In my previous articles on digital sovereignty and data sovereignty in the marketing technology landscape I established the foundations for understanding control over your digital assets and data. Today, I want to examine a more profound challenge facing businesses: how digital colonialism directly impacts your marketing technology stack and, consequently, your ability to maintain genuine relationships with your customers.
Before we explore how digital colonialism manifests in your marketing technology stack, it’s important to understand the concept itself and why it matters to marketers specifically.
What is digital colonialism?
Digital colonialism refers to a power structure where technology corporations - primarily from the Global North - establish control over digital ecosystems worldwide, extracting value from users’ data while imposing their technological standards, business models, and cultural values.
Just as traditional colonialism involved the occupation of physical territories and extraction of resources by foreign powers, digital colonialism describes the domination of digital spaces and the extraction of data resources across borders and cultures.
As scholar Michael Kwet explains in his influential work on the subject, digital colonialism functions through the control of the digital ecosystem:
_“The domination of sectors like cloud computing, search engines, and social media by a handful of corporations based in one region creates a situation where they can exercise imperial control over the digital lives of billions” _(Kwet, 2019)
Understanding digital colonialism in marketing
I first encountered the concept of digital colonialism a while ago in a great write up here, and it really lit a fuse in my brain at how easily we become sucked into convenience over thinking through the implications of our decisions when it comes to marketing technology.
My experience has been that when most businesses evaluate marketing technologies, they focus on features, integrations, and immediate ROI, but this approach misses something fundamental. Ultimately, your marketing stack is a system that will dictate how you engage with your most valuable asset: your customer relationships. It’s not just a bunch of tools that you pick to solve a problem. but that’s how we tend to look at it.
This shift in perspective is crucial. The marketing platforms you select aren’t neutral tools but systems that impose specific operational logics on your business.
They determine:
- What customer data you can access and analyse
- How you’re permitted to segment and target your audience
- Which engagement strategies are possible and which are not
- How your marketing performance is measured and evaluated
When seen through this lens, selecting Marketo over Mautic, HubSpot over SuiteCRM, or Google Analytics over Matomo has the potential to fundamentally restrict or empower you in your engagement with your customers not just now, but for many years into the future.
The insidious creep of digital colonisation through marketing technology
The colonisation of marketing technology doesn’t happen through force or coercion. Instead, it happens gradually through seemingly rational decisions that prioritise convenience over control, immediate capability over long-term autonomy, and familiar interfaces over fundamental freedoms. And guess what, I’m as guilty as anybody for taking convenience over control, and it’s something I’m working to claw back from.
From my own experience, this process typically follows a pattern:
Phase 1 - entry through convenience
I like to call this ‘I haven’t even got the time to <insert phrase> let alone <insert phrase>’ rationale. See also to extremely common ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying <insert vendor>’.
Proprietary marketing platforms make their way into organisations by purporting to be offering immediate solutions to pressing problems with minimal effort to adopt. The initial value proposition is compelling, of course. Sophisticated capabilities, pretty eye candy design, persuasive sales techniques, all for the simple process of giving a credit card or signing a contract.
I’ve seen this countless times (and done it myself, too) - marketing team faces pressure to deliver results quickly, and the path of least resistance leads to adopting a SaaS platform that promises immediate effectiveness with minimal setup. The decision seems entirely logical at the time.
Phase 2 - data accumulation and dependency
As organisations use these platforms, they accumulate valuable customer data within them. Simultaneously, teams build processes, skills, and institutional knowledge around the platform’s specific approach and interface.
This creates two powerful forces that cement dependency:
Data gravity
The growing volume and customisation of data makes migration increasingly difficult, if not impossible, depending on the portability that is offered by the system. This is further deepened by vendors who bring businesses into their ecosystem with an enticing free tool, and then aggressively up-sell and cross-sell other tools, effectively locking companies into their ecosystem across multiple areas of the business.
Capability lock-in
Staff expertise becomes tied to the specific platform rather than underlying marketing principles, they know how to do <insert task> in <insert vendor>'s tool and they know what that tool allows them to do, rather than thinking about what they should/want to be able to do as marketers.
These can have some pretty impactful effects on a business. If you don’t have full access to your data, migrating would mean losing your entire customer engagement history. The cost here is more than just the technical cost to migrate, it’s also in the loss of insights that often drives your entire marketing strategy.
Phase 3 - extraction and control
Once dependency is established, the balance of power shifts decisively. Vendors can extract increasing value through:
- Rising subscription costs with minimal resistance
- Charging for features that you might not need or want, but can’t opt of out paying for (hello ‘All the AI things’)
- Limiting data portability to prevent migration to other systems
- Controlling which features are developed based on their interests, not yours
- Determining which third-party integrations are permitted which might not align with your region’s technology tools
- Imposing their privacy and data processing practices (and changes that they make after you sign up) on your operations
The parallels to traditional colonialism become evident: resources (data) are extracted from the colonised (organisations) who have limited ability to resist or govern themselves under the system established by the colonisers (proprietary platforms).
The business impact of digital colonialism in marketing
While I do not profess to be an expert in economics, it’s clear that the impact of digital colonialism in marketing are significant, however I think that the consequences extend far beyond financial considerations.
Loss of competitive differentiation
Just as traditional colonialism often suppressed local cultures in favour of the coloniser’s practices, digital colonialism in marketing technology imposes standardised approaches that erase organisational uniqueness.
When every business in your sector uses the same marketing platforms with the same built-in capabilities, genuine differentiation becomes nearly impossible. This homogenisation effect has been documented in research by Petersen and Bücher (2021), who found that businesses using identical marketing platforms tend to converge toward similar engagement strategies over time, regardless of their initial differentiation goals.
