India’s largest companies are increasingly giving their marketing technology stacks a rude wake-up call. Where once corporate marketers proudly built toolkits stuffed with dozens of specialized apps, CFOs and CMOs are now asking whether it’s all adding up. Today there are more than 15,000 MarTech products on the market, yet studies show organizations are using only about one-third of their stack’s capabilities. In other words, firms are spending roughly a quarter of their marketing budgets on technology even as most of those tools sit idle. It is no surprise that many are now on a mission to prune the fat. Marketers are shifting from “more tools” to “better tools.”
The story starts with an explosion of tools. A 2024 Statista survey counted more than 15,000 MarTech solutions, more than double the pre-pandemic figure. This proliferation reflects every conceivable marketing need: analytics, CRM, automation, personalization, ads, social management, and much more. But proliferation breeds complexity and cost. Companies now allocate about 25 percent of their marketing budget to technology, yet the average utilization of those stacks has fallen from 42 percent to 33 percent in just one year. With a quarter of spend and two-thirds of features unused, pressure is mounting to justify each license.
The global response has been swift. A majority of marketers have conducted a full audit of their MarTech stack in the past year. The top motivations are familiar: eliminate duplicate capabilities, simplify user training, and reduce integration headaches. Management consultants estimate that rationalizing these stacks can raise marketing ROI by up to 40 percent. The trend, often called “stack rationalization,” means moving from a fragmented toolset to a cohesive, streamlined system that focuses investment on high-impact solutions.
India’s enterprises are catching the wave. Marketers here are under similar “era of less” constraints: tight budgets and smaller teams. One recent survey noted that 92 percent of marketing teams are now managing with just 20 tools or fewer, and many report budgets stuck at roughly 7 to 8 percent of revenue. Digital adoption is surging across sectors, from small-town retail to big banks, yet regulations on data and privacy are tightening. Nearly 60 percent of marketing budgets in India now go to technology, and roughly half of Indian firms are already using AI and machine learning in marketing, achieving efficiency gains of up to 65 percent. The combination of heftier tech spend and the promise of AI has executives demanding that every tool pull its weight.
Senior marketing leaders confirm the change in perspective. At HDFC Bank, Deepak Oram, Senior VP of Growth Marketing and MarTech, says his team has deliberately slimmed its toolkit. “You can definitely have fewer tools,” he observes, but cautions that a smaller stack does not automatically make marketing simple. What matters is leveraging back-end complexity with big data and AI to keep the customer-facing side seamless. In practice, HDFC has doubled down on composable architecture and data platforms. Oram’s mantra is “stack fitness”: prune redundant apps, but build deep integrations and AI-driven processes behind the scenes. The goal is a high-performing stack, not a low-count stack at any cost.
Retail and travel firms tell a similar story. Tata Digital, part of the $150-billion Tata conglomerate, faced unwieldy fragmentation. By 2021, Tata’s digital brands each had separate apps for electronics, grocery, and travel, with unique tech back-ends — 20 or more distinct stacks in all. The solution was radical integration: in four months, Tata Digital re-platformed all brands onto one unified super app called Tata Neu. The company integrated over 20 tech stacks, consisting of third-party and home-grown data systems, under one roof. This consolidation cut content silos and overhead while preserving each brand’s unique customer journeys. For Tata, the payoff came in a big launch during cricket’s IPL, a marketing moment planned around having a lean, integrated stack.
Other brands have taken equally decisive action. At florist chain Ferns N Petals, product head Chirantan Sharma says that MarTech has effectively “plateaued” in 2025 — there are simply too many overlapping solutions. His remedy: “a ruthless approach to eliminate redundancy.” Similarly, Sudhanshu Tripathi, CMO of antivirus firm Quick Heal Technologies, recently gutted several off-the-shelf marketing apps. Quick Heal now focuses on building in-house telemetry to capture exactly where users engage and convert. Tripathi admits his team abandoned broad-stroke tools after disappointing results. “Email delivery rates were terrible, and it could not integrate with platforms like WhatsApp,” he explains. “In our business, where timely, multi-channel engagement is critical, it just did not scale.” So Quick Heal scrapped the tool and rebuilt key functions internally — a classic stack streamlining.
These experiences echo a broader refrain: stack rationalization is not about doing more with smaller spend, but about doing smarter. The retained tools tend to be the ones at the core of strategy — primarily CRM and analytics platforms — while many point solutions fall by the wayside. Companies are gravitating towards unified suites such as Adobe Experience Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and HubSpot, which pack analytics, content management, advertising, and CRM under one roof. By contrast, niche apps for minor tasks or redundant overlaps are increasingly on procurement committees’ kill lists.
