Challenge Something

The opportunity for Challengers in a world of Big
We’ve seen the extraordinary growth in a decade of a handful of brands that have become so all-conquering as to have transformed our personal and social habits globally.

With this growth and success, though, another kind of media commentary has simultaneously developed around Big, particularly in the West: an increasing suspicion of the power and motive that accompanies it.

Simply putting the word Big in front of a category descriptor – Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Tech – has come, through repeated media headlines, to trigger a common emotional response from us: a sense of cynical giants putting their commercial interests before their customers’ real needs, with a different moral compass to our own, ignoring their social responsibilities in pursuit of growth and preserving the status quo.

And the growth of Small
In the emotional vacuum created by this cultural distrust of Big has come, unsurprisingly, the renewed romance around Small. And so accompanying the growth of the Dominators has also come the increasing success of Small – or Smaller, to be more accurate. A BCG study in 2017 showed US$22bn of value had moved from bigger brands to smaller challengers in US packaged goods over a preceding five year period, with a similar pattern in Europe.

In this changing environment we see a new wave of challengers emerging, with new perspectives and strategies powering their challenge. Common to many of these challengers is a very simple shift in understanding what a challenger is:

Not a brand that
challenges someone,
but a brand that
challenges something.

Challenger is a mindset
A challenger brand is not a number / state of market. What makes you a challenger brand is the mindset you bring to your situation. Being prepared to do something bold and imaginative to upset the status quo, in order to succeed.

It’s an attitude, a vision, an unacceptance of convention and existing worldviews. Its the drive of ambition, tempered with meaningful purpose. Finding the right cause can be the thread that links everything together, in a powerful way:

• Something that you see in the category that is a driver that doesn’t belong there anymore.
• Something about the user experience that you’d like to put right
• Something about the way that society works
• Something about the way that society talks, that you think is wrong or unnecessary or belongs to a past time e.g. what are we going to do about the emerging obesity crisis in the next generation? And what can our brand do to pioneer and champion solutions to that

The bigger danger you can face as a brand isn’t actually rejection. It’s indifference. Be bold – challenge the status quo, and become a champion within your industry.

Reading Suggestion
Overthrow II –– 10 strategies from the new wave of challengers
Written by Adam Morgan & Malcolm Devoy