As an imported product, the rapid landing development of CDP in China is actually related to the new wave of digital marketing reform of Chinese enterprises. When it comes to the current brand or enterprise marketing, MarTech is an inescapable topic, and CDP once occupied the "C" position in the domestic MarTech field. Why does CDP become the favorite of brand enterprises? How does CDP help the brand marketing operation? Combining his personal observations with the company's business practices, Whale Strategy product Leader Liu Jia shared with us his in-depth understanding of CDP.
Merge public and private data to become a "piggy bank" of brand data assets
Founded in 2017, Whale Strategy's growth coincides with the rapid expansion of China's digital marketing industry. Liu Jia told us that Whale Strategy, with a mission of "making brands understand customers better", is an enterprise that uses a combination of Internet and data models to provide brands with global marketing and operation solutions.
In Liu Jia's mind, Whale's strong technical gene is one of the most distinctive labels of his strategy. The construction and application of CDP products is an important part of Whale strategy solutions. Whale strategy is analyzing the precipitation of brand, person and field data assets for next generation CDP, and has a deep understanding of CDP capabilities.
At present, there are three types of CDP in the market, including pure data CDP which only assumes the role of data convergence. An analytical CDP that displays the combined data through BI and allows users to conduct user-defined analysis; A marketing CDP that focuses on marketing scenarios, has clear ROI and goals, and is closely integrated with the business. This is the type of CDP that Whale Strategy is working on.
The birth of CDP is closely related to the needs of brand enterprises. To discuss the function of CDP, we should start from the development process of CDP. Liu Jia said that in the past, the brand did marketing and data assets precipitation, first carried out advertising through the public domain, stored the returned monitoring data in the three-party DMP(data management platform), forming the first data assets of the brand.
Since then, with the gradual maturity of the brand, the increase of data volume and higher requirements for data security and richness, the construction of one party DMP has begun. All the data stored by DMP is used for advertising. With the development of private domain and accumulation of member data, the concept of CDP emerges at the historic moment. CDP is a user data platform after the upgrade of the DMP. As the name implies, it focuses on the statistics of data assets from the user dimension and integrates the data in the DMP with the user member data. That is, the integration of party data and advertising data, which can also be regarded as the combination of public domain and private domain data. CDP acts as a piggy bank and reservoir, collecting and managing data for brands and depositing data assets that can be reused over and over again.
The value of CDP can be seen from the history of the data management mode of brand enterprises. Liu Jia summarized the core value of CDP into three points:
First, it helps the brand to summarize and integrate scattered data in the early scenes from 0 to 1, which is convenient for the brand to carry out detailed overall management analysis.
Second, there are differences in cognition, understanding and caliber of multi-party data scattered in various channels. CDP can help align data indicators, including system and organization combing and alignment, so that different departments can understand data from the same objective dimension, reduce internal communication costs, improve decision-making efficiency, and increase the value of data assets.
Thirdly, the formation of internal data culture identity of brand enterprises. With unified data and understanding of data, enterprise organizations can complete the acquisition and use of data in a good basic data environment and cultivate a good awareness of data culture, which is conducive to the long-term development of brands.
02 Real-time interaction, privacy protection, multidimensional analysis, differentiation advantage to help brand operation
CDP is playing an important role in the brand digital marketing link in the new era. What is the specific operation process? Liu Jia combined with Whale's practice of CDP products, made a detailed interpretation for us. Liu Jia divided the digital marketing link into six steps, which are advertising, user diversion, user retention, user promotion, traffic split and transformation. As a comprehensive digital marketing operation platform, the matrix of product tools can connect the marketing links in addition to advertising.
Take the marketing service case of X, a new tea drinking brand, conducted by Whale Strategy Group as an example. Under the premise of privacy protection, offline queuing data is used to optimize the real-time performance ability and LBS-based preferential policies. The distribution of X online orders can be adjusted according to the queuing data of stores and online purchase data. And encourage users to participate in App games to punch in or buy offline to get preferential content, so as to conduct user diversion, retention and transformation.
