Posted by 
Virtually every marketing vendor brags about providing “a 360-degree view of the customer,” “a single source of truth” about the customer or some equivalent.
But, according to technology analyst David Raab, that assumes you have unified, integrated storage of all your customer data. And, he says, most tools don’t, which is why he initiated in 2013 the idea of a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
In this article, part of our MarTech Landscape Series, we look at this newly named marketing component.
Raab told me he had noticed various marketing systems were disconnected from each other, in that they offered incomplete data or did not organize it effectively for marketing purposes. CDP advocates cite an Experian study (The 2016 Digital Marketer) that said technical issues were the biggest obstacle toward creating a unified customer view, instead of such factors as lack of data or lack of interest.
This week, Raab Associates and a group of 11 CDP vendors launched the Customer Data Platform Institute to promote the concept of “a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” Its website offers documentation, a newsletter, product info, surveys, evaluation guides and other resources.
What is a Customer Data Platform?
“Over the last three years.” Treasure Data founder and CEO Hiro Yoshikawa said in a statement accompanying the Institute’s launch, “we’ve seen more and more data-driven marketing organizations adopt Treasure Data to unify their customer data.“
“We now know what to call this,” he added.
[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]
