Business marketers are catching up with consumer marketers in Customer Data Platform deployments, according to a global member survey released by the Customer Data Platform Institute.

The survey found that 41% of companies selling to consumers are in the process of deploying a CDP, compared with just 19% of companies selling to business.  But 34% of the B2B companies plan to start deployment within the next twelve months, compared to only 19% of consumer brands.

Other survey finding suggest the change is coming just in time:

• Business marketers are more likely than consumer marketers to rely on CRM or marketing automation systems to unify their customer data (22% vs 8%).
• Business marketers using CRM or marketing automation in this way have below-average satisfaction with their martech investments.
• CDP users have higher satisfaction than non-users among both business and consumer marketers.

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Other survey findings include:

• consumer marketers have more fragmented data than B2B marketers, with 62% reporting many disconnected systems compared with 48% of B2B marketers.
• inability to assemble unified customer data is the most-cited obstacle to using customer data well, listed by 63% of respondents compared with incapable delivery systems (54%) or inaccessible source data (47%).
• a unified customer view is the most important CDP benefit, listed by 86% of respondents.  Many fewer cited applications such as predictive modeling (59%), message selection (49%) or cross-channel orchestration (49%).
• companies with a specialized martech manager or staff are more satisfied with their marketing technology results than firms where marketing technology is run by a central IT department or left to individual groups within marketing.

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The Customer Data Platform Institute educates marketers and technologists about customer data management.   The Institute publishes industry news and educational materials, provides vendor comparison reports, builds directories of industry vendors and service firms, and offers Webinars, workshops, and consulting on related issues.

Customer Data Platforms are defined as “packaged software that maintains a unified, persistent customer database which is accessible to external systems.”  They are the only types of packaged software specifically designed to create and share a complete view of each customer.  Institute Founder and CEO David Raab named the Customer Data Platform category in 2013.

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