Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A CDP typically supports ingestion, identity resolution, profile enrichment, audience building, and activation to marketing or service systems. It differs from a data warehouse in its focus on usable customer profiles and downstream activation, although modern stacks often overlap. Teams should evaluate data governance, consent enforcement, schema quality, latency, and whether profile matching is transparent and controllable.
What is Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software that collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources into persistent profiles that other tools can use.
Why it matters
A CDP typically supports ingestion, identity resolution, profile enrichment, audience building, and activation to marketing or service systems. It differs from a data warehouse in its focus on usable customer profiles and downstream activation, although modern stacks often overlap. Teams should evaluate data governance, consent enforcement, schema quality, latency, and whether profile matching is transparent and controllable.
Example
A retailer combines website behavior, mobile-app events, purchases, and loyalty data to build audiences for personalized messaging.