I spent years working in and around Adobe and Salesforce ecosystems, so I’m deeply familiar with how enterprise marketing suites are bought, implemented, and defended. Complaints about large vendors aren’t new. What is new is the intensity, consistency, and scale of the frustration I’m hearing from large enterprises right now.
Across conversations with marketing leaders at massive companies, a clear pattern has emerged. They’ve poured millions of dollars into marketing suites like Adobe Experience Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, yet adoption is low, flexibility is limited, and the promised returns rarely materialize. Teams feel stuck, slowed down, and increasingly constrained by tools that were supposed to simplify their work. Several people I spoke with used the same phrase to describe this moment: Suite Fatigue.
This isn’t just anecdotal. When a company like Adobe sees its stock price fall roughly 40% over two years, it signals more than market volatility. It reflects growing skepticism about whether the suite model still delivers the value it once promised. What I’m hearing from the field confirms that skepticism. In fact, insight from in-depth conversations with 52 enterprise teams showed 94% of teams report frustration with their marketing suite, while 79% cite challenges related to complexity, cost, and vendor lock-in.
Generational Shift
Many organizations feel they’re paying more every renewal cycle while getting less in return. Tools are difficult to use without specialists. Features that look compelling in demos don’t translate into real operational improvement. In some cases, teams are sitting on expansive licenses for products that few people actually use.
There’s also a generational shift underway that’s accelerating this tension. When my generation entered the workforce, Microsoft was the default for nearly everything. The next generation grew up using Google Workspace and modular, cloud-based tools. Younger marketing leaders are questioning infrastructure decisions made long before they arrived. They’re asking why their organizations are locked into $10 million or $20 million annual contracts, why switching vendors feels nearly impossible, and why flexibility was traded for a sense of safety that no longer exists.
Suite Fatigue
The image I keep coming back to is a CMO with a ball and chain around their ankle, dragging a bloated marketing suite behind them. That’s what Suite Fatigue feels like in practice. Progress is possible, but every step forward is slower and more painful than it needs to be.
Price is the most obvious pain point, but it’s rarely the only one. Consider a common scenario within Adobe’s ecosystem. A company wants to improve journey optimization, so they purchase Adobe Journey Optimizer. Then they learn it requires Adobe Experience Platform, which significantly increases cost. Next, they discover that activating audiences requires yet another product, Adobe Real-Time CDP. What starts as a modest purchase quickly turns into a multi-million-dollar commitment. Instead of buying one integrated solution for $10 million upfront, companies are pulled into a series of smaller purchases that ultimately add up to the same spend.
This tight interdependence between products creates constant friction. Teams feel trapped between buying additional tools they didn’t plan for or limiting what they can actually execute.
Platform Complexity
At the same time, Adobe is maintaining multiple versions of core products like email and analytics because many customers don’t want to upgrade. Newer versions are often more expensive and remove capabilities teams still rely on. Forcing migrations risks customer churn, as Google experienced when it pushed users off legacy Analytics. As a result, transitions are slow-rolled, older products are kept alive, and customers are left navigating a confusing mix of dependencies where using one tool often requires buying or avoiding another.
Another major source of frustration is how long-term customers feel they’re treated. After 10, 15, or 20 years, many vendors assume dependency. Support quality declines, prices rise, and accountability weakens. Several leaders described the relationship as one-sided, where the primary reason they stay isn’t value, but how painful and disruptive it would be to leave. Difficulty uninstalling the suite becomes the vendor’s strongest defense.
Complexity compounds all of this. These platforms have grown so intricate that teams often need dedicated specialists or external consultants just to operate day to day. Large consulting firms are incentivized to push these tools, even when they know they’re bloated and inefficient, because complexity drives consulting revenue. Simpler tools are better for customers, but less attractive to service-heavy business models.
Action is Required
Many organizations know the cost of waiting is rising. Falling behind more agile competitors, missing opportunities, and being constrained by legacy infrastructure all carry real consequences. Yet resistance remains strong, often because careers and expertise are tied to these platforms.
That resistance is starting to erode. As leaders who championed these suites retire or move on, a new generation is stepping in with far less allegiance. For them, replacing a legacy stack isn’t reckless. It’s a chance to reset, regain flexibility, and build a system that matches how marketing actually operates today. They’re not anti-suite. They’re anti being treated like an annuity.
This shift is also being accelerated by data architecture. Customer data is increasingly centralized in cloud warehouses, not scattered across marketing tools. AI depends on clean, unified data to deliver meaningful results. As the warehouse becomes the center of gravity, the logic of tightly coupled, closed marketing suites becomes harder to defend. Platforms like Snowflake and Databricks are quietly reshaping where marketing infrastructure begins.
Suite Fatigue isn’t about collapse. It’s about reassessment. Marketing suites once reduced risk by simplifying a fragmented ecosystem. Today, they increasingly concentrate risk by locking data, workflows, and innovation into a single vendor’s roadmap. For many organizations, the harder question is no longer whether switching is painful, but whether waiting is even more costly.
Adam Greco is one of the leaders of the data industry. As one of Omniture’s earliest customers and employees and a data consultant, he has helped thousands of organizations improve their digital properties through data. Adam has blogged extensively about data and authored the preeminent book on Adobe Analytics. Adam has held strategic roles at Salesforce, Amplitude, and several other leading organizations. He has served as a board member of several data technology providers and has won several awards from the Digital Analytics Association. Adam is a product evangelist at Hightouch, where he helps leading organizations strategize around using data to accelerate growth.
