disruptor Archives - Emotive Brand

Are you up to the challenge?

Starting today, we’re launching a three-part series on challenger brands—who they are, how they behave, and why your brand could benefit from adopting their disruptive mindset. As this is the first blog in the series, let’s start with the basics. The beginning, as they say, is always a good place to start.

What is a challenger brand?

“A challenger brand is defined, primarily, by a mindset—it has business ambitions bigger than its conventional resources, and is prepared to do something bold, usually against the existing conventions or codes of the category, to break through.” —The Challenger Project, by eatbigfish.

Even if you’re not familiar with the term “challenger brand,” you’ve certainly experienced its narrative cousin: the underdog story. It’s David and Goliath. It’s Rocky. That oft-romanticized vision of a plucky innovator running a business out of their garage and taking down the big guys. Think of Ben & Jerry’s vs. Haagen-Daz, Sam Adams vs. Budweiser, or Apple vs. Microsoft.

Category is the new challenge

While in the beginning being a challenger brand often meant slaying one particular dragon—Pepsi vs. Coke—modern challenger brands are more focused on what they are disrupting instead of who. It’s not about me versus you; it’s about me versus the category, the industry, and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

From Airbnb to Blue Apron to Warby Parker, challenger brands are redefining the ways we travel, eat, shop, and more. As Adam Morgan says, “Being a challenger brand today is less about business enmity, and more about an often mission-driven desire to progress the category.”

Criteria for challenger brands

To be clear, there are no rules set in stone about what makes a challenger brand. By definition, it’s a fluid position. You might start out a challenger and be so successful at taking out the competition that you become the next target on top of the hill. It’s a Shakespearean cycle of ascension and dethronement that leaves only the most innovative companies standing.

“A challenger brand can take many forms; it’s more of a mindset than a specific set of rules,” says Kohlben Vodden, founder of StoryScience. “These brands tell stories that by proxy make us feel empowered. They tell us real success lies in breaking away from the pressure of social norms, challenging authority, and being disagreeable. These brands represent character strengths that we humans universally hold up as positive and admirable qualities—bravery, perseverance, fairness.”

In essence, to be a challenger your brand needs to:

Be somewhere in the middle of the market. You’re not first, but you’re not last. You have enough experience and validity to get in the ring and start punching above your weight.

Have an insatiable hunger and big ambitions that go beyond hitting your numbers. You and your employees need to share a fundamental belief that you are unlike any other company on the planet.

Understand what it takes to close the gap between good and great. When you talk about something as aspirational as a company’s vision for the future, you should never limit yourself to making something merely good. This isn’t a task to work on; it’s a shared vision to work toward.

Culture is the lifeblood of challenger brands

All things considered, this is as much about emotion and personality as it is about strategic priorities. If there’s a straight line through challenger brands, it’s the infectious culture they cultivate and maintain through the ups and downs. And how do you shape culture? Through your mission, vision, beliefs, and behaviors. “Clarity around what a business believes in, and what change it’s trying to bring about, acts as both inspiration and filter for the kinds of disruption it will pursue,” says Mark Barden. “Without that clarity, disruption becomes chaos pretty quickly.”

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California

Disruptor vs. Enabler Brands

These days, disruptor brands get all the attention. Companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber have each skyrocketed into popularity by rattling the industries they came from. We get it. There’s something inherently inciting, even American, about the idea of taking down the big guys with your off-kilter vision of the future. It’s easy to root for.

But here’s the thing about trailblazers — if everyone blazes their own unique trail, customers are faced with a dizzying network of singular (and often incompatible) solutions. In the course of one day, a person might bounce back and forth between ten different technologies, all of which claim to take the hassle and complexity out of life. I want to find a photo, but I’m not sure if it’s on my phone, my external hard drive, or one of my various clouds. Have you seen that popular new show? It’s exclusively on one of the streaming networks — but not the one you have.

Don’t Downplay the Power of Unification

More and more, we believe there’s a strong case to be made for the power of enabler brands. The ability to bring everything together in a way that’s secure, contextual, and delightful is nothing short of a magic trick in this ever-shifting technological landscape.

In our work in the B2B sector, too often we see enabler brands limit the inspirational nature of their work. Whether it’s customer case studies, presentation decks, or collateral design, enabler brands can sing with the same sparkling brilliance as B2C disruptors.

While every company has its own unique challenges, here are some general thoughts on how enabler brands can elevate their impact.

Hone in on the results of the technology, not the technology itself.

Granted, your technology needs to be world-class and should always have a technical click-through for the nitty-gritty. But at the highest level, people are more interested in what new worlds you’re opening for them. That’s your role: to engineer what’s possible. Think of Dropbox’s recent redesign. They went from just a place to store your files to a living workspace that brings teams and ideas together.

How does this look in practice? Look at the imagery in your decks. What are people seeing? Is it moments of authentic human connection that wouldn’t be possible without your radiant technology? Or is it computer generated graphics and stock photography? During the next big conference, which one do you think will unite your team more?

Productivity is its own kind of delight.

Most enterprise tools aim to improve productivity. That might mean managing information, storing data, tracking issues, sharing updates, whatever you need to get the job done. But just because something is functional, that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful. Look at Slack. They have taken something often regarded as a chore — communicating with your co-workers — and made it, dare I say, fun? On their design blog, they discuss the importance of bringing humanity into the product. By putting people (not features) first, they have built a brand people love to experience.

Building a community is more rewarding than growing users.

As Scott Cooper writes in his blog, “The Changing Role of Brands,” enabler brands have the unique opportunity to empower the communities behind the technology. “Look at your audience with new eyes, in terms of community,” says Cooper. “Listen for the ideas that they believe in deeply or identify with. Let go of any preconceptions about your roles as a marketer and the relationship your brand has with people. Now ask yourself: how you can contribute meaningfully?”

When building your customer success stories, ask yourself what communities are truly benefiting from your technology? How can you champion their voices? There’s nothing inherently emotive about a 3-D printer, but whether it’s creating prosthetic limbs or affordable housing, people are using them in inspirational and innovative ways every day.

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking these efforts are somehow separate from the real work of your technology. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: people make decisions with their hearts. Investing in the human aspects of your brand is not fluff: it’s a holistic way to equip your sales team with better tools, attract and retain top talent, and foster a healthier, more productive culture. Instead of giving your team something to work on, you give them something to work toward.

So, enablers, remember this. Disruptors will always hog the spotlight, but sometimes nothing is more exciting than being given the right environment to thrive.

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Tag: disruptor

Challenger Brands: A Primer