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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsA martech vendor’s category label is a positioning choice, not evidence of what the product can do. The more reliable check is whether dated release notes and product documentation show the capability the label describes, especially in the months around a rename. That is the core argument of Gene De Libero’s article “Martech category labels don’t mean anything anymore,” published September 24, 2026 and attributed to MarTech. The article tests the idea on digital experience platform (DXP) vendors, and its findings are worth understanding before you act on any new category name.
What the article argues
De Libero’s claim is that a vendor’s self-selected category label has become a weak proxy for the product. Vendors choose labels to win attention and place themselves in a market story, and those labels can move quickly as trends change. A label may describe where a company wants buyers to see it, where its product was in the past, or where it is heading. The article’s practical advice is to evaluate dated product changes rather than treat a new label as proof of capability.
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How the evidence was gathered
The article’s comparison has a specific scope, and it is worth knowing its boundaries before generalizing from it:
- Yearly homepage captures were reviewed for 24 content and experience platform vendors across 2020 to 2026. Usable archive results were available for 23 of them.
- All 17 vendors in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, published January 28, 2025, were checked. For each, current homepage language was compared with product release notes.
- Two of the 17 vendors had no dated changelog the author could access, so they were assessed from product documentation instead.
- Homepage wording was captured on September 12, 2026. The vendors are not named in the article.
The article is a reported case study, not an independently audited census of the martech market. The author’s sample is small, one vendor’s documentation was spread across roughly seven products of which only two were reviewed, and the findings rest on the author’s reading of public material. The article’s full text was not independently reproduced for this piece.
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What the DXP comparison found
The counts below come from De Libero’s article and cover the 17 DXP vendors in the Magic Quadrant comparison.
| Measure | Result (of 17 vendors) |
|---|---|
| Homepage led with AI or agentic language | 11 |
| AI capability the author could verify | 13 |
| No AI capability found | 3 |
| Inconclusive | 1 |
| Homepage category language matched the product | 11 |
| Homepage language overstated the product | 3 |
| Homepage language understated the product | 3 |
The pattern is not one-directional. Labels were more often right than wrong in this sample, but the errors ran in both directions, so a buyer cannot assume that every new label is empty or that every unlabeled capability is missing.
Overstatement, understatement and repositioning
An overstated “agentic” label
The article’s clearest example of overstatement concerns one vendor that adopted an “agentic” label. In the six months afterward, its changelog contained 53 entries, of which only four mentioned AI. The label was prominent; the release output was mostly something else. A buyer who read only the homepage would have a very different picture from one who read the changelog.
Labels that understate the product
The other direction matters just as much. The article counts three vendors whose language undersold what the product could do. For a buyer, an absent AI label is therefore a prompt to check documentation, not a verdict that the capability is missing.
Repositioning over time
Historical homepage captures show how often a vendor has changed its story. Of the 24 vendors reviewed, 23 had usable archive results. According to the article, one vendor used six different identities across six years. A changing label on its own does not prove the product is weak, but a long run of identity changes is a reason to ask what stayed constant underneath.
Industry statistics cited in the article
The article also reports figures from Wynter, a B2B message-testing firm. These are presented as reported by De Libero, and the underlying Wynter report was not independently reviewed for this piece:
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- 99% of B2B software homepages claim AI, according to Wynter as reported by De Libero (2026).
- 86% of homepages claim to save time, according to the same attribution.
- The average messaging overlap among category leaders is 57%, according to the same attribution.
- In a separate exercise, 100 B2B marketing leaders were asked to match anonymized value propositions from five leading CRM products to their brands. Respondents scored an average of 1.86 out of 5, according to the same attribution.
Taken together, these figures suggest that claims cluster around the same language, which is why a label rarely distinguishes one product from another on its own.
What practitioners said
The article quotes two people from the industry. Scott Brinker, who publishes the marketing technology landscape graphic, is cited from a June 2022 episode of the Customer Data Perspectives podcast. Per the article, he described category boxes as “a way for an analyst to think about an industry,” adding that “companies don’t care about those boxes.” He also said: “Everybody wants to be their own category creator and have a category of one. It’s a mess.” The recording itself was not checked for this article.
Best Value
Peep Laja, CEO of Wynter, is quoted as saying: “Your positioning isn’t bad because it’s wrong. It’s bad because it’s interchangeable.” The quote is reproduced as it appears in De Libero’s article.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to test a category label
The article’s advice translates into a short procedure you can run on any vendor you are evaluating:
- Record the category name the vendor uses today, from the homepage and from its main product pages.
- Find an archived copy of the homepage from the year the name first appeared, and note the wording that changed.
- Pull the vendor’s dated release notes for the twelve months around that change. Ask: what changed in the product the month the name changed?
- Count how many release-note entries actually support the new category, and what each one delivers. Ask: how many of the release notes support the new category?
- For each capability you care about, mark whether it is generally available, in beta, or only planned. Planned features in a roadmap should not count as shipped capability.
- If the vendor’s documentation is split across several products, map which product carries each capability instead of assuming the whole suite has it.
- If there are no dated release notes you can access, treat the product documentation as the primary evidence and note that the evidence is weaker.
The question underneath all of this is simple: does the name still describe the product? If the answer depends on the homepage alone, the label is not enough to decide.
The Tool Desk
Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Comparison axes for shortlisting vendors
When comparing vendors, use these evidence axes instead of category names alone:
- Stated category versus documented capability: does the product documentation support the label?
- Release-note evidence around a rename: did the product change when the name did?
- Accessibility of notes: are the release notes dated and publicly reachable?
- Availability: is each capability generally available, in beta, or only planned?
- Documentation completeness: does the public documentation cover every product you would buy?
The article does not provide a named-vendor scorecard, so these axes are a method rather than a ranking.
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