Liu stressed that in this case, real-time high interactivity is one of the most critical capabilities for CDP to manage user data. Data changes such as users placing orders and purchasing at the front end shall be summarized and fed back in real time to trigger subsequent order allocation changes or game progress changes. This is one of the biggest strengths of Whale's CDP product, which allows for better real-time interaction and a better user experience.
The rapid layout of privacy protection is another highlight of Whale Strategy CDP products. In 2021, the "Data Security Law" and "Personal Information Protection Law" were successively implemented, which provided standardized procedures and systems for the collection and application of consumer data, and also put forward higher requirements for the current brand digital marketing. For CDP, which operates on the basis of user data assets, the changes are dramatic.
In Liu Jia's opinion, the impact of data security laws and regulations on CDP products is mainly reflected in the acquisition of consumer data. CDP data sources are usually divided into three categories: first-party data, second-party data and third-party data. Brands can continue to collect first-party data through their own channels and authorized by privacy policies and user agreements. However, the second-party data collected by e-commerce and other platforms will be subject to considerable restrictions. Not only will the unique identification of users be closed, but also the collection and circulation of data will have strict requirements. The transaction of third-party data sent back by data packets and crowd packets will be almost prohibited.
In this case, the importance of zero-square data authorized subjectively by users to brands will become more and more prominent. Whale has also started early in this direction, integrating privacy management modules into its CDP products to help companies use data in a more compliant manner.
Liu Jia also mentioned that Whale Strategy CDP's other advantage is the wide range of data dimensions. Many clients of Strategy CDP adopt an online-offline integrated business model, and CDP's data collection and management not only focus on the dimension of consumers, but also consider the dimension of operation scenarios, which can not only get through users' information. The online and offline operation space can also be connected through the information of "field". At the same time, Whale strategy CDP can also conduct separate data analysis and cross-data analysis for the two dimensions of "man" and "field", which enhances the accuracy and richness of data analysis results.
In view of the current situation, the market potential of CDP is huge, and there is still a lot of space for self-upgrading and commercial application. When it comes to the future development trend of CDP, Liu Jia believes that there will be three major trends in the future of CDP:
First, the value of CDP as a data center will be more and more prominent, such as stronger business attributes. It is not only a platform for data extraction and analysis, but also a tool to facilitate business growth in a closed loop.
Second, the establishment of CDP will become more and more egalitarianism. All brands should have their own CDP. However, based on construction and operation costs, CDP projects still have long cycles and unclear benefits, which makes it difficult for them to be widely popularized. In the future, the cost of CDP can be reduced through low-cost scenario application, so that users can feel the value of CDP, which is also the significance of technological progress.
Third, it is fine-differentiation. Based on the enhancement of business attributes, CDP in different fields can have different functional emphases. For example, CDP tools with different functions can be dedicated to apparel and fast-moving consumer products.
These three CDP development trends are also the direction that Whale strategies for CDP products are being upgraded. At the end of the interview, Liu Jia said that Whale strategies for CDP will continue to deepen its understanding of the industry in the future, and make deep efforts in the usage scenarios of customers' industries, especially in the marketing scenarios, hoping to bring better use experience to enterprises. To really empower their business operations to grow.
About Whale strategizing
As a professional omni-digital marketing operation platform in China, Whale, through key technological innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) and Data model (Data), provides future-oriented retail brands with data-driven, collaboration-first, simple and easy to deploy omni-brand marketing solutions. It aims to enable sustainable fine operation and lean growth of retail brands and open up the "last mile" of MarTech. At present, Whale strategy service system has widely covered food and beverage, beauty makeup and skin care, fashion shoes and clothing, light luxury jewelry, digital electrical appliances, catering and tea drinking, business super convenience, automobile service, medicine and health and other industries. It has accumulated benchmark customers such as Unilever, Watsons, Sibei, Midea, Paopamart, Nextev, Carrefour and more than 300 Top brands in the industry. The company was founded in 2017 in Hangzhou, and has offices in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing.
