- Often not needed
- we will say so
- Identity
- the hard part
- Activation
- or it is just storage
Customer Data Platform
A CDP unifies customer data into a single profile that campaigns can act on. It solves a real problem, at real cost, for fewer companies than are sold one.
- First question
- And frequently the answer is no.
Do you actually need one?
A CDP earns its cost when you have genuinely fragmented customer data across multiple systems, meaningful volume, a real identity resolution problem, and the operational capacity to act on unified profiles once you have them. That last condition disqualifies most buyers.
A unified customer profile nobody uses is expensive storage. We have seen implementations where the platform works correctly, the profiles are accurate, and no campaign has ever been built on them because the marketing team lacks capacity to design the segmentation.
So we start with whether the problem you have is the problem a CDP solves. Often it is an integration problem, which is cheaper, or a data quality problem, which a CDP will faithfully reproduce at scale.
- 8 areas
- One body of work, not a menu.
What’s included
Needs assessment
An honest evaluation of whether a CDP is warranted, including the recommendation not to buy one where that is right.
Requirements definition
What the platform must actually do for your use cases, written before vendor conversations rather than after.
Vendor evaluation
Comparison against your requirements, with the trade-offs made explicit. We hold no vendor relationships.
Identity resolution design
The genuinely hard part — deciding how records are matched, and what confidence threshold is acceptable given the cost of a wrong merge.
Data model and schema
Structuring profiles around the questions you will ask, since retrofitting a schema is expensive.
Source integration
Connecting the systems that hold customer data, and cleaning what arrives, since a CDP replicates bad data faithfully.
Activation design
The use cases that justify the investment, designed before implementation so the platform gets used.
Governance and consent
Consent state travelling with the profile, which is both a legal requirement and commonly missed.
- Common questions
- Asked on most first calls.
Questions
How do we know if we need a CDP?
Fragmented customer data across systems, real volume, a genuine identity matching problem, and capacity to act on the result. Missing the last one is the most common reason implementations fail.
Can our existing tools do this?
Sometimes. Some CRMs and marketing automation platforms cover a good portion of CDP functionality for smaller data volumes. Worth checking before buying a new category of software.
How long does implementation take?
Three to nine months realistically, depending on source count and data quality. Vendor timelines assume clean data, which nobody has.
What is identity resolution and why is it hard?
Deciding when two records are the same person. Same email, different phone. Shared household device. Old address. Every rule you set produces both false merges and false splits, and you are choosing which error is more tolerable.
Will this fix our data quality problems?
No. A CDP unifies data, including the errors. Data quality work has to happen alongside, and is frequently the larger part of the project.
- Related
- Often scoped alongside this.
Related services
MarTech Consulting
Stack audits and integration so platforms stop contradicting each other.
GA4 Consulting
Implementation and repair. Most GA4 setups under-report.
Email Marketing
Lifecycle and campaign email, with deliverability treated as technical.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Testing on high-traffic templates, prioritised by revenue.
- Next step
- We look at your site before the call.
Start with a free audit
An automated crawl plus a 30-minute walkthrough of what we can see from outside your site. If what you need isn’t something we do well, we’ll tell you.