Book review: Amit Tiwari. 2023. Mar-Tech: A Marriage Made on Earth

Good things come in small packages. This idiom fits perfectly on this sleek 300-page treasure trove of information on the subject of Mar-Tech (Martech). The author, Amit Tiwari, has poured his professional experience in strategic marketing technology area into this book, which makes it a goldmine of knowledge on the latest developments in Martech. The book has been written from a practitioner’s perspective, and it is not an academic literature or textbook on the subject.

Fourteen chapters of Mar-Tech: A Marriage Made on Earth have been grouped under four parts. In line with the subtitle of the book, the chapters are aptly named Introduction, Courtship, Marriage, and Life. The one-liners like “Technology is smart but not smug”, “In all this time, while markets have changed, marketing has not”, and new insights into the traditional area of marketing make the book exciting and captivating.

Martech is a marriage between marketing and technology. The basic premise of the book is that technology is not a leader but an enabler. It cannot be prefixed but can only be suffixed with a domain, for example, agri-tech, edu-tech, etc. The same is the case with marketing. The book is an easy read, even for readers who do not have any technological background. Martech, as defined by the author, is “the ever-evolving service of value offering and transfer”. Since time immemorial, technology has served marketing in the areas of logistics, experience, and transactions. Marketing is people-oriented, while technology is a process-oriented discipline. These complementing attributes make them perfect collaborators. The author explains through various case studies how these complementary aspects help in solving various business problems and generate new marketing ideas. “Not Just a Cadbury Ad” campaign featuring small sellers is an example of the effective use of technology to change the way marketing is done. Mill Blackbird is another example of the application of technology where advertisement makers no longer require original car models to shoot an advertisement.

The book provides a road map for the meaningful transformation of the people, processes, and practices in organizations’ Martech environment. Considering its interdisciplinary nature, it is not easy to place the responsibility of Martech under any of the existing CXO designations, such as Chief Technology Officer, Chief Digital Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer. Marketing leaders cannot bask in the glory achieved during the bygone era of continuous improvements. As the author mentions, today is the era of a relentless pace of constant innovations, which not only turns yesterday’s innovations obsolete but also replaces today’s redundancies. There are many ways to stay innovative. In a new designation, the Chief Marteching^TM Officer (CMO) can be a leader of innovations in marketing using technology. CMO can be the arbitrator of the marriage of marketing and technology. Three divisions of Marteching^TM are technology, data, and content, and the management layer binds them together. Progress made in Martech in the last couple of decades shows that irrespective of the domains, everyone now works in technology. The book closes with a recommendation that—“if the Marteching™ rebrand of Marketing is to be successful, it will require every one of our perspectives”. So, bring it.

For professionals and academicians who want to understand the practical aspects of Martech, this book, filled with anecdotes and case studies, is a good read.