How Challenger Brands can

compete against Brand Leaders

ADAM MORGAN
 The 8 credos of successful challenger
brands

1. Break with Your Immediate Past

2. Build a Lighthouse Identity
3. Assume Thought Leadership of the Category
4. Create Symbols of Reevaluation
5. Sacrifice
6. Over-commit
7. Use Advertising & Publicity as a High-Leverage
Asset
8. Become Idea-Centered, Not Consumer-Centered
 1. Break with Your Immediate Past

If you are up against a giant with an

eight-foot spear, the one weapon it is
foolish to choose is a four-foot spear; if
you can’t match the length, you need
something different.
 1. Break with Your Immediate Past

• Redefine what business we should really be

in (in context of The Big Fish)
• Free ourselves up to see all the possibilities
of the category
• See clearly both opportunity and threats, and
create the momentum to push Challenger
Strategy into Challenger behaviour.
 2. Build a Lighthouse Identity

• Challenger brands do not attempt to navigate

by the consumer. Instead, they invite the
consumer to navigate by them. (Not “That’s
why”advertising)
• Like a lighthouse, one notices them without
looking for them
 2. Build a Lighthouse Identity

Four Key Dimensions:

• Identity
• Emotion
• Intensity
• Salience

“Energizer Bunny”
 2. Build a Lighthouse Identity

• The Challenger Brand has to possess a

stronger, emotionally based relationship with
the consumer than the brand leader does.
• Indifference is death.
 3. Assume thought leadership of the
category

• It’s not just about strategy. It’s about

behaviour.
• Deliberately break some of the category
conventions, while rooting yourself in others.
 4. Create symbols of reevaluation

Attack the dominant consumer complacency

(deep-seated belief/habit). Introduce a new
dimension.

Ericsson Mobile Phones

 5. Sacrifice

• A brand leader’s currency is its mass appeal.

• Challengers need to create differences which may
sometimes polarise consumers. (To strongly attract,
one may also deter).
• The sacrifices a Challenger needs to make do not lie
in the incidentals to the business, but in the
fundamentals:
– Trade numbers for identity
– Trade availability for desirability
– Trade depth for definition
 5. Sacrifice

• Concentrates the internal and external

expressions of identity by eliminating
activities that might dilute it.
• Allows the creation of strong points of
difference.
• Generates critical mass for the
communication of the identity and
differences by stripping away other
secondary activities.
 6. Over-commit

• Aim two feet below the brick.

• We cannot fool the consumer by talking
about good intentions. Overcommitment is
the only way to translate intention into
behaviour.
 7. Use advertising & publicity as
a high-leverage asset

• Challengers must demand to be noticed.

They need to take a bold position in
everything they do.
• Creative breakthrough is a strategic
necessity. Need ideas that seize the target’s
imagination.
• “You can play safe and take a risk. Or you
can take a risk and play safe.”
 8. Become idea-centered,
not consumer-centered

• Communication ideas engage the

imagination and emotion of consumers who
think their needs are already satisfied by the
brand leader.
• Need to continually `manufacture’ ideas to
incessantly demonstrate the promise.