If you’re a customer data platform (CDP) vendor, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now. I hate to break it to you, but you shouldn’t be. The CDP market has it all wrong.

Sure, the market is growing exponentially; 2019 has brought $2.4 billion in funding and a projected Compound Annual Growth Rate of 29.3% until 2023. Over half of mid-market and enterprise firms have already adopted a CDP, and another one third plan to do so.

New entrants are pouring into the market, with the number of vendors growing by 60% in 2018 alone. Major players such as Adobe and Oracle are now hopping on the bandwagon, announcing CDP offerings after an initial reluctance to brand them as such. Salesforce, for example, called CDP “a passing fad” in 2018. By 2019, they were rolling out a platform of their own.

The hype is building — and that’s the problem. As Gartner shows us, when hype goes too far up, it only has one place to go next: crashing back down.