A marketer's guide through the CDP selection conundrum

However, it's not uncommon for Martech platforms to deliver less value for organisations than anticipated - and most of the times the product is not the culprit. Despite having validated a product in terms of vision and ability to execute it, understanding of a market or industry, innovation roadmap and scalability potential, the common challenge of inconsistent customer experiences remains and has a much deeper root cause.

This applies even more in the case of data-related projects, including CDP implementations - that aim to build capabilities that are not democratically available to the marketing organisation but are highly dependent on the broader organisation and its technical know-how. Unclear data ownership or data quality issues or integration challenges will contribute to a subpar CDP implementation.

Add inadequate planning, lack of alignment with business goals, and organisational resistance to change to the mix and we can see why CDP implementation programs have a good chance of stalling to a halt, hiding behind the ‘personalisation at scale’ terminology but failing to actually align with evolving customer expectations.

For marketers to benefit from the full value of a CDP, such initiatives need to be looked at from a broader perspective - beyond any particular software product and underlying data platform.

As per its broadly understood definition, a CDP is the platform that supports organisations in understanding the context of the customer and consumers at any given moment, across all touch-points, and in actively managing this context. Data and insights are collected, unified and leveraged in order to produce and activate relevant content. The CDP is a central hub for customer data collection, assembly, analysis & activation.

From a technical perspective, usually under ownership of IT & data teams, CDPs are a collection of customer-relevant data points coming from various source systems (usually systems that interact with customers) via integrations. Data is stored and maintained as per data management and governance best practices. Subsequently, data is made available for consumption to various groups: - - to analysts through dashboards, looking to create insights, segments, predictions;

• to data and AI engineers, looking to build data models and algorithms that best leverage insights into available data;
• to marketers, for a hands-on approach to channel management;
• to various marketing channels and touch points, programatically creating moments of truth across a brand’s customer experience , leveraging integrations and orchestration logic.

Additionally, CDPs embed AI capabilities for enhanced data consumption as well as activation. Depending on the product procured as well as build appetite, enhanced capabilities such as identity resolution, real-time processing and predictive analytics are available.

From a marketers perspective, whether strategists, CRO specialists or campaign managers, CDPs are a source of insight into the context of their customers and audiences, one to which they are users. Marketers are given the ability to understand customers holistically and identify opportunities for improvement across the entire decision journey - be it in the form of how a campaign is executed or how a personalisation use case within certain channels, influencing a particular KPI, needs adjusting.

The extent to which a CDP creates value for marketers through its’ capabilities is highly dependent on the priority use cases of an organisation - whether expected to contribute to business growth or to support in efficiency and cost reduction ambitions. As a concrete example - an organisation looking to optimise sales might struggle with abandoned carts and users that need to be reactivated through campaigns and re-targeting. Should the product and customer interaction be of such nature, real-time activations might turn out to be a high-priority requirement which becomes a key factor in the CDP selection. In a similar manner, the capability of understanding whether a particular customer is part of a household by matching data sets with those of other customer profiles might not be a high-priority.

All such use cases and capabilities leading to the desired customer experience will be key factors in the evaluation and weighing exercise that is the rollout of a CDP solution. Beyond the CDP solution, defining clear priorities and desired outcomes will lead to the most viable, lucrative version of an organisation’s MarTech architecture.

So how can a marketer best navigate the challenges of a CDP selection? The answer: by teaming up with technology and data counterparts, sensitive to organisational challenges. By having a common goal to invest in competitive advantage, re-use of capabilities and building of custom solutions only if clearly differentiating or needed.

With a long list of possible evaluation criteria, here are a few key steps to take into account:

1. Define your prioritised list of desired business outcomes and use cases first
2. Understand your status-quo - maturity of existing capabilities and data, adoption of MarTech capabilities already contributing to your priority use cases
3. Map your required capabilities to solutions and tools that fit to your enterprise architecture and system landscape
4. Understand a CDP product’s background and evolution (Did the vendor start as a point solution addressing a very specific st of use cases or is the vendor offering a CDP solution as part of a broader cloud-native platform, highly scalable but requiring custom build?)
5. Map your capabilities to potential solutions and tools that fit to your enterprise architecture and system landscape.

With focus on understanding the impact of new capabilities and building skills necessary to thrive in a data-infused world, marketers have a stellar shot at transforming work and delivering excellence. The journey to finding the perfect CDP is not just about choosing a platform—it's about building partnerships and clarity in ownership, leveraging diverse expertise, and ultimately driving outcomes for your organisation.