Martech Utilisation Rebounded to 49% — Still Half Idle. Audit Before You Renew.

The number Gartner published in 2025

Marketing organisations are actively using just 49% of the capability their martech stack has been purchased for, per Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey. Flip that around and it reads plainer: on the average contract, the buyer is paying full price for a tool and using half of it.

This is not a new low. It’s a partial recovery. Gartner’s own trend line runs 58% in 2020, down to 42% in 2022, down further to 33% in 2023, then back up to 49% in 2025. Three straight years of getting worse at using what was bought, followed by a rebound that still hasn’t caught up to where the industry stood five years ago. Even inside that rebound, only 15% of organisations qualify as Gartner’s “high performers” — meeting strategic goals with martech, at positive ROI.

What changed between 2020 and now

The honest reason utilisation dropped is not laziness. It’s sprawl. The global martech landscape grew from roughly 150 solutions in 2011 to over 15,384 by 2025 — a hundredfold expansion in the number of tools a marketing team could plausibly buy. Procurement outran the operational capacity to run what got bought, industry-wide, for over a decade.

Gartner’s own diagnosis of the underlying causes, from the survey commentary, names three drivers in roughly equal measure: solution overlap (30%), difficulty hiring or retaining people to run the tools (28%), and sheer stack complexity (27%). None of those three is “the tool doesn’t work.” All three are operational — nobody owns it, nobody was trained on it, or it duplicates something else in the stack.

That matters for how you read your own renewal invoice. A tool sitting at 20% utilisation isn’t automatically a bad tool. It might be a tool nobody was ever assigned to run.

Note the sample: this trend comes from Gartner’s North American, UK, and European survey base. No India-specific Gartner martech utilisation figure exists in the public research. The pattern below is presented as a plausible extension to Indian D2C stacks — CDPs, WhatsApp commerce platforms, loyalty and personalisation layers — given the same tool-stacking behaviour is visible here, not as a measured Indian statistic.

Why this is the budget conversation to have now, not later

Martech isn’t a minor line item. Gartner’s CMO Spend data puts martech at roughly 23.8% of total marketing budget in 2024 — the largest or second-largest single spend category, level with paid media at 27.9%. Utilisation waste sits directly on top of the biggest controllable cost in the marketing budget, not a peripheral one.

And the budget itself is under more pressure than it was: Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found marketing budgets flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue, unchanged from 2024, and 59% of CMOs report insufficient budget to execute their strategy. Every rupee sitting in an idle feature is a rupee that isn’t funding the campaign someone is short on cash for.

A separate, non-Gartner ecommerce study corroborates the same shape of problem from a different angle: a SALESmanago-commissioned survey of 150+ UK, German, Spanish and Polish ecommerce marketing leaders found 99% report leaving key stack features unused, and 62% use only half to three-quarters of what’s available. In that same sample, 47% blame lack of time and only 17% blame lack of expertise — the fix, for most, is operational bandwidth, not more training. That study is a different sample from a different geography; it isn’t merged with the Gartner figure here, it’s cited alongside it because it points the same direction.

What it costs, worked in rupees

There is no published rupee figure for what Indian D2C brands specifically waste on unused martech — no one has audited that market. What follows is a labelled estimate, built from the 49% figure and a stated assumption, so you can run the same math on your own contracts.

Formula: Idle spend (₹) = Annual martech spend × (1 − Utilisation ÷ 100). At ₹8,00,000/year and 49% utilisation, that’s ₹4,08,000/year of paid-for-but-idle capability. [ESTIMATE — back-of-envelope math from the stated Gartner figure, not a researched rupee number.] The same brand at 2023’s low point of 33% utilisation would carry ₹5,36,000/year idle on the same ₹8L spend.

What idle capability costs at different stack sizes, at 49% utilisation

All four rows are estimates — arithmetic applied to the Gartner 49% figure at illustrative spend levels, not a sourced Indian rupee statistic.

Five ways this shows up in a D2C stack

1. The WhatsApp commerce suite bought during a funding round. A ₹40 crore-revenue D2C skincare brand signs a 12-month contract intending to run abandoned-cart, post-purchase upsell, and loyalty messaging. Eight months in, only abandoned-cart is live — the agency that configured it moved on before the rest was built.
2. The CDP nobody logs into. A marketplace-plus-D2C seller buys a customer data platform to unify order data across channels. The sync runs; segmentation and predictive-LTV modules sit unused because no one owns the tool day to day, and the growth marketer still builds ad audiences manually from spreadsheet exports.
3. The personalisation widget frozen at default settings. A beauty brand installs a recommendation engine before a sale event, sets up the default “customers also bought” block, and never touches the A/B testing, dynamic bundling, or cross-sell modules on the same top-tier licence.
4. The loyalty platform running one program out of five. A food/FMCG D2C brand licenses tiered rewards, referrals, subscriptions, and win-back on one contract. A year later, only the basic points-per-rupee program is live — referral and win-back, the two modules with the clearest ROI for a repeat-purchase category, were scoped and never built.
5. The attribution tool bought to settle an argument, then ignored. A performance-led brand buys multi-touch attribution after a founder-versus-media-buyer disagreement about which channel drives sales. The dashboard gets checked once a month at best — the tagging work needed to trust the model was never finished, so it’s paid for but not believed.

Before and after: the same brand, six months apart

The audit isn’t theoretical — running it on one real-shaped stack freed roughly ₹2.1L/year without cutting anything critical.

The audit: four questions before you renew anything

This doesn’t require a data team or a new tool purchase. It requires going through what you’re already paying for, one contract at a time, before the renewal window closes.

The risk you’re actually managing

Sorting your stack into the four boxes above, honestly, is the entire audit. Most teams have never drawn the matrix — they’ve only ever seen the invoice.

Gold is reserved for the quadrant that gets misread most often: low usage, high criticality. A fraud/COD-verification trigger or a disaster-recovery messaging flow can sit at near-zero usage and still be the most important thing under contract. Red is reserved for the pile that’s actually safe to cut — low usage, low criticality, the loyalty modules and personalisation tiers nobody ever configured.

AI is adding a new layer on top of the old problem

One more complication worth naming before the next renewal cycle: Gartner’s October 2025 survey found 45% of martech leaders say the AI agents already bundled into their existing tools fail to meet the performance vendors promised. Brands are now paying for an unproven AI layer bolted onto a stack they weren’t fully using to begin with. The fix isn’t buying the next AI add-on your vendor is upselling. It’s running the audit above on what’s already under contract before adding anything new to it.

“The martech landscape didn’t get harder to use. It got too big to use completely — and most contracts were never built to be cancelled easily once signed.” Framing drawn from Gartner’s cited underutilisation drivers — solution overlap, hiring difficulty, stack complexity — not a direct quote from a named individual.

Conclusion and next step

Half your stack sitting idle isn’t a reason to distrust every tool you own. It’s a reason to find out, contract by contract, which half. Gartner’s number is the industry average — your own audit is the only thing that tells you where your brand actually sits inside it, and the four-question framework above takes an afternoon, not a new platform purchase.

Next step: before your next renewal lands, run every tool under contract through the four-question audit and sort the failures into “idle and replaceable” versus “rare but critical” using the risk matrix. If the visual and creative side of your stack is part of what’s under review — the photography, the listing assets, the campaign creative that these platforms are meant to be delivering — a visual brand audit does the same exercise for the assets themselves, not just the software running them.