Master the hottest technology around to drive marketing success
Marketers are faced with a stark and challenging customers demand deep personalization, but they are increasingly leery of offering the type of personal data required to make it happen. As a solution to this problem, Customer Data Platforms have come to the fore, offering companies a way to capture, unify, activate, and analyze customer data. CDPs are the hottest marketing technology around today, but are they worthy of the hype? Customer Data Platforms takes a deep dive into everything CDP so you can learn how to steer your firm toward the future of personalization.
Over the years, many of us have built byzantine “stacks” of various marketing and advertising technology in an attempt to deliver the fabled “right person, right message, right time” experience. This can lead to siloed systems, disconnected processes, and legacy technical debt. CDPs offer a way to simplify the stack and deliver a balanced and engaging customer experience. Customer Data Platforms breaks down the fundamentals, including how
Understand the problems of managing customer data Understand what CDPs are and what they do (and don't do) Organize and harmonize customer data for use in marketing Build a safe, compliant first-party data asset that your brand can use as fuel Create a data-driven culture that puts customers at the center of everything you do Understand how to use AI and machine learning to drive the future of personalization Orchestrate modern customer journeys that react to customers in real-time Power analytics with customer data to get closer to true attribution In this book, you’ll discover how to build 1:1 engagement that scales at the speed of today’s customers.
Martin Kihn is a writer, digital marketer, dog lover, balletomane and spiritual athlete. He was born in Zambia, grew up in suburban Michigan, has a BA in Theater Studies from Yale and an MBA from Columbia Business School. His articles have appeared in New York, the New York Times, GQ, Us, Details, Cosmopolitan and Forbes, among many others, and he was on the staff of Spy, Forbes, New York and Vibe. Until recently, most of his writing could be called satirical or snarky, meticulously researched and office-based.
In the late 1990's, Kihn was Head Writer for the popular television program "Pop-Up Video" on MTV Networks and was nominated for an Emmy for Writing. He lost to "Win Ben Stein's Money," decided to quit writing and got into business school. Ironically enough, the tragicomic world of American business, where everybody seemed to be speaking an impressive language that was not quite English, and not quite clear, provided him with a whole new vein of source material, and his writing career really took off.
Kihn's first book was a humorous expose of the consulting industry called "House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time" (Grand Central 2005), based on the three years he spent working for a large consultancy. The Economist said "a more entertaining book about business is unlikely to appear for a long time," and Salon.com called it "exceedingly smart and funny," echoing Publishers Weekly's reviewer, who declared the book "highly intelligent and deeply funny."
Former co-workers and pinheaded career consultants were less amused, however, spamming Amazon.com with one-star reviews and all but sabotaging the book's chances in the marketplace.
Enraged but unbroken, Kihn reemerged a few years later with a grotesquely satirical stunt-memoir called "A**hole: How I Got Rich & Happy By Not Giving a Damn About Anyone" (Broadway Books 2008). The premise of this reality TV-type firebomb was that a guy who is too nice to get ahead in business (aka Marty) decides systematically to turn himself into a pricktard and reap the rewards. Film rights were sold to Warner Brothers, where it is in development, and Booklist raved "Kihn's got a great ear for dialogue - and a comedic sense worthy of Second City."
For reasons that elude the Author, "A**hole" became a publishing phenomenon in Germany and Austria, sitting for months on the Der Spiegel bestseller list and causing his German publisher to proclaim him "the David Hasselhoff of satirical non-fiction." Notes from his legion of German fans lead some to suspect Kihn's gossamer irony was lost in translation.
Kihn is married to the singer-songwriter Julia Douglass. Her most recent projects include a series of brilliant one-minute animated songs about cooking called ChefDoReMi.com. After twenty years living and working in New York City, the couple recently relocated to Minneapolis, where Kihn works as a digital marketing strategist for a well-known agency.
"Bad Dog: A Love Story," marks the emergence of a mature writer at the height of his powers. At its heart is an intensely charismatic, terribly-behaved 90-pound Bernese mountain dog named Hola. After a shattering personal crisis, Kihn decides to train Hola and together they earn their Canine Good Citizen certification from the American Kennel Club. It's a journey of redemption, as together man and dog reclaim their lives by working toward a common goal.
More like 3.5 stars but I am rounding up because there are so few resources on this topic.
Probably the best parts of this book is the history of different information architectures applied to marketing. I hadn't thought about what topics like a CRM or automation really mean in the context of the overall IT stack.
The idea of a CDP makes sense and is in line with other tech trends. Too many of the claims for why it's needed were overused in this book and not that surprising in the first place. "Marketers use data from lots of sources" -- I don't know where that's not true in analytics today; repeating this claim ad nauseam just sounds myopic and uninformed.
Overall a decent (if the only) book introducing the CDP, although repetitive and lacking context with broader trends in IT or analytics.