While challenger brands exist across every business category, their impact on the food and drink industry has been particularly profound. With a relatively low barrier to entry and consistent demand for innovation – coupled with the obvious and easy enemy of ultra-processed foods – the sector has experienced radical disruption from challengers dedicated to doing things differently.
But doing things differently doesn’t come easy for large organisations with multi-layered decision-making structures, and ways of working that were originally designed to manage packaging tweaks rather than new brand creations. This might explain why corporates have responded to the challenger phenomenon by acquiring or investing in already successful start-ups, or by seeking to speed up innovation from their own established brands. What they haven’t done – despite it requiring significantly less investment – is successfully create their own challenger brands from scratch.
Over the past 17 years at B&B, we’ve worked with founders, start-ups and challenger brands every single day. We’ve never not been busy creating a new challenger, riding every new wave of innovation, from coconut waters to kombuchas, eco nappies to electric bikes. We’re proud of the longevity we’ve built into these challengers, with brands like Bear, Pip & Nut, Dalston’s, and Kit & Kin still going strong after more than a decade in the market. With such a strong track record in challenger brand creation, we’ve often wondered why larger organisations rarely approach us to build new brands for them.
So is there such a thing as an entrepreneurial mindset that’s common among founders, but difficult to replicate within a more corporate environment? To help us find out, we’ve been analysing the behaviours of the successful founders we’ve worked with, and found four key attitudes that come up again and again.
1. SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE
Being a challenger brand isn’t an aesthetic, and no amount of trendy fonts, cheeky socials or disruptive designs can disguise a lack of genuine purpose. True challengers demand category change through a better product or a different business model, taking on the challenges that other brands can’t or won’t. Marketeers need to ask themselves whether their innovation is offering consumers real change, or simply packaging up the same old stuff in shinier packaging. Gen Z consumers are notoriously savvy when it comes to seeing through performative gestures, and demand authenticity from the brands they choose.
GIVING BACK: Kit & Kin combines good looks with genuine ethics
2. PASSION OVER EGO
The founder story is a familiar trope for start-up brands, and is of course a signal of authenticity and credibility. But successful challengers have to deliver more than a cult of personality, which can sometimes lack the external perspective needed to keep consumers interested. This sounds like great news for corporate challengers who lack a founder, but even if they’re not front and centre, it’s usually the founder’s energy that shapes the brand’s trajectory. The strongest start-ups are notoriously built from a founder’s personal need for something not catered for by the market – and it’s this obsession that drives the business forward.
FOUNDER ENERGY: Pip Murray, the driving force behind Pip & Nut
3. INSTINCT OVER DATA
For all their incubator strategies and intrapreneur schemes, the majority of corporate brand creations are likely to encounter slow-moving decision-making processes and a top-down need for definitive data. Gut instinct isn’t built into the toolkit of larger organisations, but it’s a crucial characteristic of successful entrepreneurs. For them, gut instinct isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about knowing who to trust. Self-aware founders understand their strengths and weaknesses, and seek out experts who can bring the right experience and expertise to the table. Creating ‘collaborative instinct’ – where founder and agency share a single-minded strategic vision – has enabled B&B to build hugely successful and long-lived brands with zero consumer testing.
NATURAL INSTINCT: BEAR’s brave design was born through trust not testing
4. BRAVERY OVER SAFETY
One of the downfalls of an over-reliance on consumer data is the creation of safe, reassuring and ultimately predictable work. The Cost of Dull project by Eatbigfish reports that advertisers in the UK need to spend almost £10 million more on media to make dull advertising campaigns as effective as interesting ones. The implication here is that big brands can afford to be boring, whereas challengers can’t. Smart founders know this, and prioritise bravery as a necessary brand behaviour to ensure effectiveness. Bravery, it turns out, is not the risk that many marketeers make out, but an essential strategy for deeper consumer engagement
BOLD DELIVERY: Challengers like Dalston’s can’t afford to be boring
Our conclusion? When it comes to founders vs marketeers, we truly believe it’s a ‘who cares wins’ situation. For successful challengers, attitudes like substance, passion, instinct and bravery aren’t buzzwords or a list of brand values, they are genuine character traits that contribute towards success. But with the right combination of people and partners, it is certainly possible to uncover and stay true to such challenger behaviours within a larger organisation. With alignment, clarity and a pinch of ‘collaborative instinct’, there’s no reason why we can’t create the next big thing.
