Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 18, 2020

Everything you need to know about 2020 is covered by the fact that “apocalypse bingo” is already an over-used cliché. So I doubt many marketers have found spare time to worry about data security – which most would consider someone else’s problem. But bear in mind that 92% of consumers say they would avoid a company after a data breach. So, like it or not, security is a marketer’s problem too.

Work Management 276

Work Management Marketing Management Privacy Fulfillment 276

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 25, 2020

Call me a c**k-eyed optimist, but marketers may actually be getting better at buying software. Our research has long shown that the most satisfied buyers base their selection on features, not cost or ease of use. But feature lists alone are never enough: even if buyers had the knowledge and patience to precisely define their actual requirements, no set of checkboxes could capture the nuance of what it’s actually like to use a piece of software for a specific task.

Work Management 194

Work Management Marketing Management Sample Vendors 194

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 18, 2020

Balandra Customer Flow Diagram The need for a system that assembles unified, sharable customer profiles is now widely accepted. So is the label of “Customer Data Platform” to describe such systems. What people do still debate is whether a Customer Data Platform should only assemble those profiles or should also include features to “activate” them in the sense of selecting customer treatments.

Ideal Customer Profiles 38

Ideal Customer Profiles Rules Paid Search Agency API 38

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

The CDP Institute published its semi-annual Industry Update report today, which you download here for free. Although every word and image in the report is a jewel, there’s no question that the main story in this edition is CDP industry consolidation. Events in the past six months (stretching a bit to include early January 2020) include seven new funding rounds, three acquisitions of CDP vendors, four acquisitions by CDP vendors, and four asset sales by CDP companies.

Buy 240

Buy Work Management Marketing Management Acquisitions 240

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 11, 2019

Acquia , which is moving past its roots in Web content management to become a multi-channel “digital experience platform” (DXP), took a big step in that direction today with a deal to buy the AgilOne Customer Data Platform. The deal follows Acquia’s May 2019 purchase of open source marketing automation platform Mautic and September 2019 purchase of site building tool Cohesion.

Digital Experience Platform 156

Digital Experience Platform Marketing Automation Services Buy Marketing Management 156

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 11, 2019

One of the unwritten laws of punditry is that one event is random, two events are interesting, and three events make a trend. By that measure, the purchases of data analytics vendors Looker by Google , Tableau by Salesforce , and Origami Logic by Intuit within a three week span must signify something. Is it that martech suites must now include business intelligence software?

Enterprise Management 253

Enterprise Management Marketing Management Analytics Acquisitions 253

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 19, 2019

Is real-time processing a requirement for a Customer Data Platform? It’s a deceptively simple question that can’t be answered without resolving two additional questions: What do we mean by real-time processing? How do we decide what is and isn’t a requirement? Let’s tackle the definition of real time first. There are at least four different flavors of real time processing that relate to CDPs.

Ideal Customer Profiles 253

Ideal Customer Profiles Process Work Management Marketing Management 253

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 7, 2019

I returned earlier this week from a sequence of workshops, speeches, and meetings in Europe, all focused on Customer Data Platforms. Here are some observations: - The European CDP market is indeed behind the U.S. My own conversations are with people who already care about CDPs, so they're a very skewed sample. But vendors, consultants, agencies, and marketers I spoke with mostly agreed that the larger community is just beginning to hear about the concept.

Work Management 136

Work Management Marketing Management Paid Search Agency Vendors 136

Customer Experience Matrix

NOVEMBER 18, 2018

“If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made” runs the old joke. The irony-impaired managers of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) seem to have taken this as serious advice, last week announcing creation of a “Center for Brand Purpose” that will help companies publicize their social purpose. Confirming the worst stereotypes of marketers as cynical hucksters, the press release promotes its mission with the argument that “purpose-led brands grow two to three times faster than their co

Paid Search Agency 192

Paid Search Agency Advertising Agencies Privacy Protection Work Management 192

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

Salesforce has sipped the Kool-Aid: it led off the Dreamforce conference today with news of Customer 360 , which aims to “help companies move beyond an app- or department-specific view of each customer by making it easier to create a single, holistic customer profile to inform every interaction”. But they didn’t drink the whole glass. Customer 360 isn't assembling a persistent, unified customer database as described in the Customer Data Platform Institute's CDP definition.

