Beyond the AI Noise: Three MarTech Shifts That Matter for 2026
Unless you’ve been living on a desert island with no Wi-Fi, you know that in 2025 marketing was dominated by talk of AI. So instead of more predictions about generative or agentic AI, let’s look at three trends that will matter just as much in 2026.
Fractals Will Define the Future of Marketing
The marketing funnel is dead—not dying, not evolving, but dead. And every day you cling to it, you’re losing ground.
For decades, marketers have clung to funnels as a comforting fiction: awareness, consideration, conversion. It’s tidy, easy to explain, and utterly disconnected from how people actually behave. No customer moves neatly through those stages.
Real customer journeys are chaotic. They scroll TikTok while half-reading reviews, abandon carts for weeks, then buy after a friend’s comment. They loop, pause, re-enter, and skip channels entirely. Funnels don’t capture that reality—they simplify it out of existence.
A better model? Fractals. They’re messy, recursive patterns that repeat at every scale—just like human behavior. Every click, scroll, and share is a node in a repeating cycle of engagement, disengagement, and re-engagement. When visualized with the right data, those cycles look startlingly fractal.
The implications are serious:
- Budgets will continue to leak into channels that look good on slides but don’t reflect real decision patterns.
- Messaging will miss the moment because it’s tied to an imaginary “stage” instead of real behavior.
- Competitors using AI-powered fractal insights will spot influence points before you do.
The marketers who thrive next year won’t be funnel-builders—they’ll be pattern recognizers. They’ll design adaptive ecosystems that respond to the customer’s natural rhythm. The funnel won’t evolve. It will be replaced.
The MarTech Stack Will Start to Crumble
Marketers love their stacks. Slide after slide at conferences shows off neatly layered diagrams of platforms and connectors—as if that were a strategy.
Let’s be clear: Your MarTech stack is not your strategy. It never was. When you shape your strategy around your stack instead of the other way around, you surrender control to the tools.
Too many organizations make engagement choices not because they fit customer needs, but because “that’s what the platform can do.” Communication plans shrink to what the automation tool can push. Data strategy bends to what the data platform can handle. The result isn’t strategy; it’s submission.
That mindset made sense when stacks were monolithic and expensive to change. But in 2026, that’s no excuse. Modern marketing is composable. Composable MarTech means assembling flexible, best-in-class modules around your strategy—not the other way around.
Need deeper personalization? Plug in the right component. Want to unify data across silos? Add a composable data layer. Need to pivot tomorrow? Swap modules without rebuilding the whole system.
Composability gives back what marketers lost: ownership of strategy. If your “strategy” changes every time you switch vendors, you never had one—you had a dependency.
In 2026, winners won’t flaunt their stack diagrams like blueprints. They’ll understand that stacks are plumbing, not purpose. The true strategy will live in how you design experiences, solve customer problems, and build loyalty—not in which tools you license.
The Death of Demographics: Rise of the Individual
Marketers love labels—“Gen Z,” “Millennials,” “empty nesters.” They make the world seem tidy and predictable. But those labels are becoming meaningless.
Demographics reduce people to averages, and averages are where marketing goes to die. Customers don’t think of themselves as a demographic—they act as individuals, shaped by context and behavior.
A Gen Z shopper might act like their Gen X parent when buying a car. A retiree might behave like a college student online. Behavior, not birth year, drives decisions.
So here’s the uncomfortable question: Are you still marketing to stereotypes instead of humans?
To win in 2026, marketers must pivot from demographic targeting to behavioral individuality—real-time engagement based on what people do, not who you think they are. That requires three shifts:
- Curate the right data. Stop hoarding static attributes. Focus on behavioral signals like intent, frequency, and triggers.
- Invest in interpretation. Raw data isn’t insight. Build capabilities in analytics, data curation, and journey orchestration.
- Design for individuality. Stop asking “What do Millennials want?” Start asking “What does this person need right now, given what they just did?”
Most organizations are still drowning in demographic data but starving for behavioral insight. They can quote a customer’s age and postcode but can’t predict what action signals loyalty or churn. In 2026, the brands that break that pattern—that use behavioral data to personalize meaningfully at scale—will own the conversation.
Demographics aren’t dying because they’re useless; they’re dying because they’re lazy.
In 2026 AI will continue to dominate headlines, but it won’t be the only story. Strategy, empathy, and adaptability will remain the true competitive edge.
Mike Turner is principal business adviser, SAS Customer Intelligence. With more than 30 years of experience in marketing, Turner has worked across many different industry sectors leading mixed teams of creative and technical resources in marketing agencies, consultancy, and supply and demand side commercial businesses. Turner has led two startup marketing solution software organizations through their incubation and early development and supports two university Digital Marketing MSc courses in the U.K.