processes, cultural inertia, incentives, and the sheer effort required to shift behaviors. Larger teams amplify this resistance, making change feel like pushing a boulder uphill. Without strong leadership, stagnation becomes the norm.

Brinker calls this dynamic “the great management dilemma of the 21st century”.

Implications for Marketing and Beyond

For marketers, this law is especially relevant in the martech space, where tools and platforms multiply at a dizzying rate. It’s not just about adopting the latest AI-driven analytics or automation software—it’s about integrating them into your team’s workflow without causing disruption. The risk? Overwhelmed employees, half-baked implementations, and missed opportunities as competitors who bridge the gap pull ahead.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Brinker emphasizes that even the best-led organizations can’t match technology’s pace outright. Instead, the key is strategic selection: consciously choosing which changes to embrace and which to ignore, aligning them with your broader business goals. As he draws from A.G. Lafley’s Playing to Win, strategy is about making tough choices—what’s “in” (the red area) and what’s “out” (the blue).

How to Bridge the Gap

To make Martec’s Law work for you, focus on absorption as much as adoption. This means:

• Strategic Prioritization: Evaluate tech changes against your organization’s mission. Not every shiny new tool deserves a spot in your stack.
• Cultural Integration: Go beyond installation—invest in coaching, training, and inspiring your team. Educate on why the change matters, nurture buy-in, and elevate those who champion it. A experienced consultant once recommended to myself that for every $1 committed to software licensing/subscribing, $3 should be allocated to training and change management.
• Proactive Leadership: Anticipate the gap and plan for it. In marketing, this could involve piloting martech tools in small teams before scaling, ensuring they enhance rather than hinder creativity.

I’ve seen businesses thrive by applying these principles. For instance, a mid-sized firm might skip the hype around every new AI platform and instead double down on data privacy tech that aligns with their customer trust strategy.

If you’re grappling with martech overload, Martec’s Law offers a roadmap. It’s a reminder that thoughtful adaptation beats frantic chasing. Check out Brinker’s original article for a deeper dive, and let’s discuss how this applies to your organization—drop a comment below or reach out via the contact form.

Originally inspired by Scott Brinker’s article on chiefmartec.com.

Critics rightly say Share of Voice has today been overwhelmed by the diversity and complexity of our digital media landscape. It is no longer a credible metric.

Effectiveness guru Les Binet defines SOS as the share of organic Google search queries (not paid search). The metric equates to the total searches for a specific brand, divided by the total searches for all brands in the category. This info can be extracted from Google Trends and goes back to 2004.

In brief, why not measure how many people are searching online for the different brands in your category and compare that number instead?

Says Les Binet, who is head of effectiveness at the UK agency adam&eveDDB: “over the past 30 years, I’ve found that the relationship between tracking metrics and actual purchase behaviour is often surprisingly weak. By tracking Share of Search we have a powerful, not to mention cheap, metric to measure what people are actually doing online, rather than what they say they are doing. It is by no means a silver bullet – the data needs to be interpreted with care and researchers need more detail to be able to apply this to the real world … without doubt though, Share of Search has enormous potential and predictive power to track brands and advertising going forward.”

Janet Hull OBE, founder of EffWorks Global and IPA director of marketing strategy is reported on the webstie of the UK-based IPA (the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) as saying: “We are delighted that Les has unpacked his exciting new findings with our cross-industry EffWorks audience. At a time when Covid-19 is pushing more consumers online, and while industry budgets are more strained than ever, we very much welcome the addition of Share of Search as a cost-effective, predictor of the health and potential wealth of brands and advertising. In the right hands, with the right learning, this could be a real game changer”.

Check out Les Binet’s October 2020 presentation on the topic: https://vimeo.com/465319431

In contrast, the best technologists are re-engineering and collaborating to co-create genuine digital businesses, not just “serve the business”.

As digital disruption accelerates, the division between front and back offices is blurring. Traditional back-office apps are migrating, one vendor at a time, to be closer to the sales-and-marketing, customer experience driven front end. The agility imperative means back and front office must integrate and synchronize

Digital technologies are transforming CRM. Tighter integration means CRM is extending from sales, service, and marketing into commerce. The long-term focus is not simply on selling products and services, but on delivering authentic brands and experiences, from campaigns to customer journeys to commerce.

The study, by the firm which describes itself as a customer experience consultancy, tracks the cumulative total stock returns for two model portfolios _ comprised of the Top 10 (“Leaders”) and the Bottom 10 (“Laggards”) publically traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Rankings.

According to the report’s latest edition, leaders outperform the broader market. They generated a total return that was 35 points higher than the S&P 500 Index. Laggards were far behind. Their total return was 45 points lower than the market.

Watermark states that “a great customer experience, and the internal ecosystem supporting it, can deliver tremendous strategic and economic value to a business, in a way that’s difficult for competitors to replicate”.

So why do the laggards “continue to subject their customers to complicated sales processes, cluttered websites, dizzying 800-line menus, long wait times, incompetent service, unintelligible correspondence, and products that are just plain difficult to use”?

