Joe Madafferi
The platforms that underpinned a decade of digital marketing investment are in active decline. Here's what that means for enterprise retailers — and what to do about it.
Australian retail is navigating one of its most difficult operating environments in a generation. Retail insolvencies rose 14.2% year-on-year in the six months to December 2024. Consumer confidence remains fragile. And the structural encroachment of Amazon, TikTok Shop, and Instagram continues to compress margin and erode direct customer relationships.
Against this backdrop, Composed Digital has released its first white paper, exploring these issues and how a composable martech stack leads to lower operational overhead, cleaner data flows, and new revenue streams that simply aren't available on the old stack. The paper is structured around a modelled business case, across four cost levers and two revenue levers. We've mapped out what a national retailer could realistically expect to see.
Below is an overview of the core arguments, but if you're ready to get into it...
Download the whitepaperThe platforms you're running on are running out of road
Oracle has exited the advertising business. Adobe has required it's customers to force migrate to new products. Salesforce is redirecting investment toward CRM and AI. Forrester has documented Oracle as "divesting from B2C marketing automation," and Gartner has observed that most large organisations are already in the midst of multi-year migrations away from fragmented legacy suites.
For the large number of Australian retailers still running on Responsys or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, this has become an active risk.
The cost of staying isn't just the licence fee, it's also the specialist contractor overhead required to maintain middleware dependencies. It's the engineering capacity consumed by workarounds. It's the campaign velocity lost to cumbersome, multi-system workflows. And it's the 30–50% premium you'll pay if you wait for a forced migration rather than planning one.
The response is composable architecture
The industry's answer to monolithic platform failure is composable architecture: the best components, connected through open APIs, anchored to a shared cloud data foundation, with a modern customer engagement platform at the orchestration layer. That orchestration layer is increasingly occupied by Braze.
Purpose-built for real-time, event-driven engagement across email, SMS, push, in-app messaging, WhatsApp and more Braze has been recognised as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs for three consecutive years (2023, 2024, and 2025).
The architecture matters because the alternative (patching channels together with point solutions) has a measurable cost. Research shows that 39% of brands that missed their revenue goals were using disconnected point solutions. Top-performing brands are 16% more likely to use three or more coordinated channels. And retailers engaging customers through even one coordinated owned channel versus none see a 2.2× uplift in 90-day retention.
Beyond channels: personalisation, CX, and retail media
Channel breadth is only part of the story. The white paper explores three further dimensions of value that a modern engagement platform unlocks.
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Personalisation as a revenue instrument
Retailers who personalise consistently see a 10–15% revenue lift just from getting offers and content right. Critically, these gains don't require blanket discounting, personalisation allows retailers to focus incentives only on the customers who actually need them to convert, protecting margin while driving net new revenue. Braze supports integrated holdout groups to measure incremental lift, which means the engagement programme becomes a provable revenue lever rather than a cost centre. -
The full customer experience layer
Personalisation shouldn't sit only with the marketing function. Post-purchase communications, service notifications and loyalty milestones are among the highest-engagement touchpoints a retailer owns, yet they're routinely treated as transactional afterthoughts. When Braze sits at the orchestration layer across the full customer experience, loyalty events become real-time triggers, delivery delays become proactive notifications, and the customer stops experiencing the friction of your org chart. -
Retail media
That same first-party asset base (the loyalty programme, the app, the transactional email programme) is also a monetisable media network. A retailer's owned channels provide direct, authenticated access to a known, purchase-ready audience that can be packaged and sold to brand partners as premium inventory. Woolworths' Cartology and Coles' 360 have already demonstrated the potential for this at scale.
The financial case is compelling at enterprise scale
In our new white paper, we model the business case for migration against a national retailer generating approximately $38 billion in annual sales. The case is structured across six dimensions: platform overhead, point solution consolidation, cross-channel retention uplift, operational efficiency, retail media revenue, and forced migration risk avoidance.
The headline numbers:
- ~$2.83M p.a. in recurring cost savings from year two — contractually avoidable through vendor termination and headcount redeployment
- ~$62.7M p.a. in addressable revenue opportunity across cross-channel retention and retail media
These are modelled conservatively from publicly available financial data and published industry benchmarks. The framework, not the specific figures, translates to any enterprise retailer building their own case.
The window to move on your own terms is narrowing
Retailers who move first will build the data and channel infrastructure that makes every subsequent investment (loyalty, retail media, AI-powered personalisation) compound rather than start from scratch.
The most effective first step is not a vendor evaluation. It's an honest audit of the current state: what your existing stack actually costs in total, where the integration friction sits, and what personalisation and channel capabilities are currently out of reach.
Download the full white paper — From Legacy to Lifecycle: Braze, composable architecture and the future of retail customer engagement in Australia — to get the complete financial model, the six-dimension business case framework, and an Australian department store case study.
Download the whitepaper