Bridg announces ‘first CDP’ for brick-and-mortar retailers

Customer data platforms (CDPs), where all customer-related data is centralized, are a booming category. But, although CDPs can include offline data, they have been focused primarily on providing their repository for online campaigns and use cases.

Now, Santa Monica-based Bridg has announced a CDP optimized for use by brick-and-mortar retailers, which it says is the first of its kind. The CDP, with an accompanying customer relationship management (CRM) system, is expected to be released this fall.

Since 2012, founder and CEO Amit Jain told me, his company has been focused on providing a customer identification platform for physical stores.

Previously, it created both deterministic and probabilistic profiles of customers, centered around their point-of-sale data.

If you bought shoes on one occasion at Retailer X’s physical store, for instance, the last four digits of your credit card, the shoes purchased, data, time, store location, age, income, demographics and about 150 other data points were used to create a profile.

Probabilistic and deterministic

Some of those data points would be matched via inference to create a profile that was probably you. Jain said his company’s probabilistic matches are accurate 70 to 85 percent of the time, which it can assert with 95 percent certainty.

That probabilistic profile was then uploaded to Facebook and Google to find the probable you by attribute matching, to which Bridg might target an ad touting the store’s new sale on shoes. The idea is to bring infrequent customers, about whom little is known, back to the physical store.

Bridg also maintained a profile of deterministic data about the store’s more active customers, employing such definite info as email address, loyalty program membership, subscription and the like. Other campaigns would be directed at these more accurately profiled customers, Jain said, who would be identified with personally identifiable information if the user agreed.

Now, Jain said, the new CDP will link the definite profile with the probable profile of the user, thus combining all available information in one repository.

The CDP will provide the back-end data for a front-end customer relationship management (CRM) system which will be more user-friendly than the data-managing CDP. Essentially, the Bridg platform will employ the same data as before, but now the probabilistic and deterministic profiles will be connected to provide a more complete understanding of customers.

The CRM can segment these profiles, so the marketer can target linked deterministic/probabilistic profiles for campaigns or just one or the other. There will also be such optional built-in tools as an email platform, SMS/push messaging and the capability of running a loyalty program.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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