Work Management 305

Work Management Marketing Management Ideal Customer Profiles Marketing AI 305

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 24, 2018

One of the more jarring aspects in Adobe ’s briefing last week about its Marketo acquisition* were several statements that suggested Marketo and Adobe’s other products were going to access shared customer data. This would be the Experience Cloud Profile announced in March and based on an open source data model developed jointly with Microsoft and stored on Microsoft Azure.** When I tried to reconcile Adobe’s statements with reality, the best I could come up with was they were saying that Adobe s

Enterprise Management 295

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 295

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 18, 2018

A few weeks ago, I critiqued several articles that attacked “myths” about Customer Data Platforms. But, on reflection, those authors had it right: it’s important to address misunderstandings that have grown as the category gains exposure. So here's my own list of CDP myths and realities. Myth: CDPs are all the same. Reality: CDPs vary widely. In fact, most observers recognize this variation and quite a few consider it a failing.

Enterprise Management 191

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Ideal Customer Profiles 191

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 2, 2018

Customer Data Platform vendor Treasure Data today confirmed earlier reports that it is being purchased by Arm Limited , which licenses semi-conductor technologies and is itself a subsidiary of the giant tech holding company SoftBank. The price was not announced but was said to be around $600 million. The deal was the second big purchase of a Customer Data Platform vendor in a month, following the Salesforce ’s Datorama acquisition.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Buy Marketing Management Vendors 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 1, 2018

News that Salesforce had purchased Datorama crossed the wire just as I was starting on two weeks of travel, so I haven’t been able to comment until now. This was purchase was noteworthy as the first big CDP acquisition by a marketing cloud vendor. That the buyer was Salesforce was even more intriguing, given that they had purchased Mulesoft in March for $6.5 billion and that Marketing Cloud CEO Bob Stutz (who announced the Datorama deal) had called CDPs “a passing fad” and said Salesforce alread

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Buy Work Management Marketing Management 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 29, 2018

Over the past several months, I’ve been conspiring with MarTech Advisor ’s Chitra Iyer and Amit Varshneya and industry expert Anand Thaker to produce a podcast devoted to martech news of the week. I’m happy to announce that the first two episodes of Talking Stack were released yesterday, available here. Why this podcast? Well, there’s an awful lot of martech news every week.

Newsletter 120

Newsletter Lead Scoring Lead Ranking Leads 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 8, 2018

Some people have feared (or hoped) that the European Unions’ General Data Protection Regulation would force major change in the the marketing and advertising ecosystems by shutting off vital data flows. I’ve generally been more sanguine, suspecting that some practices would change and some marginal players would vanish but most businesses would continue pretty much as they are.

Advertising Agencies 166

Advertising Agencies Marketing Proposals Barriers Vendors 166

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 7, 2018

I’m no fan of the TV show Black Mirror – the plots are obvious and excruciatingly slow. But nevertheless, here’s a story for consideration. Our tale begins in a world where all data is stored in the cloud. This means people don’t have their own computers but can instead log into whatever machine is handy wherever they go. All is lovely until our hero one day notices a slight error in some data.

Course 120

Course Best Practices Privacy 120

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 27, 2018

I ran a four hour workshop on Customer Data Platforms this week at the MarTech Conference in San Diego.* The attendees were a mix of marketers and technologists from brands, agencies, and vendor companies. We had surveyed them in advance and found, not surprisingly, goals ranging from understanding CDP market trends to optimizing data loads for technical performance.