Watermark says leaders embrace these basic tenets:

• They aim for more than customer satisfaction
• They nail the basics and then deliver pleasant surprises
• They understand that great experiences are intentional and emotional
• They shape customer impressions through cognitive science
• They recognize the link between the customer and employee experience

Download the report.

Good summary of the state of marketing in 50 slides from marketing management software company Percolate:

Here are my takeaways:

• Adults use their smart phones more than all other devices
• Vertical viewing is replacing horizontal viewing
• Mobile searches will soon replace desktops
• Millennials love their smart phone and cannot live without them
• Mobile is driving eCommerce
• Social’s share of Internet traffic is rising
• Lead generating is B2B’s biggest priority
• Blogging is B2B’s mmost important channel.

Q1 What is the best way to measure marketing performance?

ANSWER: If you are operating in a B2B environment, you will need an integrated front-end business technology platform supported by engaged people and aligned processes. This means a CRM married with a marketing automation tool, an enterprise-grade website content management solution and a sophisticated, business-driven analytics application. Ideally, your CRM is also fully integrated with your ERP system, enabling you to understand what’s happening with your recurring revenue. Without these tools, plus the right people and the processes, you cannot effectively measure your contribution to the business in these terms:

• Marketing-sourced pipeline revenue
• Marketing-sourced closed-won revenue
• Marketing-influenced pipeline revenue
• Marketing-influenced closed-won revenue
• Marketing-influenced recurring revenue
• Net promoter score
• Customer effort score

Q2 What are the major challenges that hinder this

• Poor leadership
• A failure to give more than lip service to the reality that the customer experience is the decisive differentiator and is, in reality, the new marketing
• Limited vision
• Ineffectual change management
• Business failing to engage with IT as a genuine partner
• Traditional sales & marketing misalignment
• Siloed organisational structures
• A conventional approach to analytics, resulting in reports without actionable insights

According to Zettelmeyer, managing well with analytics does not require a math genius or master of computer science; instead, it requires “a working knowledge” of data science. This means being able to separate good data from bad, and knowing where precisely analytics can add value.

Zettelmeyer states that analytics is not a separate business practice, it has to be integrated into the business itself.

“It all starts with understanding the data-generation process,” Zettelmeyer says. “You cannot judge the quality of the analytics if you don’t have a very clear idea of where the data came from.”

Zettelmeyer says decision making in the business world is being revolutionized in the same way that healthcare is with the widespread adoption of “evidence-based medicine.” Managers with a working knowledge of data science will have a distinct advantage.

“There has to be a culture where you can’t get away with ‘thinking’ as opposed to ‘knowing.’”

A recent research study by InsideSales.com shows that the average response times to website leads sits at 40 hours and 56 minutes

And though some companies are doing better than before, it is at the expense of their  slower competitors.

Too few companies appear to act on the reality that there is a direct correlation between lead response times and lead close rates.

Unfortunately, whilst the need for speed is widely acknowledged, few are geared to react in the almost instant –on timeframe.

What’s the value in a web presence if you are not equipped to engage with those who do visit your site and request contact?

This year’s Insidesales.com report involved 5257 companies.

Their sites were visited by “secret shoppers” who located a web form and asked for follow up in some form.

The clock then started ticking as Inside Sales counted down how long it would take for responses to flow and how were they managed:

• 1811 (34%) companies were eliminated from further analysis because they did not have a website which contained a functioning Web form.
• 3446 companies received a Web form submission.
• 1368 companies (40%) did not respond to the lead we submitted.
• The average response time by phone was 40 hours and 56 minutes.
• The median response time by phone was 4 hours and 8 minutes.

The average response times have not improved since the first year this research was conducted in 2008 and time of 44 hours, 31 minutes and 8 second was recorded.

1368 companies of the 3446 in the study did not make a single phone call to follow up on people coming to their website and asking for contact.

214 companies made 6 or more phone calls to follow up on web-based inquiries.

The report also found that 65 percent of companies make their initial response through email.

The remaining 35 percent use phone calls to respond — 23 percent called and left a voicemail, and 12 percent called and did not leave a voicemail.

If you don’t have a marketing dashboard environment then perhaps you should.

Indeed, if you are relying on Excel and PowerPoint to report your contribution then this means you are burdened with manual processes and rear-vision data that yields little insight.

According to a Forrester Research report, Marketing Measurement needs an MBA, your dashboards should focus on marketing’s contribution to primary business outcomes such as revenue, margin, market share, customer value,and shareholder value, these tools should also help sales, support functions, and the marketing rank and file understand how marketing programs shape interest and demand as well as lead to healthier pipelines and lower costs per opportunity.

“Digitally adept buyers couldn’t care less about the key capabilities of your products and services; they want to know why your approach will better solve their problems,” Forrester says.

“CMOs that focus dashboards on business outcomes like category ownership, market share, retention rate, and account penetration keep the focus on why customers buy, not just what they buy.”

If you don’t have dashboards tracking the metrics that matter today then you must tomorrow.