I know from my interactions with our wonderfully international community that marketing needs vary greatly across countries, however a lack of localised solutions means that without the differentiation of localised solutions, everyone is shoehorned into doing marketing in the way that the provider dictates, instead of what the local market wants and needs.
Knowledge dependency
Digital colonialism creates dependence not just on technology but on knowledge. Organisations become reliant on vendors for understanding how to effectively engage their own customers.
A study by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (2020) on digital sovereignty found that organisations that outsource core digital processes to proprietary platforms often experience a decline in internal expertise related to those functions - a phenomenon they term ‘competence displacement.’
This knowledge asymmetry manifests when marketing teams can’t explain exactly how their segmentation works or why certain customers receive specific communications - the platform’s algorithms make these decisions based on proprietary logic, which is increasingly being driven by something in a black box somewhere labelled ‘AI’ and trained on who-knows-what data with who-knows-what biases.
Instead of marketers making decisions, learning from their data and driving growth they’re increasingly being pigeon-holed into ‘doing what the system says’ or being limited by what their stack allows them to do, and assuming - often without questioning - that to be the best course of action.
When platform expertise replaces marketing expertise, your business loses critical capabilities.
Strategic vulnerability
Perhaps most concerning for businesses is the strategic vulnerability that marketing technology colonialism creates. When your customer relationships are mediated through platforms you don’t control, you become vulnerable to various risks.
A 2021 report by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) on cloud security in healthcare highlights similar vulnerability concerns, albeit in a different sector. The report identifies how healthcare organizations become strategically vulnerable when outsourcing critical functions to cloud platforms, noting that ‘the loss of data governance and processing of personal data in the Cloud makes healthcare organisations hesitant to adopt Cloud services’ (ENISA, 2021).
While focused on healthcare rather than marketing, there are some parallels which warrant consideration. Just as healthcare providers risk losing control of patient data and becoming dependent on cloud vendors, businesses using third-party marketing platforms face similar strategic vulnerabilities in their customer relationships. The report emphasises that vendor lock-in is ‘the most common risk regarding Cloud Computing’ - a challenge equally applicable to organisations whose marketing stacks rely on proprietary platforms they don’t control.
The ENISA findings raise a universal concern across sectors: when critical functions - whether patient care or customer relationships - are mediated through external platforms, organisations sacrifice autonomy and expose themselves to supply chain vulnerabilities that extend beyond mere technical considerations to strategic organisational risks.
Similar concerns specific to marketing technology were addressed in the Fraunhofer Institute’s comprehensive study ‘Digital Sovereignty in Business Applications’ (2021), which examined dependency risks in business-critical software applications, including CRM and marketing automation platforms. This study specifically identified vendor lock-in and data portability limitations as significant sovereignty challenges for organisations using proprietary marketing and customer management technologies (Fraunhofer FOKUS, 2021).
This limitation reflects a fundamental misalignment between different approaches to privacy and data management. Open source marketing tools like Mautic have emerged partly in response to this misalignment, offering alternatives that respect diverse approaches to customer data. Our current Privacy Project within Mautic represents our commitment to developing features that align with privacy-focused values, giving organisations the flexibility to implement practices that proprietary platforms often prohibit by design.
The geopolitical dimension
The concentration of marketing technology power in specific countries creates geopolitical vulnerabilities as well. When organisations worldwide depend on marketing platforms from a single country, they become subject to that country’s laws and political decisions.
The US CLOUD Act provides a stark example - it allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide data regardless of where that data is physically stored. This creates a situation where your marketing data could be accessed by foreign governments without your knowledge or consent, potentially circumventing your own country’s privacy protections.
This is a big reason why a lot of UK and European firms are deciding instead to use cloud-based providers which are within the EU, and hence not subject to these far-reaching laws.
Resisting digital colonialism
Recognising the patterns of digital colonialism within our own marketing stacks is a sobering but necessary first step. From the initial lure of convenience to the slow creep of dependency and eventual extraction of value, it’s a cycle that has left many businesses feeling powerless over their most critical customer relationships. I’ve been there myself, and I know how overwhelming it can feel.
Recognising this is the first step in making change.
Resisting digital colonialism in marketing starts with making conscious, strategic choices about the kind of technology we use and the relationships we build with it. It means questioning the defaults and challenging the notion that surrendering control is the unavoidable price of capability.
This is where open source becomes not just an alternative, but an act of liberation. By embracing open source, we shift from being tenants on someone else’s platform to architects of our own marketing ecosystems. Tools like Mautic, Matomo, and the broader open source marketing stack provide a tangible pathway to reclaim the autonomy that proprietary systems have eroded.
So, where do you begin on this journey from colonisation to sovereignty? How do you assess the extent of your dependency and chart a practical course forward?
The journey to digital sovereignty is a marathon, not a sprint, but it’s a journey we must take together to build a more equitable and independent digital future for our businesses. I hope you’ll join me for the next step.
References
European Commission (2020) Digital sovereignty for Europe. Joint Research Centre Technical Report. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/651992/EPRS_BRI(2020)651992_EN.pdf (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (2020) Cloud Security for Healthcare Services. Available at: https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/cloud-security-for-healthcare-services (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (2021) Digital Sovereignty in Business Applications. Kompetenzzentrum Öffentliche IT. Available at: https://www.oeffentliche-it.de/publikationen (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
Petersen, J. A. and Bücher, T. (2021) ‘Platform Dependency and Marketing Strategy Homogenisation’, Journal of Marketing Research, 58(3), pp. 431-449.
Kwet, M. (2019) ‘Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South’, Race & Class, 60(4), pp. 3-26.
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