Everyday Reflections

One the key things which is going through an evolutionary cycle is the whole idea of getting to know our customer better through multiple touch points. Companies which have traditionally working in space of Campaign automation through multiple interfaces are making aggressive foray into this area by coming with cloud driven integrations to construct a 360 degree profile of the customers.

Customer data platforms (CDP) are gaining momentum faster than any other marketing technology, even though many marketers are not yet familiar with the technology, it promises to provide the key to comprehensive data-driven marketing, a very attractive marketing concept where all your customer data is combined for marketing (and other) uses.

This blog is intended to give you a brief overview of Customer Data Platforms(CDP) . The target audience are novice like me , who have not heard about this and are making effort to collect some facts to improve general knowledge around trends in area of marketing.

Without the data and the management of the data, the ‘marketing brain’ that allows for smarter campaigns simply can’t function. Bringing together the data is very important and here CDP comes into picture. The aim of the CDP is to bring together all customer data and stitch the data together into unified customer profiles, so a marketer can easily work with it.

From a business perspective the ownership of all customer touch points becomes increasingly important: Facebook & Co. often know more about a customer then the company how owns the data. To turn it around: The only chance to better personalize/customize the customer experience is the ownership of proprietary data and the ability to execute towards your business goals accordingly.

It is regular to hear that marketers have tools which can function as a hub or central place for customer data & yes there has certainly never been a shortage of technologies that claim to provide a ‘single customer view’or a ‘360 degree customer profile’ but in reality there hasn’t been one platform type out there that has the potential to bring together all the data and at the same time properly make it useful for the marketer.

Quote from David Raab, a respected martech analyst, was the first to define the CDP category in 2013, and the definition reads as follows:

“A customer data platform is a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.”

So, what is the difference with other systems?

The difference between a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and a Marketing Cloud (also called “Multi-Channel Campaign Management” by market research institute Gartner, or MCCM) is not always obvious to many marketers at first glance.

This is mainly because there are no fixed definitions for these terms and therefore the market has many providers scrambling for position, who vary from each other in terms of their focus. What follows is therefore a general definition of the two categories, to the extent that is possible.

A pictorial sum-up of what we have talked until is given below.

I will continue to collect and share more information on this topic , as I find or read more !