The rationale extends to budgets as well. With inflationary pressures, many Indian companies are tightening marketing spend. Studies found firms trimmed their ad budgets from 9.5 percent of revenue in 2022 to about 9.1 percent in 2023. Nearly one-third of advertisers globally plan to cut spending. Consolidating tech is one way to yield savings: analysts estimate that organizations can cut 20 to 25 percent of costs by getting rid of redundant tools. That matches CFO expectations, since a quarter of marketing budget goes into tech. In fact, CFOs in leading Indian firms now insist on clear ROI before greenlighting new SaaS subscriptions.
Not all stacks are shrinking dramatically. Some companies are swapping tools rather than eliminating them entirely, retiring one email or analytics package but bringing in another. Still, even modest changes are driven by tighter criteria: new tech must demonstrate cross-channel ROI and fit the evolving customer journey.
An Act-On survey of marketers found that nearly everyone is running with a small toolkit: 92 percent have 20 or fewer MarTech applications in use. Indian teams are not likely to carry a 50-member “kitchen sink” stack; they follow the global norm of curating a lean set of essentials. For those 20-odd tools, ease of use and clear ROI are paramount. Vendors like Canva, Google Analytics and HubSpot top the wishlists in 2025 surveys, precisely because teams can launch them quickly and see results.
To be sure, consolidation looks different by sector. FMCG or retail giants may prioritize content engines and loyalty CRM, while banks favor data platforms and automation. Even telecom and edtech players echo the same theme: every tool must justify its seat at the table. The trend in India is towards “composable” architecture, where a few integrated components such as a CDP, a core CRM, an email engine, and an experimentation platform replace a sprawling collection of niche apps. Google Tag Manager, for instance, is now indispensable because it lets teams deploy and manage tags seamlessly. Companies are even dropping old webinar software when feedback is poor. The mindset is summarized by Sudhanshu Tripathi’s mantra: tools that do not improve user experience or outcomes are quickly phased out.
In short, India’s large enterprises are treating their MarTech stacks like living organisms: constantly trimmed, optimized and fed where needed. They are moving from marketing by feature sets to marketing by outcomes. Fewer licenses mean less training and integration overhead, and a clearer picture of customer journeys. The evidence suggests this lean approach pays dividends. Companies focusing on first-party data and real-time insights are finding consolidation gives them agility. And those embracing AI see big efficiency gains, with nearly half of firms deploying AI-driven analytics reporting up to 65 percent improvement in bottom-line metrics.
“MarTech is not just about amassing data,” observes Chirantan Sharma, “it is about using it effectively within the right context.” His point is echoed across industries: instead of piling on the next shiny app, focus on a unified platform that ties campaigns together. HDFC’s Oram emphasizes that a well-pruned stack still relies on powerful back-end complexity. In practice, Indian companies are increasingly putting less emphasis on raw tool count and more on interoperability and ROI metrics.
Globally, consultants advise that stack rationalization is essential to achieve marketing goals in an era of less. Businesses can save roughly 25 percent of marketing costs through consolidation. And a majority of marketing leaders plan to increase investment in generative AI this year, anticipating that it will deliver more value than stacking new apps. By culling obsolete systems now, firms hope to free up budgets for true innovation later.
In practical terms, India’s MarTech detox looks like this: if a tool is not heavily used, does not share data well, or adds unwieldy cost, it is on the chopping block. Email vendors with low deliverability get swapped, separate loyalty apps get folded into the CRM, and legacy personalization engines get replaced by AI-driven in-house solutions. The winners in a modern marketing stack tend to be those that earn quick wins or deliver unified data flow. Out go the “good enough” platforms and underused point solutions, and in come fewer, more strategic platforms that management can rally around.
The net effect is that MarTech budgeting and planning in Indian firms looks more like product roadmapping. Stakeholders demand that new tools solve a clear pain point and integrate with existing systems. Compliance is built in, and more teams are pushing in-house expertise — data engineers and analysts — to leverage the stack fully rather than constantly buying new SaaS licenses. As HDFC’s Deepak Oram notes, hiring “techno-functional” marketers who straddle the gap between analytics and campaigns is now as important as buying the software itself.
For Indian enterprise marketers, the message is clear: the era of bloat is ending. MarTech stacks are being treated not as trophies, but as tools to be streamlined. The pile-on mentality is giving way to surgical upgrades. One industry veteran sums up the zeitgeist: “We have an abundance of tools, so our focus in 2025 is on consolidation and simplification.” That shift, from flashy demos to sober results, is reshaping how India’s biggest brands invest in marketing. In the end, it is not the number of apps that matters, but how smartly they are used. By trimming the tech fat, these companies hope their next phase of growth will come not from more menus, but from using the right ingredients more effectively.
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