CDPs vs. data lakes: Decoding your data infrastructure

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are software tools designed to collect and organize customer data from various sources to create unified profiles, which can be used to personalize marketing and improve customer service. Despite their potential, CDPs often fall short of being the complete solution they claim to be due to issues like data quality, vendor lock-in, and not truly serving as a "single source of truth." Instead, businesses with established data infrastructures might find greater value in leveraging their data lakes, which store raw data in its native format, and using tools like Fivetran Activations to create a "composable" CDP. This approach allows businesses to maintain a consistent source of truth for customer data, avoid vendor lock-in, and adapt their systems flexibly to changing needs, using their data lake alongside tools for data transformation and activation. By transforming data and defining customer segments, businesses can sync information to various operational systems, thus enabling personalized marketing and improved customer interactions without the limitations of off-the-shelf CDP solutions.