Inside the Data Lake: Building the Retail Edge

How retailers and D2C brands can navigate tariffs and uncertainty with identity resolution—anticipating customer needs, personalizing at scale, and staying ahead

With tariffs and economic headwinds dampening consumer spending, retailers and DTC brands need every edge they can get to stay a step ahead of what customers will want next. Taking a closer look at their own retail data is one way to help navigate all the uncertainty.

When it’s pulled together, customer data can be a game-changer—helping retailers personalize shopping experiences, fine-tune inventory, and sometimes even predict what customers are looking for before they realize it themselves.

Retailers really need data that shows the full picture—what customers want, what’s getting in the way of a purchase, and what’s influencing their choices along the way. Things like spending patterns, shifts in behavior, or points of friction in the shopping journey all matter. If someone pauses at checkout, abandons a cart, or suddenly changes how they spend, the data should help explain what’s going on.

And it’s not just about what’s happening inside the store or online. External factors play a huge role too—like the economy, competitor pricing, or even cultural trends. The retailers that connect those dots don’t just scramble to keep up; they’re a step ahead, ready to adapt whether the market is booming or tightening.

Heading into 2025, Retail CMOs pointed to their biggest capability gap: understanding customers and manage their experience. They’re already collecting plenty of data, but most still struggle to turn that data into something useful—like personalizing the shopping journey and helping consumers find the right products at the right time and price. To get there, retailers need a way to pull all that customer data together into one cohesive and usable view.

At its core, an identity resolution technology helps companies truly know their customers by:

• Unifying data – Bringing together disconnected records into one complete view.
• Recognizing people everywhere – Matching the same individual across emails, devices, websites, and stores.
• Adding depth – Filling gaps with demographics, interests, and behavioral insights.
• Making it actionable – Turning the golden record into precise audiences for marketing, personalization, and measurement.
• Protecting trust – Keeping data secure and compliant with privacy regulations.

✅ Bottom line: Investing in an identity resolution technology is the foundation that makes every marketing dollar work harder. It ensures you’re reaching the right people, personalizing effectively, and proving ROI—without wasting spend on bad data.

Not all identity resolution technologies are created equal though. The wrong choice can create new risks—data leakage, low match rates, runaway costs—while the right one becomes the backbone of customer strategy. Here is a list of what Retailers and DTC brands can look for in an identity resolution technology provider:

Some providers require you to send your data into their environment, and they’ll only unify it for a narrow purpose—like building an audience for an ad campaign. But that comes with two major problems: first, the privacy risk every time data leaves your walls, and second, the lack of flexibility. Retailers need more control over how their data can be used.

Think of it as a hub-and-spoke model: once the data is unified (the hub), there should be endless ways to put it to work (the spokes)—whether that’s feeding dashboards, powering marketing automation, or driving personalized journeys. To unlock that flexibility, the data needs to be unified inside your own environment, where you control how many use cases it supports.

That’s why it’s important to look for an identity resolution provider that integrates directly with your data lake (Snowflake, Databricks, etc.). Your data never leaves your environment, making it privacy-safe by design and giving you full control over how to put your unified data to work.

Identity resolution isn’t just about accuracy—it’s about how usable the data becomes once unified. Many providers leave the heavy lifting to your teams, forcing marketers and IT to spend 40+ hours a week manually cleaning files, merging duplicates, and trying to stitch records together. That’s time lost to operations instead of insights.

The right provider makes identity resolution fast, automated, and self-service:

• AI-driven matching to link records even when data isn’t standardized
• Automated hygiene to clean, deduplicate, and correct data continuously
• Instant accessibility so unified customer profiles flow directly into your BI tools and data lake—ready for segmentation, reporting, and analysis

Why it matters: Retailers don’t just need “resolved identities.” They need data that’s immediately usable by marketers and IT alike, enabling quick segmentation, tracking of changes over time, and faster insights.

Point solutions stop at stitching PII. Modern identity resolution platforms should enrich and complete the picture—merging purchase behavior with demographics, location, financial indicators, and lifestyle context.

Look for providers with identity graphs and cooperative data sources that can fill in missing details. This is how you build the true 360° customer view—not just a cleaned-up CRM.

Why it matters: A profile that’s complete, contextual, and continuously updated is what powers smarter targeting, personalization, and retention strategies.

Beware of providers who nickel-and-dime on match counts, API calls, or data volume. These models punish retailers for trying to do personalization and real-time resolution at scale.

A stronger model: flat or always-on pricing. This supports real-time visitor resolution, continuous updates, and cost predictability—without forcing tradeoffs between budget and performance.

Why it matters: Personalization shouldn’t be rationed. The right pricing model lets retailers scale identity resolution across every customer journey touchpoint without fear of hidden costs.

Customer resolution is only half the equation. The best providers also offer a robust identity graph of the U.S. population—with demographics, interests, and identifiers for acquisition.

Why it matters: Retailers can not only understand existing customers, but also expand intelligently—finding more lookalikes and fueling sustained growth.

✅ Bottom line for execs:

Identity resolution isn’t a commodity. It’s a strategic decision with major implications for privacy, security, personalization, and growth. The retailers who win will choose providers that integrate into their data infrastructure, protect customer trust, and deliver the accuracy and scale required for modern commerce.