Customer Data Platforms, more commonly known as CDPs, focus on marketing data and the marketing function. CDPs distinguish themselves from Master data management systems in that CDPs are able to link customer transactional, engagement and interaction data such as web session IDs to a single data point in the form of something like a customer email, IP address or another identifier, such that the marketing function can more confidently identify a customer or prospect.
It’s easy to confuse the purpose and capability of the two environments because a vendor of a CDP will offer MDM-like capabilities as part of the data point management process.
Part of the confusion may also lie in the fact that MDM is a practice but is also offered by vendors like Pretectum CMDM, as a solution.
CDPs are also offered by vendors but often distinguish themselves by having pre-built structures and functionality for collecting very specific customer data from a range of sources which are then cascaded to other systems in the form of marketing execution, service execution, and customer experience enhancement approaches. These same platforms are typically characterised by also having a mixture of data sources. The content might include transactional data, consent approvals, signup form content, email and social media activity, identified website and eCommerce data. In a perfect world, the data contained in a CDP is the best it can possibly be, deduplicated and complete without defects.
The contrast with a CMDM lies in the purpose and intent of the MDM. At the core of the MDM is the objective of creating a lighthouse customer object that is cleansed, deduped, verified, validated and even enriched (perhaps with even CDP data). Further, the objective of the CMDM is to make the customer entity visible across the systems landscape to whichever systems might require an authoritative customer master data record. This might even include the CDP interrogating or referencing the CMDM for the identifiable customer.
The CMDM objective is to master the customer record for sharing and authority based on business defined rules and structures.