Sponsored by Adstra  •  November 13, 2025  •

Patrick Roman Gut, svp and head of new business, Adstra

Ask the marketing leader of a typical challenger brand about identity and they’ll likely say more about aspirations than applications. Brand teams know that identity is fundamental to everything they care about, from finding new customers and lowering acquisition costs to accurately measuring campaign effectiveness and deeply understanding customer behavior.

Fortunately, change is afoot, and identity is no longer a luxury only for the biggest enterprises. More nimble platforms are entering the market, offering challenger brands a foundation for creating a comprehensive customer view, precise audience segmentation and efficiently scaling growth beyond major platforms like Facebook and Google.

With identity more readily available, it will solve some of the biggest challenges that challenger brands face.

The identity gap for challenger brands

The lack of easily accessible identity solutions leaves all challenger brands stuck with fragmented identity, even those that are doing everything correctly. Without a comprehensive solution, their data is scattered across various SaaS (software as a service) tools that don’t talk effectively to each other. Customer insights are siloed within platforms like Shopify, Klaviyo, customer support systems, CRM tools and other SaaS applications. Additionally, challenger brands have anonymous visitors engaging with their websites, whose identities are unknown or unmanaged, limiting the potential for personalized engagement.

To counteract this, many challenger brands have turned to rented identity. They’ve grown primarily through large advertising platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon, which offer powerful identity-driven targeting.

While this is a temporary solution for identity, it means brands are missing something that they need: control. These platforms maintain total ownership and control of audience data, meaning brands lose out. Brands, for their part, know they aren’t getting a good deal. If they want to achieve their core goals of growth, revenue and customer insights, they must depend on increasingly costly channels that provide limited visibility into their own customers and restrict their strategic flexibility over the long term.

Even the most successful challenger brands are stuck with siloed data and rented identity, lacking the 360-degree customer view they want. They need independent identity solutions that fit their scrappier, growth-oriented mindset.

Making identity more accessible to challenger brands

Fortunately, this is where those big changes are coming in several areas — including affordability, flexibility and adaptability — that will finally help these brands.

Most identity solutions come with steep licensing fees designed for enterprise budgets, pricing challenger brands out of independent identity ownership. When costs come down, it means these brands can take strategic control of their own customer data.

Enterprise-focused identity tools also frequently require multi-year commitments, severely limiting flexibility while challenger brands thrive on agility. Therefore, any kind of identity solution and agreement needs to maintain flexibility to preserve first-mover advantage. Similarly, large-scale enterprise tools often involve complicated, months-long integrations. Challenger brands need solutions that deliver immediate, measurable value, not prolonged projects that drag on indefinitely.

Another obstacle that stops challenger brands from owning identity is staffing. Enterprise identity solutions typically require dedicated teams of engineers and data experts. Challenger brands don’t have these resources. They need intuitive, easy-to-use software that fits seamlessly into their existing, marketer-friendly SaaS tools like Shopify and Klaviyo.

Finally, identity offerings are frequently packaged inside broader platforms or exchanges, forcing challenger brands to buy additional services they don’t need or want. This bundled approach inflates costs, reduces transparency and limits strategic flexibility. The future relies on stand-alone products with different modules, tailored to each brand’s needs.

Embracing the future

Identity solutions should empower the ambitions of challenger brands. There are many savvy marketers within these companies eager to access identity tools, yet one of the aforementioned barriers is preventing them. When all of these walls come down, brands can tap into identity to continue growing, acquiring customers efficiently and accurately measuring their performance.

The industry is entering a new era in which independent identity capabilities can be built explicitly to meet challenger brands’ scale, agility and resource constraints. The next phase is to see how these brands redefine the space, now that they have access to the tools they’ve always wanted.