Survey: 26% of APAC firms plan to use CDPs in the coming year

Over 20% of B2C marketing decision-makers in APAC say their organisation currently uses CDPs, and 26% plan to do so in the next 12 months, a Forrester survey finds. 

Conducted by Forrester, the "The State Of Customer Data Platforms In Asia Pacific 2024" report outlines the recent growth, emerging trends, and common challenges facing CDPs in APAC, where B2C marketing executives in the region can use it as a guide to benchmark and refine their CDP strategy.

The report found that in 2024, 63% of B2C marketing decision-makers in APAC agree that their firm has invested in more first-party data collection, compared with 56% in 2021.

However, customer data concerns continue to make it difficult for marketing organisations to achieve their goals. Marketers are facing challenges such as quality of data (30%), accessibility of customer data (18%), inability to act on buyer and customer data(17%). To address these challenges, more marketers are turning to CDPs.

In 2024, 23% of B2C marketing decision-makers in APAC say their organisations have been using CDPs, and 26% plan to do so in the next 12 months.

Vendor maturity and marketers’ interest in CDPs vary widely across the region, resulting in a heterogeneous CDP market with an uneven distribution of revenue among industries and geographies.  

Specifically, Greater China, Australia, and India are the hottest CDP markets. In China, digital ecosystem players are entering the market: Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have all leveraged their robust data capabilities to introduce CDP as a standalone offering and gain market share. Australia is a mature market where mainstream Western CDPs have recently achieved strong growth.

Looking into various industries, retail, financial services, and consumer goods are the top CDP-adopting sectors. Marketers in these sectors have robust sets of customer data and excel at using first-party data, so they are prepared to invest in CDPs. They actively collaborate with CDP vendors to create industry-specific use cases and share best practices.

CDP investment in the hospitality sector has seen strong growth since our previous look at the space, driven by the postCOVID-19 rebound in travel and hospitality, said the report. 

The report also found that given lower adoption of customer analytics tools in APAC, B2C marketers turn to CDPs to gain deeper insights into customers’ behaviours, preferences, and tendencies. There is growing demand for predictive analytics with AI and machine learning capabilities.

Incorporating adjacent functionalities and use cases into CDPs

Beyond popular extended use cases such as customer analytics and marketer self-service access to customer data, there’s a growing trend of incorporating adjacent functionalities and use cases into CDPs to meet the needs of APAC marketers. The report suggested that marketers incorporate:

• Consent management. CDPs are known for making customer data actionable — but that can’t happen without proper consent. In response to increasing demand from marketers in the region, some CDP vendors have incorporated add-on consent management features natively. Compliance teams now also use CDPs to manage data governance and consent across channels, ensuring compliance with the region’s emerging privacy regulations. Marketers should ask if CDPs store consent information that includes granular details such as the time of collection and the channel in which it was collected.
• Identity resolution. While identity resolution is not a mandatory CDP feature, some vendors offer it as a differentiator. This goes beyond simple data record matching, integrating identifiers with behavioral, transactional, and contextual information to create a comprehensive and addressable consumer profile for marketing analysis, orchestration, and delivery. The ease of configuring and customising resolution logic can vary across platforms, so marketers should carefully evaluate this before buying.
• Advertising use cases. Incorporating third-party data into CDPs and using them for advertising aren’t new in APAC, as a lot of marketing and customer engagement takes place on third-party platforms such as social media, eCommerce marketplaces, and super apps. Marketers can optimise ad targeting by incorporating third-party data into CDPs to enrich first-party profiles. They can use enriched profiles to create precise microsegments, syncing audiences across ad platforms including walled gardens, or use microsegments as seed audiences to boost the effectiveness of lookalike modeling.
• Marketer friendliness. APAC marketers prefer CDPs that are tailored to their needs rather than aimed at technical users such as data analysts or agencies. They seek marketer-friendly CDPs that marketing teams can directly use and manage, reducing their reliance on IT or external vendors. Such CDPs offer features such as data collection, profile unification, segmentation, and activation in a user-friendly interface. With advanced technologies such as generative AI, marketers can even interact with CDPs in a conversational manner.

True enough, companies that have invested significantly in CDPs have high hopes of leveraging their first-party data to achieve positive customer and business outcomes. However, at times, CDP customers may find value realisation too slow, too limited, or too challenging to achieve or measure.

To realise value, the report suggested that companies should eliminate silos with a companywide CDP strategy. They should form a cross-functional committee to define goals; assess internal readiness in terms of skills and resources; convince data owners and stakeholders; and establish a RACI matrix to clarify responsibility.

Companies should also prioritise the use cases based on their value, which means relevance to their business goals and the speed at which they can demonstrate value, such as use cases involving fewer data sources and target systems. Additionally, they should prioritise use cases with higher potential for scalability and replicate these best practices across departments, brands, business units, or markets.

Marketers are suggested to be aware of hidden costs and manage them early and proactively; and to adopt an effective model to track metrics and evaluate ROI. 

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