Customer Data Platform

A customer data platform (CDP) is a system that gathers customer data from scattered sources, stitches it into a single persistent profile per person, and makes it available to other teams.

A CDP should not be conflated with an analytics tool; their jobs differ. Analytics answers “what was the behavior,” while a CDP aims to build a complete, durable profile of each customer by joining web, app, purchase and CRM data, so that profile can later be activated in marketing and personalization. Three actions are the CDP's signature: ingesting from many sources, identity unification (stitching one person's events across channels under one identifier), and activation (pushing segments to external destinations). It is that third action that ties the CDP to the privacy debate, because cross-source identity aggregation is exactly what privacy laws are sensitive to. For the Iranian market, a CDP usually makes sense with the global marketing ecosystem and is less an everyday need.