Rival, a fast-growing global marketing research and consulting firm, and Imperial Business School, the business school of Imperial College London, today announced the launch of The Rival 50, a new global index revealing the top 50 challenger brands that redefine the standard for success across today’s increasingly complex global marketing landscape.
The list analyzes and celebrates the brands that have challenged the conventions of their categories and engineered an outsized impact in both their competitive sectors and in the wider culture at large.
Built on over 10,000 hours of proprietary research and analysis conducted over the past four years, The Rival 50 is the first data-backed index to quantify which behaviors and characteristics define modern challenger brand identity. The framework used to evaluate each brand was based on three core components: differentiation, relevance, and talkability. The study encompasses the philosophies, workplace cultures, sense of mission and purpose, and the leadership styles that provide a holistic analysis of what makes each individual brand stand out from the rest of the corporate world.
“Our mission at Rival has always been to document the playbook of successful challenger brands in order to explain the specific strategies and methodologies that allow the Davids to take on the Goliaths,” said Eric Fulwiler, co-founder and CEO of Rival. “We designed the index to provide actionable insights and takeaways that any brand can apply or adapt to their own marketing plans to help grow their businesses through conviction, creativity, and community.”
The Rival 50 list will be unveiled on November 13 at the 2026 Web Summit that runs November 10–13 in Lisbon, Portugal, and released simultaneously online. The list includes both familiar and emerging brands and businesses based in the United States, South Korea, China, South Africa, Europe and the United Kingdom such as Liquid Death, Owala, Crocs, ChatGPT, Graza, Aldi, Buldak, Rhode, and Represent. The panel of jurors featured marketing industry superstars such as Fernando Machado (former CMO of Burger King), Kristen Cavallo (former CEO of MullenLowe) and Dean Aragón (CEO of Shell Brands and chairman of ANA).
The Rival 50 Index marks a milestone for the marketing industry and combines academic rigor with creative insights. It includes an in-depth research summary that offers five major trends that enable challenger brands to succeed:
- Belonging: The best challengers realize that community is not just a marketing channel but a way to cocreate new products and features with consumers.
- Ideological Distinction: In a world of sameness, conviction around a brand’s value systems and beliefs drives success. Neutrality no longer works in a hyperconnected world.
- Safety: The most successful challenger brands lower the temperature in a world defined by noise and fatigue. These brands offer a sense of reassurance in environments that thrive on pressure and complexity.
- Beyond the Commercial: Challenger thinking no longer belongs only to companies. It defines creators, athletes and fictional characters who build worlds people choose to live in — cultural operating systems.
- Media Amplification: The strongest brands think and behave and like media companies to flourish in the attention economy and design content ecosystems that never switch off.
Rival CEO Eric Fulwiler will be available for interviews at Web Summit or afterward. To arrange an interview with Fulwiler, Rival’s leadership team, or any of the featured brands, contact producer@wearerival.com.
View the teaser video introducing the Rival 50, and learn what it’s all about here.
About Rival
Rival is one of the fastest-growing marketing research and consulting firms in the U.S. and UK, working with challengers such as Oura Ring, Wonder, and Webflow to help them scale and incumbents such as Xerox, JP Morgan, and Unilever to help them innovate. Rival’s mission is to understand what challenger brands do differently to grow in categories that are being disrupted and bring those insights and advantages to blue-chip brands of any size and sector. For more information, visit www.wearerival.com.
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