Transforming Customer Data into Insights

Chapter 3. Meeting Modern Data Challenges with a CDP

How many electronic devices have you used today? Perhaps you checked your phone after waking up, worked from your desktop or laptop, and interacted with a chatbot on a website you visited during a break—all in the space of one morning. To provide a unified brand experience—which customers now expect—marketing technologies must identify and synchronize all of these devices. At the same time, there’s a good chance that as you read the news you learned about another ethical or security concern about organizations’ use of customer data. How can the seemingly contradictory wishes or personalization and privacy be reconciled?

In Chapter 2, you learned about direct marketing as an alternative to mass media, and the progression of tools from database marketing to customer relationship management and customer data management platforms. Here you will learn about the four essential facets of the CDP, and how the CDP emerged to address new developments in technology, privacy, and regulation. Figure 3-1 shows this history and progression of marketing technologies.

As Figure 3-1 suggests, it’s best not to think of each new technology as completely supplanting the other but instead as being additional slices of an overall marketing stack.

Figure 3-1. The history and progression of marketing technologies

Note

A CDP doesn’t necessarily replace ...