Conference 149

Conference Paid Search Agency Advertising Agencies Paper 149

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 13, 2018

Should marketers pay consumers directly to access their personal data? The idea isn’t new but it’s become more popular as people see the huge profits that Google , Facebook , and others make from using that data, as consumers become more aware of the data trade, and as blockchain technology makes low cost micro-payments a possibility. One result is a crop of new ventures based on the concept has popped up like mushrooms – which, like mushrooms, can be hard to tell apart.

Personalization 120

Personalization Ad Exchange Mobile Advertising Loyalty 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 4, 2018

The Customer Data Platform Institute will be launching its European branch later this month with a series of presentations in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg. We’ve seen considerable CDP activity in Europe – nearly one quarter of the CDPs in the Institute's latest industry update are Europe-based, several others with European roots have added a U.S. headquarters, and some of U.S.

Work Management 212

Work Management Marketing Management Allocation Paid Search Agency 212

Customer Experience Matrix

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

Most Customer Data Platforms are Software as a Service products, meaning they run on servers managed by the vendor. But some clients prefer to keep their data in-house. So before releasing the CDP Vendor Comparison report – now available here – I added a line for on-premises deployment. This seemed like a perfect fit: a clear yes/no item that some buyers consider essential.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Vendors Comparison Amazon 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JANUARY 27, 2018

Political situations come and go but trust is the foundation of civilization itself. So I was genuinely shaken to see a report from the Edelman PR agency that trust in U.S. institutions fell last year by a huge margin – 17% for the general public and 34% for the “informed public,” placing us dead last among 27 countries. All four measured institutions (business, media, government, and non-governmental organizations) took similar hits, although government fell the most.

Paid Content 153

Paid Content Paid Search Agency Advertising Agencies Lead Scoring 153

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 19, 2017

The Customer Data Platform Institute (CDPI) recently surveyed its members about their customer-facing systems and CDP deployment plans. ( Click here to download the full report.) While CDP Institute members are obviously not typical marketers (being smarter, richer, and better looking), the answers still provide some intriguing insights into the marketplace.

Marketing Automation Services 136

Marketing Automation Services Customer Surveys Planning Comparison 136

Customer Experience Matrix

DECEMBER 6, 2017

My wife is working on a Ph.D. in education and recently took a course on strategic planning for academic institutions. Her final project included creating a game to help illustrate the course lessons. What she came up with struck me as applicable to planning in all industries, so I thought I’d share it here. The fundamental challenge she faced in designing the game was to communicate key concepts about strategic planning.

Resources 136

Resources Class Course Conference 136

Customer Experience Matrix

SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

I’m currently drafting a paper on use of Customer Data Platforms by B2B SaaS marketers. The topic is more intriguing than it sounds because it raises the dual questions of why CDPs haven’t previously been used much by B2B SaaS companies and what's changed. To build some suspense, let’s first review who else has been buying CDPs. We can skip over the first 3.8 billion years of life on earth, when the answer is no one.

Marketing Automation Services 168

Marketing Automation Services Buy Work Management B2B Marketing 168

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 31, 2017

It’s more than four years since my original review of AgilOne , a pioneering Customer Data Platform. As you might imagine, the system has evolved quite a bit since then. In fact, the core data management portions have been entirely rebuilt, replacing the original fixed data model with a fully configurable model that lets the system easily adapt to each customer.

Elasticity 0

Elasticity Multi-Channel Paid Search Agency Analytics 0

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 30, 2017

1. I won't wear a tin foil hat or neon eyeglasses.well, maybe the glasses. 2. I will not present a dialog between a marketer and his new AI assistant, Worldwide Holistic Optimizer (WHO), which has unexpectedly replaced his old assistant, the Workflow Automation Tool (WAT). Computer: Hi Dave. Marketer: Who’s there? Computer: Yes I am. Marketer: You are what?

Marketing AI 120

Marketing AI Conference Automation Optimization 120

Customer Experience Matrix

AUGUST 25, 2017

A recent Forrester study found that most marketers expect artificial intelligence to take over the more routine parts of their jobs, allowing them to focus on creative and strategic work. That’s been my attitude as well. More precisely, I see AI enabling marketers to provide the highly tailored experiences that customers now demand. Without AI, it would be impossible to make the number of decisions necessary to do this.

