CDP (Customer Data Platform)
A CDP is software that brings the data a company holds in different places (website, app, shop, CRM, customer service) together into a single profile per customer and makes it available to other tools.
The problem it solves is familiar to any company with several channels: the same customer appears with an email address in the CRM, an ID in the app and a loyalty card in store, and no system knows it is the same person. The CDP collects those sources, joins the records that belong to each customer and keeps a persistent profile that email, the website or advertising platforms can draw on.
It is often confused with a DMP, but the two work with different data. A DMP handled unnamed, short-lived profiles based mostly on third-party cookies; a CDP works with known customers and first-party data. In advertising it is used to build customer segments (those who bought a year ago and have not come back, the most valuable ones) and send them to activation platforms, or to exclude them from acquisition campaigns.
