Have you ever thought "Wow, they get me," when interacting with a brand? It could be as simple as Netflix recommending the perfect show to binge, or Amazon suggesting a product that complements what's already in your cart. We now expect these personalized experiences from brands. However, with more content, brands, and purchasing channels out there, it becomes difficult to personalize at scale. Enter the customer data platform (CDP).

CDPs aren't new to the market, but there is still some confusion about what constitutes a CDP.

A CDP, as defined by the Customer Data Platform (CDP) Institute, is "a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems."

Businesses utilize CDPs to compile a single view of their customers by aggregating data from multiple sources. From there, businesses leverage that data across multiple marketing channels to personalize the customer experience.

G2 has over 600 reviews for CDPs. These reviews include questions regarding features like data enrichment, predictive modeling, and providing a recommendation engine that uses artificial intelligence to give suggestions based on desired outcomes. Out of all the reviews for the CDP category on G2, the average response for the recommendation engine feature is a 6 on a scale from 1-7 (7 being excellent). CDPs continue to steadily proliferate the MarTech market (see graph below). Our most recent Summer 2019 research reports for CDPs reveal leaders in the space based on user review data, satisfaction ratings, implementation metrics, and many other data points.