Forrester has published The Forrester Wave™: Customer Data Platforms For B2C, Q3 2024. It’s an exciting moment because this is the very first Forrester Wave evaluation for this category. Given the heavy buyer and vendor interest in customer data platforms (CDPs), it evokes the obvious question: “What took you so long?!”
For context, consider the history of the category. The early years of the CDP were challenging. Despite widespread enthusiasm for CDPs, creating a new category to solve difficult problems is hard. And while anyone can claim to offer a CDP, anyone who’s ever built, deployed, or used a CDP will tell you that they are a lot more sophisticated than they look on paper and extremely difficult to do well. The CDP’s embryonic stages were characterized by functional immaturity, product marketers gone wild, and mismatched buyer expectations for what the technology could accomplish.
Ramping the category up to a level of functional capability where CDPs actually solve enterprise marketers’ problems took time. This victory is hard-fought; vendors and buyers alike deserve credit for their perseverance and continued investments to push the category forward.
2024 Is The Year When It Came Together For CDPs
The functional capabilities across a range of committed, legitimate vendors power a landscape where CDPs can support marketers at scale. We’ve looked at the 12 most important CDP vendors: ActionIQ, Adobe, Amperity, BlueConic, Microsoft, mParticle, Redpoint Global, Salesforce, Tealium, Treasure Data, Twilio, and Zeta Global. To address current and future requirements, marketers must consider three key factors that differentiate CDP providers in 2024 and beyond — specifically, their ability to:
- Assemble the most robust customer profile. Top solutions cover a wide range of data inputs from many different sources — including not moving the data at all — and must transform the data into usable and consistent attributes, incorporate third-party identity and data services, and correctly match data to form the profile at the desired resolution level.
- Support the entire customer lifecycle. Top solutions now go beyond traditional CDP use cases centered around customer messaging campaigns to support a full set of marketing-oriented tactics such as personalization and paid media in customer marketing and acquisition scenarios.
- Future-proof against ongoing customer engagement evolution. Top solutions support a high degree of configurability and flexibility with support for custom integrations, comprehensive data governance capabilities, usability for a range of roles and stakeholders, security and consumer consent management features, and flexible underlying data architecture.
Now, The Real Work Begins
B2C marketers must focus on strategically implementing and utilizing CDPs to put timely, complete, high-quality customer data to work to drive better customer engagement through personalization, timely interactions, and consistency across channels and touchpoints. And the CDP community must continue pushing solution capability maturity forward; journey orchestration, customer insights, and CDP for customer experience await!
The CDP Wave evaluation will help you understand how these 12 vendors stack up against 29 functional, strategy, and market presence criteria. Readers can also customize the Wave scorecard to reflect their own specific priorities. To learn more about our Wave findings and Forrester’s marketing technology best practices, please request a guidance session or inquiry.
