The Holy Grail. Originally a title given to the cup used by Christ at the last supper, which has been much sought after but never found, this term has come to represent something extremely difficult – perhaps impossible – to find or get. For many years, marketers around the globe have been attempting to realize their own Holy Grail of ‘real-time, cross-channel marketing’, yet many have failed in this quest. Now, a marketing tool has emerged that promises to make this dream a reality: the Customer Data Platform.

Data privacy is a hot topic these days, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcing stricter guidelines for the use of personal data for EU citizens and the forthcoming California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) offering stringent powers to consumers who feel that their personal data has been misused.

These data management regulations, and similar laws in countries like Australia, Japan and Brazil, are starting to put pressure on organizations to establish systems and processes that demonstrate the responsible use of customer data.

Although it faces some competition from the Scott Brinker Supergraphic, Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising’ is arguably the most awaited martech and adtech market visualization of the year. While the Supergraphic is one dimensional and doesn’t really say a lot about a product’s journey, the Hype Cycle plots the reality versus the myth of every technology wave.

Gartner is able, through its global presence and position of authority, to accurately measure the technology talking points of the moment (CDP, DMP, machine learning, etc.) and provide estimated timelines for these innovations to reach the stage where customers will start to see their maximum value. Similarly, the Hype Cycle will alert the market to anything that has hyped too far and predict its obseletion, i.e. that it will cease to be talked about and developed, before it reaches maturity.

Over the past three years, there has been a lot of confusion about what a Customer Data Platforms (CDP) can and can't do, and subsequently what benefits a CDP can bring to a company. Here are the 5 most frequently asked questions about Customer Data Platforms:

1. Can I use our home grown solution to create CDP-like benefits?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) will typically be controlled and used solely by the marketing team, so the information stored will be customer-related (contact information, customer activities/behaviors and transactions). Its raison d’être is to create a Single Customer View (SCV) by normalizing the customer data collected from marketing and operational systems across the business, and drawing together all known information about the customer into one ‘Golden Record’. During the Single Customer View creation process the CDP will cleanse the data, correct incorrect or inconsistent formatting, and merge duplicate entries. The data is also persistent, which means that it is retained indefinitely (unless required to be removed by law), including every change or process, which is then timestamped for 100% traceability.

Customer Data Platform series: 5 of 5

Over the next 5 weeks, read a new blog each week from our CDP Series as our CMO helps you to understand the CDP landscape, capabilities and functionality.

Let's just get something straight; it's common (and understandable) to assume that 'tag management' means organizing either the tags that make blogs more searchable or the meta tags used to improve the SEO of a web page. That isn't what we're talking about here.

This blog focuses on management of the snippets of code (tags) embedded into a web page to record information when a customer accesses and interacts with a company’s website or mobile app, or to help launch the functionality of marketing technology products. In the latter case, the vendor of the martech will request that the customer embeds the code. Just like a Customer Data Platform, the main function of a Tag Management System is to help manage large amounts of first-party information collected by companies about their customers. 

If you're looking for some solid statistics to help convince your company's directors that businesses with Customer Data Platforms (CDP) perform better than those without, then look no further. In 2019, BlueVenn and London Research surveyed close to 200 businesses with revenue of $50 million or above to find out how companies are using CDPs to improve their performance and customer journey. Arguably, the most interesting finding is that CDP owners are 2.5 times more likely to outperform their company's marketing goals than their peers. 

A really interesting research piece from Gartner, called ‘Distilling Marketer Adoption, Views and Misperceptions of Customer Data Platforms’, reveals the results from a survey of 504 marketers. The researchers found that 51% of respondents claimed that their Customer Data Platform (CDP) was their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

As the report states, “this misperception of a CDP as a CRM solution reflects a lack of appreciation for the advantages that many CDPs have over heritage CRM applications. These include scale, profile unification, segmentation and connection to marketing systems.”

Customer Data Platform series: 4 of 5

Over the next 5 weeks, read a new blog each week from our CDP Series as our CMO helps you to understand the CDP landscape, capabilities and functionality.

The basic raison d'être of both a Master Data Management (MDM) solution and a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is similar. Both exist to ensure that a business has a supply of carefully curated, unified, accurate and reliable corporate data, a single trusted view to deliver insights and drive business innovation, but that's where the similarities end.

For a start, MDM is a discipline and a set of processes designed to transform organization-wide data, especially in large companies, while a CDP is a packaged software product with a specific purpose to deliver a single view of the customer that the marketing department can use for the improved personalization of marketing campaigns. Another key difference is who stands to benefit from their use and how they are managed within the organization.

According to Gartner, “Access to customer data, in real-time, unifying profiles across channels and ability to measure comprise the competitive playing field that will define the coming years,” allowing retailers to effectively personalize cross-channel customer journeys.

A Customer Data Platform, or CDP, helps by bringing in huge amounts of online and offline customer data from a multitude of sources, then cleansing, deduplicating and unifying this information into a Single Customer View that can then be accessed by all other marketing channels, platforms and business intelligence tools.

To then unify these profiles across channels, look for a CDP with ‘orchestration’ or campaign management capabilities, which will function as a ‘smart hub’ to orchestrate and trigger all your channels from a central decision-making point.

Customer Data Platform Series: 2 of 5

Over the next 5 weeks, read a new blog each week from our CDP Series as our CMO helps you to understand the CDP landscape, capabilities and functionality.

A question that we often get asked is whether Data Management Platforms (DMP) and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are interchangeable?

More specifically, can a DMP be used to deliver the same results as a CDP, and if not, why not?