How Marketers Become Super-Marketers: 5 Lessons From the ET Martech Summit

In today’s world, marketing is about creating consistent, meaningful experiences across every touchpoint. At the ET MarTech Summit 2025, Raj Iyer, EVP and Portfolio GM – Business and Industry Solutions at HCLSoftware, set out to decode how technology and strategy can turn everyday marketers into super-marketers.

Here Are the Five Biggest Takeaways From That Conversation.

1. Relevance is the New Reach

Marketers have spent years chasing reach, getting in front of as many people as possible, across as many channels as possible. But today, that game is changing fast.

Customers today are bombarded with messages across various channels, and most of them are generic and automated. As AI produces content at scale, attention is becoming a scarce resource.

Raj captured the sentiment perfectly.

That’s the new customer mindset. They care about how relevant you are and not how loud you are. Modern marketing is not about sending more messages; it’s about sending the right one at the right time.

Customers now expect:

• Empathy: Communication that understands where they are, not just what they did.
• Personalization: Something that genuinely improves their experience, not just adds their name to a template.
• Privacy-first engagement: Where sharing data feels safe and trust is earned, not assumed.

Attention now follows relevance, not frequency.

2. Experience has Become the Product

Experience (X) isn’t just about customers; it’s the foundation of every intelligent connection.

AI’s primary purpose should be to enhance human experiences, improving customer, employee, and partner experiences, and even machine-to-machine interactions across connected systems.

What customers remember about a brand today isn’t a campaign, a discount, or a feature. It’s how the brand makes them feel.

That feeling, present in every email, app, ad, and interaction, is the experience. It’s the sum of every promise kept, every moment of convenience, and every frictionless journey.

Raj Iyer on experience as a product.

The real advantage lies in how well brands use data and insights to deliver context, not just content.

Raj explained it through a simple formula: Experience × Data × Operations (XDO). Where experience delivers the promise, data fuels understanding, and operations make it repeatable.

When marketing feels seamless, experience stops being a byproduct; it becomes the brand itself.

3. Consistency Makes the Real Competitive Advantage

Marketers chase innovation, but customers often reward consistency. Customers might not notice when things go right, but they always remember when they don’t. They might forgive a missed offer, but not a broken experience they faced.

Maintaining consistency across channels and teams is hard. It demands connected data and intelligence that gets the customer’s context. When everything works in sync, marketing stops feeling like a series of campaigns and becomes one continuous brand experience.

The takeaway is that marketing success is not about doing more; it's about doing the right things.

4. A Bigger Martech Stack Doesn’t Mean Smarter Marketing

Walk into any marketing team today, and you’ll see dashboards everywhere. Campaign tools, analytics platforms, CRMs, CDPs, automation suites. It looks powerful on the surface, but underneath, it’s often chaos.

Many marketers already feel that there are too many tools and too little connection. Most enterprises now run 30–40 different platforms.
Raj’s advice on this was simple.

The insight is powerful. Stop adding tools, start connecting them.

5. AI Won’t Replace Marketers. It’ll Redefine Them.

HCL Unica+ has AI that enhances marketing, making it less mechanical and more human at its core. We understand this through five principles: A, B, C, D, E— AI-first, Brand-new experiences, Cloud-native flexibility, Data-driven action, and Everyday simplicity.

HCL Unica+, an AI marketing automation platform,brings these to life through AI agents like Max, the marketer’s assistant. Max helps analyze campaigns, create audience segments, and generate content using natural, conversational prompts. To see how HCL Unica+ brings these ideas to life, explore it here.

AI amplifies human judgment rather than replacing it.

The Future Belongs to the Super-Marketers

The common thread across Raj Iyer's points: technology hasn't reduced the need for human insight in marketing, it's increased it.

It’s no longer about chasing reach or stacking more tools. It’s about earning attention through relevance, creating harmony between systems, and designing experiences that feel effortless and real. And as AI steps in, it’s not to replace creativity, but to give it room to grow.

The marketers who’ll lead this next chapter, “The Super-marketers,” will be the ones who use intelligence to connect with empathy, simplify with purpose, and make every interaction feel just a little more human.

Watch the complete interview on YouTube.