Challenger Brands
A challenger brand is one that dares to position itself directly against category norms in order to stand out in the eyes of consumers.
What is a challenger brand?
A challenger brand defines itself in direct opposition to how a category normally behaves, allowing them to achieve rapid growth in a competitive landscape by shaking up the status quo.
As much of a creative mindset as it is a market position, being a challenger brand often takes a level of bravery and ambition that's greater than the resources a brand has available. For this reason, many startup brands take a challenger stance, though bigger companies are increasingly borrowing from the challenger brand playbook.
The kind of opposition that makes a challenger brand can take different forms. It could create an entirely new category nobody else has claimed, take on the big dogs by calling out their shortcomings, or build a cult following from the ground up. With the right insight and execution, a challenger brand can punch well above its weight.
How do you become a challenger brand?
Naturally, the route into becoming a challenger completely depends on what you're reacting against. However, the strongest challenger positions tend to draw from one of the following approaches.
Category Design
Creating an entirely new category, instead of competing within an existing one.
White Space
Exploiting a gap within a category that no competitor has claimed, or rejecting the status quo.
Cult Brand
Building a devoted, hyper-specific community that goes beyond ordinary customer loyalty.
Lifestyle Brand
Weaving a brand into a consumer's daily life, greater than a single moment or purchase.
What a challenger brand looks like in practice: Snooz
Ice cream is one of the most saturated categories in the freezer aisle, if not the whole supermarket. The branding would suggest the same too, with stacks of packaging so vanilla it's enough to put you to sleep.
Enter Snooz, the only ice cream that's actually designed to help you get those eight hours, replacing eye-opening emulsifiers and e-numbers with a sleep-friendly mix of camomile, theanine, magnesium and lemon balm.
But while the team had reimagined one dreamy product, they needed a brand that people wouldn't sleep on.
Snooz
Snooz had created the sleep-friendly ice cream category from scratch, so the opportunity to differentiate from the played-out gingham and seasides was clear. We gave them a brand that belongs to the night, subverting every light, blue-sky, child-friendly code with a cooler aesthetic and language more fitting with the hours after sundown.
But Snooz's look and feel isn't in night mode for the sake of it. Over 60% of ice cream is consumed after 6pm. This insight gave Snooz the freedom to create their own rules rather than follow them, all while playing into real consumer behaviour.
Outcome: A challenger brand built from the ground up, solidifying its own category rather than melting into the background.
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