Challenger Brands

Essentially, Buffy creates a start-up with the goal of eradicating evil, something that venerable institutions have been woefully unsuccessful at. Along the way, Buffy’s team encounters many of the problems young entrepreneurs face on a regular basis. What follows is a list of lessons this business-minded reporter picked up while watching Buffy.

In an extract from Marketing Excellence 2, Peter Kirkby, vice president, global marketing excellence, GSK Consumer Healthcare sets out how to give a brand a new lease of life.  Keeping large organisations sufficiently responsive to consumer needs and competitor context is easy to write about, but clearly much harder to do. A good brand revitalisation will be characterised by these four things:

GraphScience has already signed some of the United States' largest retailers, while in stealth mode. And after today's launch, the CEO hopes to soon compete with Google AdWords.

Pepsi used to be the prototype of the strategic challenger brand. Now it’s the prototype of the strategically-challenged brand. In falling over themselves to be the opposite of Coke, Jakeman and co. are guilty of the kind of fuzzy thinking that must have Coke’s executives enjoying “happiness and moments of joy.” Jakeman summarizes months of research with the statement that “Coke is timeless. Pepsi is timely.”

If the title of my blog post seems shocking then it’s more in line with my flair for standing out in the crowd, which I believe is the way to go with anything in life and business.

Understanding these seven keys shall provide you the necessary start to building your Challenger Brand marketing strategy. As you gather this information, be 100% sure that this information is valid and relevant to your primary target audience.

Time was when selling a product was far simpler—not much competition, fewer available product forms and benefits, limited media formats to deal with and absolutely no social networks.

There are those brands that survived more than a generation on the strength of its product technology, thus gaining a stable following. These brands are ready to move into the next level to conquer new markets and become real challenger brands in their category but are managed by people afraid of competing in unfamiliar territory.

The way overpriced and over-marketed shaving industry has been begging to receive a good Netflix-ing for years, and now Dollar Shave Club is here with a brilliant business model and an even more brilliant viral video to get the word out. You can learn all about it here, but basically all you really need to know is you can now pay a flat nominal monthly amount for razor blades. How great is that?