Ditch the Demos: How Challengers reject the status quo
By Sarah Tilley
A common misconception about Challengers is that they are small niche brands, but in reality, Challengers are brands who have ambitions that outweigh their resources. Often, to achieve these ambitions, they need to move beyond their original target consumer and look for new audiences. So, what happens if you do go from being a niche brand with a hyper-focused demographic target to one that needs to speak to a much wider group of people? In times like these, Challenger brands recognise the need to break with the status quo. They look beyond demographics to focus on their consumers’ mindset. Lebara, one of the fastest growing mobile networks in Europe, used their inherent Challenger thinking to question category norms and grow their audience beyond the niche.
When Lebara was founded in the early noughties, their target audiences were based on demographics – migrants and ethnic populations who were looking for cheaper ways to stay in touch with the people back home. But we now live in a world where everyone has a mobile phone, and the telecoms category has flattened out. As David Clyde, Group Brand Director at Lebara, told us, “The only way we're going to grow is by winning share from other brands.” They needed to move beyond a single demo audience into a more mainstream consumer – one that was struggling with the cost-of-living crisis and didn’t know that there was an alternative to legacy contracts from the big telecom companies.
Through their marketing strategy of “championing a smarter way to connect”, Lebara were able to challenge consumer inertia around what a mobile network could do in a fun and interesting way. Consumers no longer had to to sign up to a multi-year contract or buy a handset through their provider – they could just pay for what they actually needed.
By challenging the big networks on their incumbent category behaviour, like using costly celebrities to advertise and increasing prices mid-contract, Lebara demonstrated to a much wider audience why they should make the switch, and saved them money in the process.
