Have your marketing technology investments lived up to their promises? For many marketing organizations, the answer is no, and the industry is undergoing a shift that’s only adding to the frustration.

For years, these same marketing organizations relied on complex, all-in-one platforms that bundled many tools together. These monolithic “suites” shaped how integration partners worked — heavy projects, heavy fees, long timelines, and rigid delivery methods that made promises but rarely delivered the flexibility you needed.

Now, composable architectures are slowly replacing those monoliths. Instead of one platform that does everything, organizations are assembling modular tools connected through APIs. However, many integration partners keep applying the same methods they’ve used in the past, and based on our experience, more than 60% of martech implementations fail to deliver the expected value to customers.

The result? Marketing organizations invest in modern technology but end up with stacks that feel as slow and inflexible as the old suites. To understand why, you need to look at the three different mindsets driving implementations: vendor-focused, feature-focused, and outcome-focused approaches.

The old playbook: vendor-focused integrations

Vendor-focused approaches put the vendor at the center of every decision. Integration partners often follow the playbooks of the vendors they’re tied to, focusing on certifications, incentives (for the partner), and pre-set delivery patterns that serve the vendor’s roadmap instead of yours.

In practice, vendors often encourage you to adopt their ecosystem in full, regardless of whether it matches your needs. If the vendor’s roadmap shifts away from your priorities, you have little room to adapt. Vendor-focused projects keep you locked in and dependent, which explains why only 4.2% of marketing organizations use their marketing suite as the central platform of their martech stack.

When the vendor’s interests take precedence, your goals often end up second.

The overlooked trap: feature-focused implementations

Even when marketing organizations try to avoid vendor lock-in, many partners fall into another trap: feature-focused thinking. Instead of aligning with your business objectives, the focus shifts to the capabilities of a chosen tool.

In these cases, partners aim to “turn on everything” the product offers, believing that activating features equals success. Roadmaps become checklists, and teams celebrate technical completeness even if it doesn’t move the business forward.

The result is bloated stacks and rising maintenance costs. Organizations with 10 or more martech tools typically use only five of them on a weekly basis. Feature-focused delivery is different from vendor-focused approaches, but it’s equally damaging. One ties you to an ecosystem. The other ties you to a feature set. In both cases, you end up serving the technology instead of the other way around.

This underutilization isn’t unique to one survey. Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey found that organizations are using just 33% of their martech stack’s available capabilities. Both G2 and Gartner highlight the same issue: more features don’t equal more value.

The better playbook: outcome-focused composability

Outcome-focused approaches start from your goals, not the vendor’s interests or the product’s feature list. They ask: what outcomes are you targeting? Faster time to market? Improved lead conversion? Lower integration costs?

Once those goals are clear, the stack is composed with tools chosen to meet them. You add only what’s needed and leave out what isn’t. If you find something doesn’t work for your business, swap it out for something that does. Success is measured in business impact, not technical scope.

An orchestration layer makes the stack work together effectively. It sits between your back-end systems (content management, commerce, data platforms) and your front-end delivery (sites, apps, portals). It helps you:

• Combine content and data from multiple systems without custom middleware
• Give marketers a no-code interface to build and change experiences themselves
• Keep flexibility in how front-end teams design and deliver customer experiences
• Manage governance, localization, and performance across many markets and channels

This provides the flexibility of composable systems without creating another monolith.

Why composable demands outcome-focused approaches

Composable architectures aren’t automatically simple. If approached with vendor-focused or feature-focused habits, they often fail. Industry research documents widespread frustration as organizations invest in modular stacks but end up disappointed because the wrong priorities guided implementation.

Composability isn’t just a passing trend — it’s rapidly becoming the standard. In the Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXPs 2025, analysts predict that by 2026, at least 70% of organizations will be mandated to acquire composable DXP technology. That’s up from 50% in 2023. This growing mandate underscores why outcome-focused approaches are critical: while composability may soon be unavoidable, organizations still control how effectively they implement it.

The data is stark: 65.7% of professionals cite data integration as their biggest martech challenge, and the implementation failure rate continues to climb. These aren’t technology failures — they’re failures of execution and mindset.

Without an outcome-focused approach, composable projects risk becoming as rigid and costly as the monoliths they were meant to replace.

Patterns of the outcome-focused model

Shifting to an outcome-focused model means applying a different set of practices:

Align with outcomes — Define goals in business terms: faster publishing cycles, higher engagement, reduced maintenance costs. Use these as guiding principles.

Migrate step by step — Avoid “big bang” rebuilds. Replace one part of the stack at a time — a funnel, region, or business line — to limit risk.

Use an orchestration layer — Orchestration connects back-end systems and gives marketers control without custom code, preventing fragile integrations and developer bottlenecks.

Establish governance early — Define schemas, APIs, and responsibilities before scaling. This creates order instead of chaos.

Empower your teams — Give non-technical users tools to build and launch experiences themselves, freeing developers to focus on complex engineering.

Change partner incentives — Reward partners for delivering business results, not for implementing the largest number of features.

These patterns protect you from both vendor lock-in and feature bloat while delivering measurable value.

Counterpoints and realities

It’s important to acknowledge that monolithic suites still have a role in certain contexts, especially in regulated industries where compliance and centralized procurement matter most. Composable also introduces complexity, and organizations without the right skills or governance may struggle.

That said, compliance should not be seen as a permanent excuse to avoid composability. Even in highly regulated industries, modular architectures can succeed when paired with strong governance and orchestration. Regulations dictate the outcomes you must prove — such as security, traceability, and data integrity — but they don’t mandate monolithic systems. With the right guardrails, composable stacks can actually make it easier to adapt as regulations evolve.

Business leaders should treat orchestration as part of a strategy, not a silver bullet. The right path is incremental, governed, and focused on measurable outcomes.

The choice ahead for integration partners

The future of martech is composable, but composable alone isn’t enough. The way you implement determines whether it delivers value or becomes another disappointment.

• Vendor-focused approaches lock you into ecosystems
• Feature-focused approaches tie you to capability checklists
• Outcome-focused approaches align technology with your goals

Orchestration is now a core part of that outcome-focused path. It makes composable architectures workable by bridging back-end systems and front-end delivery while empowering your teams.

Integration partners that align technology with business outcomes will thrive. Those that cling to vendor-driven or feature-obsessed approaches risk holding their customers back.

About the Author

Digital Mindshare LLC (Digital Mindshare), sponsor of How Marketing Technology Works®, is led by Gene De Libero, a Martech Healer with over three decades of experience helping organizations and leaders ‘Ride the Crest of Change.’ Digital Mindshare is a New York-based Marketing Technology Transformation® consultancy that helps clients optimize their martech investments, ensuring maximum returns and strategic alignment.