Martech is blind to the wrong intent.
It would be too easy, and not quite true, to say that martech is blind to intent. Martech sees a great deal of intent — just not the kind that matters most, at the moment it matters most. The distinction is worth getting exactly right, because it determines where a brand looks for its next customer.
Martech sees declared intent: preferences, surveys, wishlists, sizes, categories, loyalty choices. It sees historical intent: what the customer bought, how much they spent, when they last transacted, what their basket contained. And it sees on-surface intent: what they clicked, browsed, searched, added to cart or abandoned on the brand’s own property. This is valuable — it is the foundation for personalisation, replenishment, recommendations and lifecycle marketing. For an engaged customer it is a rich picture.
But it is not enough, because the most valuable intent a brand can act on is rarely the intent expressed inside the brand’s own walls. It is the re-entry signal: the moment a past customer begins thinking about the category again after a period of silence. A skincare buyer starts researching sunscreens before summer. A grocery customer’s household needs change. An insurance customer begins comparing renewals. A jewellery customer starts browsing gifting ideas before a festival.
Where re-entry first appears
Where does that intent first appear? Almost never in the brand’s own email, app or website. It appears in search, in social, in marketplace browsing, in comparison content and review sites, in creators and partner brands, in payments and travel and adjacent categories. It leaks into the world long before it shows up on a surface the brand controls. That is the gap. Martech sees the intent a customer chooses to express on a surface you own; adtech sees the intent that leaks into the world — and the most expensive version of that leakage is when the customer is already known to you. The richer a brand’s owned data, the easier it becomes to forget how partial it is.
The gap, stated precisely
So the problem is not that martech is blind to intent. It sees plenty of it: what a customer has told you, what they have bought before, and what they do on your own email, app and website. What it cannot see is the intent that shows up somewhere else — a past customer starting to look at the category again on a marketplace, in a search, or on a rival’s email. That blind spot is not about working harder or buying better tools. It comes down to where the data is created: a CRM can only record what happens on your own surfaces, so it cannot watch a customer comparing prices on Amazon or reading a competitor’s newsletter. Better segmentation will not fix it, because the gap is one of coverage, not analysis.
This is exactly why the two costliest customers are the ones martech loses sight of: the one who has just bought, and the one who has gone quiet. Both, almost by definition, do their next-purchase thinking somewhere you cannot see. A brand that mistakes its rich view of on-surface behaviour for the whole picture will keep being caught out — most painfully by its own former customers, walking back into the market without it noticing.
