Customer Data Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

While the global pandemic has had a dampening effect on business in general, it also seems to have raised interest in precisely the types of solutions that Customer Data Platforms deliver. With stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines spurring the movement of customer interactions – both B2B and B2C – to digital channels, marketers are increasingly interested in technologies that collect data from those interactions, unify them, deliver insights and enable campaign orchestration.

Whether that’s taking place in something called a CDP or whether the category morphs as it grows is up for discussion, however. In its most recent report on the market, Gartner predicted that 70% of independent CDP vendors will be acquired or will acquire adjacent technologies to diversify by 2023. According to Gartner, these players will get into of personalization, multichannel marketing, consent management or master data management (MDM) for customer data. In part, this expectation arises from the fact that the number of CDP vendors is so high (approaching 100, according to Gartner) that it’s difficult to believe they will all remain viable as individual entities.