Marketing AI 174

Marketing AI Campaigns Planning Work Management 174

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 14, 2017

I reviewed Blueshift in June 2015 , when the product had been in-market for just a few months and had a handful of large clients. Since then they’ve added many new features and grown to about 50 customers. So let’s do a quick update. Basically, the system is still what it was: a Customer Data Platform that includes predictive modeling, content creation, and multi-step campaigns.

Features 120

Features Enterprise Management SMS Multi-Channel 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 7, 2017

Customer Data Platform vendors come from many places, geographically and functionally. Lexer is unusual in both ways, having started in Australia as a social media listening platform. About two years ago the company refocused on building customer profiles with data from all sources. It quickly added clients among many of Australia’s largest consumer-facing brands including Qantas airlines, Optus telecommunications, and Westpac bank.

Marketing Automation Services 120

Marketing Automation Services Ideal Customer Profiles Elasticity Adwords 120

Customer Experience Matrix

JULY 3, 2017

I’m still chewing over the role of “walled garden” vendors including Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and in particular how most observers – especially in the general media – fail to grasp how those firms differ from traditional monopolists. As it happens, I’m also preparing a speech for later this month that will touch on the topic, which means I’ve spent many hours working on slides to communicate the relevant concepts.

Work Management 68

Work Management Personalization Effectiveness Marketing Management 68

Customer Experience Matrix

JUNE 18, 2017

Most of the comments I’ve seen about Amazon ’s acquisition of Whole Foods have described it as Amazon (a) expanding into a new industry (b) continuing to disrupt conventional retail and (c) moving more commerce from offline to online channels. Those are all true, I suppose, but I felt they missed the real story: this is another step in Amazon building a self-contained universe that its customers never have to leave.

Amazon 212

Amazon Paid Content Buy Marketing AI 212

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 24, 2017

One of the grand challenges facing marketing technology today is having a computer find the best messages to send each customer over time, instead of making marketers schedule the messages in advance. One roadblock has been that automated design requires predicting the long-term impact of each message: just selecting the message with the highest immediate value can reduce future income.

Promotion 176

Promotion Lead Scoring Lead Ranking Optimization 176

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 20, 2017

There are dozens of Web personalization tools available. All do roughly the same thing: look at data about a visitor, pick messages based on that data, and deploy those messages. So how do you tell them apart? The differences fall along several dimensions. These include what data is available, how messages are chosen, which channels are supported, and how the system is implemented.

Advertising Channels 120

Advertising Channels Personalization Multi-Channel API 120

Customer Experience Matrix

MAY 14, 2017

Last week’s MarTech Conference in San Francisco came and went in the usual blur of excellent presentations, interesting vendors, and private conversations. I’m sure each attendee had their own experience based on their particular interests. The two themes that appeared the most in my own world were: - data activation. This reflects recognition that customer data delivers most of its value when it is used to personalize customer treatments.

Privacy 120

Privacy Work Management Marketing Management Conference 120

Customer Experience Matrix

APRIL 19, 2017

Last week’s passenger-dragging incident at United Airlines left many marketers (and other humans) aghast that any company could purposely assault its own customer. As it happens, airline technology vendor Sabre published a survey of airline executives just before the event. It confirms what you probably suspected: airline managers think differently from other business people.

Marketing Management 198

Marketing Management Ethics Loyalty Customer Surveys 198

Customer Experience Matrix

MARCH 29, 2017

Like many people in the marketing technology industry, I was tickled in 2011 when Gartner predicted that CMOs would soon have bigger tech budgets than CIOs , and even more tickled when Gartner said in 2016 that it had happened. But my recent pondering of the relationship of marketing and IT departments had me rethinking the question. On an anecdotal level, I’ve never seen or heard of a company where the marketing technology group was anywhere near the size of the IT department.

Enterprise Management 120

Enterprise Management Work Management Spending Marketing Management 120