Historically, when we talked digital customers, we thought of them in terms of email addresses and cookies—a digital trail of their browsing behaviors. Now, marketers can’t rely on cookies alone to know their consumers and measure performance, especially considering Google’s announcement to remove support for third-party cookies by default on its Chrome browser, following Apple (Safari) and Mozilla (Firefox). It’s even more critical that companies use data from diverse sources, create stronger data architectures, and build governance frameworks to truly understand who consumers are and, more importantly, what they desire from brands.
Successful businesses have likely formed a unified identity graph, or an understanding of each customer. They use AI models, analytics tools and techniques to bring together a wide range of previously siloed, structured and unstructured data sets, and merge them with data from ecosystem partners. It’s this convergence of transactional data, demographic data and psychographics that helps brands infer what customers are thinking and when they might make a purchasing decision. Pulled together in a responsible way that protects individuals’ privacy, the data paints a more complete picture—a Living Customer Profile—of every existing and potential customer.
