PHOTO:
Charles Deluvio
Some say that curiosity didnât kill the cat, indecision did. The CDP category is teetering dangerously on the edge of the catâs fate. 2021 will be the year that indecision disappears.
David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute, coined the term customer data platform (CDP) in 2013. By 2016, interest in the category began to take off and by 2018, CDPs went mainstream. As we finish the first week of 2021, the category faces its toughest challenge yet: to prove whether it belongs.
Originally created with the purpose of being a marketer-managed system that creates a unified customer database that is accessible to others, today almost every marketing technology category has a vendor calling itself a CDP. We re not going to try to make sense of this market (we did that last year), but we would like to examine some changes we believe is coming this categoryâs way.