CMP vs. CDP: What is the difference?

At the highest level, any company, especially a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) company, has two basic marketing needs.

First, it needs a source of marketing information, and the consents and preferences required to manage that information in a compliant way that builds, rather than destroys, customer trust.

Second, it needs a way to ingest and use this information for direct marketing, market intelligence and analytics, personalization, and other uses.

Due to technological limitations, companies of the past had to employ multiple systems, processes, and manual/human interventions to achieve these two main goals. Today, though, only two types of platforms are required to meet these needs: a Consent Management Platform and a Customer Data Platform.  

What is a Consent Management Platform?

A Consent Management Platform, or CMP, is a technology that “supports all aspects of collecting, consolidating, synchronizing, and applying end-user choices about personal data.”  A CMP allows an organization to set up and manage compliant data collection experiences, including notices, in a consistent manner. It provides detailed tracking and reporting capabilities that allow an organization to deeply understand and address positive and negative trends, identify and manage small issues, and show the value of earning customer trust. It also stores consents and preferences and, through two-way integrations with the organization’s systems, turns those consents and preferences into real-world actions: either preventing data use/transmission or allowing it.  

Most robust CMPs allow an organization to manage data collection and set data use rules according to jurisdictional requirements. CMPs also provide the technology advantage necessary to collect and manage consents/preferences across multiple channels – websites, apps, devices, and others. The technological sophistication needed to provide and manage different data collection and notice experiences (including different languages, wording, opt-in/opt-out models, and designs) and translate those complicated rules into operational commands to various systems is enormous. A CMP is up to the task, however.  

What is a Customer Data Platform?

At the most basic level, however, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a platform that supports marketing and customer experience use by consolidating customer data from multiple channels in a central location. For example, a CDP can gather customer data from websites, Customer Retention Management (CRM) systems, emails, social media, and other sources and unify these data points into a comprehensive view of each individual customer. Often through a customer database, automation technologies, and technologies that manage campaigns and reporting, a CDP allows an organization to develop customer profiles and insights and create customized customer experiences. It also supports access by different marketing and analytics systems and departments.  

What are the differences between a CDP and CMP?

Though CDPs and CMPs are different technologies with slightly different purposes, it is easy to see how together they form the two primary pillars of sophisticated, compliant, and business-supportive customer interactions. In a way, a CDP is the source of truth about the customer and manages (and receives feedback about) direct company-customer interactions (in both directions). Similarly, a CMP is the source of truth about consent and preferences: which consent/preference experiences that the organization presented to the customer, how the customer responded, and what that means for data uses and handling moving forward.  

It is also easy to see that these pillars must “talk” to one another to get the most value out of both types of technologies. For example, the CDP will not have the information it needs to set permissions for marketing campaigns without the detailed information about to which data uses the customer agreed. Similarly, without information about the preferences the customer set, the CDP will not know which campaign, channel, and medium will be most effective. Conversely, without the detailed identity information of the CDP, the CMP will have a more challenging time collecting accurate consent and preference information associated with a given consumer.  

It is not just the two technologies that must talk effectively. The people involved in both sides of the process must also communicate well and often. The CMP team will need advice about branding, channels, and customer experience goals to create a consistent data collection experience in line with brand image. Without insights about appropriate channels, data use goals, and data use/marketing strategies, the CMP team will risk creating consent/preference experiences that ask for the wrong data uses or creating the right experiences but in the wrong channels.  

In other words, while both technologies share a common goal, they each support a distinct set of tasks required to accomplish that common goal. Similarly, the stakeholders involved in both sides of the equation – customer data management and consent/preference management – focus on different tasks towards the common goal of engaging with the customer in exactly the right way. To accomplish this common goal, both the CDP/CMP technologies must work well together, and the stakeholders must work together.  

How does a CMP work together with a CDP?

If an organization is considering buying or building either a CDP or a CMP, it should ensure that both the people and the technologies talk well and often. Here are a few tips for making that happen: 

• Include stakeholders involved in both consent and customer management activities in the entire buy/build process, starting with building requirements together and considering the close integration that will be required between the two systems.  

• When both systems are up and running, ask for input from both stakeholder groups when designing, collecting, and reporting metrics. Gather both teams together regularly to consider metrics from both systems in a united conversation. Oversee negative trends together.  

• Design campaigns and consent experiences with input from both groups.  

• Regularly compare changes in marketing strategy, business goals, jurisdictional consent requirement changes, and other factors together as a cross functional stakeholder group.  

In summary, though they share the common goal of placing the customer first, CDP and CMP technologies support different ends of that customer-first equation. That said, it is necessary for both technologies to integrate and work well together. Since different teams are typically involved CDP and CMP activities, careful planning to ensure that the teams also talk well and often.