Party & Individual DMOs in Salesforce Data Cloud(Data 360): A Marketer’s Foundation for Unified Customer Profiles
- sfmcstories
- Jan 11
- 3 min read
Modern marketing depends on one critical capability: knowing who the customer really is across channels, systems, and moments. Salesforce Data Cloud approaches this challenge through two foundational Data Model Objects (DMOs): Party and Individual.
Rather than forcing all incoming data into a rigid “contact” structure, Data Cloud uses Party and Individual to model identity in a way that reflects how customer data actually exists in the real world.
Why Party & Individual Exist in Data Cloud
Customer data rarely arrives clean or consistent. The same person may appear multiple times across systems, each with different identifiers and attributes. Salesforce introduced Party and Individual DMOs to:
Accept identity data without premature unification
Support both B2C and B2B identity models
Enable accurate identity resolution before marketing activation
This separation ensures flexibility at ingestion and confidence at activation.
Party DMO: The Identity Container
The Party DMO represents any entity that participates in a relationship. It is intentionally generic and system-facing.
From a data modeling perspective, Party allows Data Cloud to store identity records as they arrive, without immediately deciding whether they represent a person, an account, or another entity.
Key characteristics of Party:
Represents people, organizations, or other entities
Serves as the input layer for identity resolution
Allows multiple source records to coexist
Acts as the anchor for unification logic
For marketers, Party operates mostly behind the scenes, ensuring that identity data is captured accurately and safely.
Individual DMO: The Unified Person Profile
The Individual DMO represents a real human being — the profile marketers segment, personalize, and activate.
Once Data Cloud determines that a Party represents a person, it creates or updates an Individual record. This becomes the golden customer profile used across marketing use cases.
What makes Individual marketer-friendly:
One Individual = one real person
Attributes are unified across sources
Designed for segmentation and activation
Connects directly to Contact Point DMOs
In short, Individual is where marketing value comes to life.
How Party and Individual Work Together
Party and Individual are not competing concepts — they are complementary layers.
The flow typically looks like this:
Data is ingested from source systems as Party records
Identity resolution evaluates matching rules
Related Party records are unified
An Individual is created or updated for a person
The Individual becomes available for marketing use cases
This layered approach protects data quality while enabling scale.
Why This Model Is Powerful for Marketing Users
By separating identity ingestion from activation, Salesforce Data Cloud delivers several marketing advantages:
Cleaner segmentation using unified Individual profiles
Consistent personalization across channels
Reduced duplication in audiences
Accurate suppression and consent enforcement
Reliable activation into Marketing Cloud and other destinations
Marketers no longer need to manually reconcile identities — Data Cloud does it structurally.
Common Marketing Use Cases Enabled
Party and Individual DMOs power many real-world scenarios, including:
Building a single customer view across web, email, and mobile
Identity-based audience creation
Cross-channel personalization
Consent-aware engagement
Reach and frequency management
All of these depend on accurate Individual profiles built on Party-based identity resolution.
A Simple Way to Remember
Party → System-facing identity container
Individual → Marketer-facing unified person
Salesforce intentionally designed this separation so marketers can focus on people, not data complexity.
Final Thoughts
Party and Individual DMOs may feel abstract at first, but they are the structural foundation of Salesforce Data Cloud. Together, they ensure that every marketing decision is based on a trusted, unified understanding of the customer.
For marketers, mastering these concepts means better segmentation, stronger personalization, and more confident activation — without worrying about what’s happening behind the scenes.
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