Scott Brinker, the CTO of cofounder of ion interactive and blogger at ChiefMartec, released his latest iconic miniature logo infographic of companies in the marketing technology space. This time, he claims there are 1,876 companies or nearly DOUBLE the amount when he last released a report in 2014. That’s not insignificant.
The accompanying write up is worth your time as he underscores some of the same issues we’re facing here at The Hub, mainly attempting to place individual companies into categories and buckets. As Brinker said:
First, new categories keep emerging, often as rebellious offshoots from previous categories. For example, I charted “Influencer Marketing” separate from “Social Media Marketing” this year, because of the momentum of so many companies using that label. But it’s arguably a subset rather than a separate category, with enormous overlap between them. As product managers vie to differentiate their products, alternate labels and variations flood the digital airwaves. Most vendors wrestle with wanting to dominate a category of their own invention (“blue ocean”) yet compete in larger and more popular fields (“red ocean”). It makes for a frothy brew of ever-shifting category labels.
He also discussed how more companies are sneaking into the marketing cloud discussion, no doubt due to the consolidation and sheer number of companies in the space. If you’re going to standout in a crowd, it’s best to say you can do it all.
To read the full report, click here.
