Fear Indifference not Rejection
Challenge yourself on your audience before it challenges you.
Ben Cooper, Nick Geoghegan & Emily Horswell
For too many incumbent brands, the consumer is an inconvenience – at best, part of a faceless blob for products to be thrown at. At worst, the consumer is a capricious, ungrateful tyrant who should really know what’s best for them. Famously, (or perhaps apocryphally, it was the 1980’s after all) the UK’s British Rail described its passengers as “SLFs” an acronym for “Self Loading Freight” such was the low esteem in which its customers were held. But for a Challenger, audience is everything. Challengers are brands and businesses that see the category for its failings and who are determined to change things. By their very nature, they need to bring their audience along with them.
While it would be foolish to say that all consumers are loyal, swayed by purpose or that one should aim at a niche (that’s for you, LinkedIn), Challengers understand the importance of courting people who share the same points of view that they do. Time after time, we see that the most potent Challenger strategies are those that are built with a clear aspirational mindset of who their consumer is. This group might not represent the volume, but they appeal to a mindset the consumer wants to buy into, even if they don’t necessarily meet all the criteria themselves. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for brands that wish to employ a Challenger Mindset.
Audience as Inspiration
At eatbigfish, we have yet to find ‘busy working mum’ a fertile creative springboard (but answers on a postcard if you have, please). We have all read dull, sometimes lazy stereotypes cosplaying as insightful pen portraits and racked our brains as to how they might provide an inspiring focus or help to answer a particular challenge. In our experience, they don’t.
Unlike incumbents, Challengers recognise that a brand for everyone, is actually for noone. They know the difference between a demographic target that they will aim for in media and the aspirational mindset that they build the brand for.
The Ardbeg Comitttee: a community for the insanely commited
When eatbigfish worked with Ardbeg to reposition this intensely smoky single malt whisky from Islay, we were inspired by what their master distiller Dr Bill Lumsden told us, “When I imagine Ardbeg products, I embrace the idea of making the whisky weird – so that some people will hate it.” This strong sentiment led to Ardbeg’s call to arms of ‘Weirdos assemble’ — those insanely committed people who are the extreme within the extreme, who don’t do things by half measures. It was certainly a lot more interesting than a target of ‘45+ men who like the finer things in life’. This unique positioning drove them to create a whole new brand world of B-movie horror, comics and extreme BBQ, all the while allowing the brand to connect to others who are equally as fanatical.
This respect for the audience, the ‘insanely committed’, and the single-minded focus on appealing to them, has helped this Challenger stand out in what is an otherwise pretty staid and predictable category.
The Ardbeg 'Ice Scream' Truck: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo / Matt Alexander
Re-evaluating Relevance
The temptation for most brands is to identify an insight that represents their broad audience and play it back, as if holding a mirror back up to them. Too often, this point of view asserts that their brand is just like them. We see this frequently and it represents an incumbent mindset of playing it safe.
Tiffany & Co.’s ‘Not your mother’s Tiffany’ 2021 campaign was a real symbol of re-evaluation from the brand to signal the new cohort of consumers it wanted to win with. Turning its back on its long-established history of appealing to the 5th Avenue and Bond Street strolling upper classes, Tiffany challenged their audiences to reconsider the brand that they thought was stuck in the past. Collaborations with celebrity mega-couple Beyonce and Jay-Z have also contributed to this shift to appeal to younger buyers. In doing so, they have no doubt also attracted the latent supressed rebelliousness of those newly minted who can now afford such jewellery pieces.
“Patagonia is defined by its commitment to quality and to the environment...For each order, we require disclosure of how the product will be used and reserve the right to refuse service.”
– Patagonia’s Corporate Sales Catalogue
Whilst Tiffany seeks to reinforce its new repositioning, Patagonia chose to use the rejection of a consumer group to reassert their existing one. Patagonia caused a fleece gilet-induced meltdown on Wall Street when they announced that they were stopping supplying certain businesses with branded gear who were not in line with their mission. When Patagonia launched the ‘Don’t buy this jacket’ campaign, the finance fraternity would not have expected the message might be for them too.
‘The New Axe Effect’: Unilever/The Martin Agency
Axe/Lynx is a tale of both the virtues of evolving a core positioning from the past and recognising when the brand has got it wrong. When Axe decided to move on from its “edge in the mating game” strategy, talking to pubescent young men desperate for female attention, they went too far from their core. With the ‘Find Your Magic’ campaign, Axe lost sight of both who they were as a brand and who they needed to appeal to. But in returning to and reinterpreting ‘The Axe Effect’ in 2021, they were able to present a more fun, easy-going confidence that was still about smelling good and attraction, resonating once again with their key audience. Whilst the olfactory merit of the products themselves may be up for some debate, the strategy U-turn is a reminder to brands never to lose sight of who their audience is and that a positioning need not be entirely re-written for modern times. Sometimes a modern reinterpretation is more powerful.
Whilst incumbents might gravitate to jumping on the latest trend bandwagon or worse – playing into a lazy audience insight – Challengers lean into the fact that they have set themselves ambitions that might feel bigger than their brand. They continually find ways to recontextualise and evolve their message to keep them fresh. Sometimes that might start with a dramatic reframe like Tiffany, it might mean rejecting certain tribes like Patagonia or sometimes, it requires a more subtle but no less effective evolution of the core brand essence that fits with the next generation of consumer.
Challenger brands treat their consumers as more than just people who buy their stuff. They focus and speak to them with respect, unafraid of the fact that some people might reject them. Through the overcommitment to a specific tribe and mindset, along with the acceptance of rejection by others, Challengers create more exciting brand worlds, repositioning themselves for the future faster and more readily depose the competition as part of the monster they are fighting.
So, for any brand owner looking to be more consumer-centric, ask yourself: what do you, as a brand, want to fight on behalf of your audience? What does a radical or dramatic symbol of this challenge look like? And are you truly comfortable with the rejection from some, to appeal to and be loved by others?
Fear indifference, not rejection.