Ten years ago, Adam Morgan, believed by many (including me) to be the Challenger Brand guru, wrote the first edition of Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders. Morgan, who worked for one of the largest ad agencies in the world at the time, wrote from his experience with second, third and fourth-place brands. Nevertheless, the Challenger Brands he used as examples were still industry behemoths compared to the regional players or early-stage types that I am accustomed to working with. He outlined eight credos in his book to guide others to succeed, and I became one of his disciples — or as Seth Godin might say, a member of Morgan’s “tribe.”

I found his ideas both profound and inspirational, but I also realized a problem or two. I saw a need to help the real “guppie” — the small and medium-sized businesses, mostly entrepreneurial, who aren’t even on the scoreboard yet. They are often still run by their founders and in many cases, don’t have anyone on staff who is solely dedicated to branding and marketing, much less a marketing department. And because of their size and even perhaps their lack of focus, according to Adam Morgan’s definition of Challenger Brands, they don’t even qualify:

“There are three criteria for a Challenger Brand: a state of market, a state of mind, and a rate of success:

1. State of Market. Challengers are by definition not the Number One brands, nor are they niche
2. State of Mind. This is what really characterizes all these players — being Number Two (Number Six, or 18) is simply an accident of birth. Challenger brands have a mind-set that encompasses two key differentiators:
   1. Ambitions that exceed their conventional marketing resources, and,
   2. A preparedness to accept the marketing implications of the gap between their ambition and their marketing resource.
3. Rate of Success. The final criterion for a Challenger has to be, for our purposes, success… …a period of their life we can learn from, a period in which they enjoyed rapid growth. This is what Challengers can offer us over the Brand Leaders — an illustration of how to do it quickly.”

This year, Morgan released the second edition of Big Fish, new and improved, in which he patiently lays out 12 different “stances” a Challenger Brand can take. But the brands I am most interested in and excited about are a subset of Challenger Brands and therefore need a new name to define them (I’m working on that!). We might view this class of companies as the “Challenger Brand Farm Team,” the group that will most likely spawn the Challenger Brands of the next decade. I want to help them get there faster.

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Posted by: Andrea Fitting in: Advertising, The Changing Marketplace at: 9:37 am Keywords: Adam Morgan, Brand Leaders, brands, Challenger Brand, Eating the Big Fish, eight credos, entrepreneur, rate of success, Seth Godin, tribes

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