Embrace the virtue of restraint: Get more from what you already have
Confession
MarTech has never been my natural habitat. Mention Snowflake and I still picture something falling from the sky; mention a data warehouse and I picture a very large building. But I understand the attraction of new technology.
There’s always a new platform, a new capability, a new demo that makes something complicated look remarkably easy. And lately, of course, there’s AI. Put those two letters somewhere in the presentation and suddenly a perfectly ordinary piece of software acquires a faint glow.
The temptation is particularly strong when everyone else seems to be buying it. You hear about something at a conference. A colleague sends you an article. A vendor shows you a beautiful demonstration. Someone asks why we don’t have one.
And before long, the question becomes, should we buy it?
Perhaps there’s another question we should ask first. Are we getting everything we can from what we already have?
There’s good reason to ask. Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey found that organizations that responded are using just 49% of their MarTech capabilities. That means, collectively, we’re still shopping while half the cupboard is full.
Virtue
The opposite of lust is restraint.
For healthcare marketers, we define restraint as the discipline to fully utilize what you have before chasing what’s new.
That can sound rather joyless. Restraint conjures up images of denying yourself something you desperately want, but I don’t think of it that way.
Restraint doesn’t mean refusing to innovate or keeping outdated technology long after it has stopped serving you. And it certainly doesn’t mean ignoring a genuinely transformative new capability because someone has declared a moratorium on software.
It means making sure the problem requires a new tool before buying one.
We explored this at considerably greater length in our ebook, Stop the sprawl: maximizing your MarTech. The central idea is simple. Highly calibrated teams begin with the outcomes they’re trying to achieve, identify the capabilities required to achieve them, and then determine whether the tools they already own can do the job. Only then do they go shopping.
That’s restraint, but it’s also good system design.
Repentance
Before you add something to your MarTech stack, spend some time looking at the stack itself.
- Who owns each platform?
- Which capabilities are actually being used?
- Where do tools overlap?
- How well do data and workflows move between them?
- Do the people expected to use the technology know how to use it?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question, are we trying to solve a technology problem at all?
As Jamie Mermelstein puts it in Your stack works. Your system doesn’t, healthcare organizations have accumulated increasingly sophisticated technology while the architecture, governance, and measurement surrounding it haven’t always kept pace. In many cases, the constraint is the operating model, not the technology.
A new platform can be an appealing answer to a governance problem, a training problem, a process problem, or an ownership problem because buying something feels like progress. Unfortunately, the new tool arrives in the same organization that had the old problem. So now you have the old problem and another login. This is where restraint becomes useful.
It asks us to pause long enough to understand how the system operates before assuming the system needs another component. That may mean clarifying ownership. Fixing an integration. Training people on capabilities they didn’t know they had. Agreeing on which platform does what. Or finally switching on the functionality you’ve been paying for all along.
None as exciting as a product launch, but it’s considerably more valuable. And sometimes, after doing all of that, the answer really is we need something new. Good. Restraint isn’t a bias toward old technology any more than innovation should be a bias toward new technology. The goal is the right technology for the job.
If your existing platform can’t support an important workflow, creates persistent friction, lacks a capability tied to a real business objective or simply isn’t performing well enough, there may be an excellent case for something different.
The difference is that now you have a reason to buy it beyond desire.
One small act
The next time someone suggests a new piece of marketing technology, before the demo, ask one question. “What can’t we do today that this will allow us to do?”
Then check. Not what you think your current technology can do. Not what everyone vaguely remembers from implementation three years ago. Find out.
If the answer reveals a genuine capability gap tied to something you need to accomplish, you may have found a very good reason to invest.
If the answer is, “Well, technically we can already do that…”
You may be feeling the first little stirrings of lust.
Take a deeper look at how Lust shows up in healthcare marketing and how to embrace Restraint.
