Customer Data Platform: The goal of a CDP is to gather all customer data and concentrate it into unified profiles. This enables brands to work easily with them.
We have all heard stories of tools that can function as a hub or central location for customer data. Certainly there has never been a shortage of technologies that claim to provide a “single view of the customer” or a “360-degree customer profile”.
But there really hasn’t been a type of platform that has the potential to bring all the data together and make it useful to the marketer at the same time.
David Raab (https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-raab-22146b/), a respected analyst at Martech and Adtech, was the first to define the CDP category in 2013, and his definition reads.
“A CDP is a brand-managed system that creates a continuous, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”.
How is a CDP different from other systems?
What are the major differences between a CDP and systems such as a CRM or a DMP?
Customer Data Platform differences with CRMs.
Developers and Marketeers created CRM systems to interact with customers. This, based on historical and general customer data to create a continuous customer profile. They are not built to ingest large volumes of data from other sources.
A CDP is capable of connecting all types and sources of customer data. Both internal and external data, structured or unstructured, batch or flow. This allows brands to have a much more complete view and customers understanding. Then, to act on these data even in real time.
Differences with DMPs.
It is easy to confuse a DMP with a CDP. Developers designed the DMPs to serve ads and allow retargeting using cookies. They focus more on anonymous segments and categories than on individual clients. In a DMP, much of the information is anonymous and usually expires after 90 days (the lifetime of the cookie).
The CDP creates a unified customer profile. That means it stores the data and maintains the history. Then, by combining it with all the data about its customers, unique records are obtained.
Specialists designed DMPs to target anonymous users for advertising. Marketeers created CDPs as a database of identified customers information to use for more than just advertising.
Source: Econsultancy.com