Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders by Adam Morgan

From the Publisher

EATING THE BIG FISH : How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded

The second edition of the international bestseller, now revised and updated for 2009, just in time for the business challenges ahead.

It contains over 25 new interviews and case histories, two completely new chapters, introduces a new typology of 12 different kinds of Challengers, has extensive updates of the main chapters, a range of new exercises, supplies weblinks to view interviews online and offers supplementary downloadable information.

Marketing Business

Although out last year, Eating the Big Fish, is one of the most stimulating books on brands and has grown to become a must read.

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By: Adam Morgan. ISBN 0-471-24209-8

Preface
T hey existed before Avis, of course: the second-rank brands, cruising the category reef in the shadow of the Big Fish. It was just that, before Avis, they always seemed just that-second rank. The brands we emulated, the brands we learned from, the brands we all wanted to be, underneath, were the brand leaders. "You know the new VP in marketing? I hear he comes from Clorox."
And then a car-rental company threw down a gauntlet to the brand leader in its category, and our view of what it meant to be number two changed. The strategy was smart, the image suddenly more desirable than even that of the brand leader: perhaps we were witnessing the birth of Number Two as Marketing Icon. Perhaps now we would start to see the marketing landscape change. Almost immediately, we enshrined the Avis story in legend: how the staff wore the badges of the slogan to en-list them in the cause, how the company used the little details to support a much higher emotional claim, how they weren't really number two at all, and that was the real brilliance of their strategy.
But Avis proved a false dawn. As second-rank brands went, there was some sterling support work in the years that followed from Pepsi-and that was it. Volkswagen was, well, the Beetle; and as much as everyone admired what it had done, it was hard to convince any marketeer that what they really wanted to be was another Beetle.
So the brand models remained the Brand Leaders. We read about Coca-Cola and Kellogg's, and all the other brands that had led their category since records began, and marveled. And if we wanted a number-two strategy, we had a choice of Avis or Pepsi: we could try harder, or go younger. But frankly, after a while that became a pretty thin diet for those of us working on second-rank brands. There were no real vitamins left in there, once everyone had taken a turn at chewing it over a few times. We had to go back to just trying to differentiate again. And then, one afternoon in 1984, Apple bushwhacked IBM in the Redskins- Raiders Superbowl, and the Challenger brand was born again. People didn't remember the product details in the 20-page print insert that Apple ran the week following the game; all they remembered was a single 60-second commercial, and a girl with a hammer, and a decla-ration of intent that sent shock waves through the computer industry and imprinted Apple and Steve Jobs firmly on American popular cul-ture. Hey, did you see that Apple ad? Apparently they only ran it once.
The little guy was back. Avis lived again.
The years that followed, the years of the bull market, were the years of the new entrepreneurs. Money men and women, yes, but also busi-nessmen and women. Huizenga, Diller, Roddick, Branson, Murdoch. And with them came, it seemed, an explosion of new businesses and brands, challenging the hegemony of the old order. IBM didn't fall, but it wobbled, and suddenly it seemed as though anything was possible; the big brands seemed not omnipotent, but suddenly monolithic, immobile, old-fashioned, slow to react. The time of the new launch, let alone the number two, had come. The new marketing icons were not brands that had been market leaders since 1925; they were brands that had only been born two, three, five years ago and were turning the rules of their category upside down. Some stayed, some died, but the shape of the mar-keting landscape was changed forever.
Which leads me back to why I started writing this book.
For some reason, I have never seemed to work on brand leaders. I have worked on coffee shops and airlines, family cars and condoms, col-orants and video games, but I have never seemed to find myself on the side of the big guy, the one with the muscles, sprawling confidently astride the category. Instead, I have always found myself in the opposite corner, picking up my gumshield on behalf of the number two or three- outspent, outpunched, and out to make a fight of it.
It was fairly obvious to me even as a novice in this situation that the model of the brand leader was not one it was wise to follow. Not simply was success impossible for a number two by following their strategy, but we couldn't even succeed by imitating their kind of relationships with the consumer. While "trust" and "reassurance" and "simplification of choice" might be of value to an established player with perfect distribution, they certainly weren't going to be enough to create preference for us. It would take a different kind of relationship to persuade our consumer to walk past the long, convenient rows of red cans and bend down to pick out the little blue one at the end.
But what were the alternatives? I feared for my sanity if I ever heard again the desperate injunction, "Let's all try to think outside the box"; surely the way to overcome the strategic difficulties we faced lay in something more structured than two hours of wild brainstorming. Equally worrying was the simplistic reduction of our approach to one-dimensional talk about "differentiation." Surely there was more than this to be learned from those who had passed this way before? Surely the iconic second-rank brands had done more to earn their success than sim-ply try to be "different," important though that undoubtedly was?
Trying to find existing models to draw from didn't help. I could find lots of books about brand leaders, and brand leadership, that drew con-clusions and compared one with another. But nobody seemed to have done the same with second-rank brands. There were books about indi-vidual companies and their founders, but no one seemed to have tried to trace what, if anything, the successful ones had in common. And this was curious, well, because surely there were so many more of us than them, the brand leaders. Because surely if one really thought about it, we were the rule and they were the exception: there is by definition only one brand leader in each category.
So I went looking for successful second-rank brands. They obvi-ously must exist as potential models-some had become as iconic in their own way, after all, as brand leaders-but they just hadn't been grouped together as like things before; although as marketeers we had segmented and labeled consumers by every kind of attitude and behav-ior, we had remained curiously general in the way we thought about brands.
And this interested me: if I could find enough of these successful second-rank brands, what would they have in common? Could I glean from them seven or eight shared characteristics that, taken together, might in turn give me some guidelines as to how I should approach mar-keting my own brands and businesses? The beginnings of a more struc-tured process?
The more I searched, the more the answer seemed to lie in what a colleague of mine gave the name of "Challenger brands": second-rank brands that had demonstrated growth in the face of a powerful and es-tablished brand leader. This book will look at some forty of these "Chal-lenger brands" and the eight common marketing strands that the majority of them seem to share. In the opening chapters, I talk a little more about the situation facing second-rank brands and why it is that they need to think so differently about themselves. The bulk of the book is then given over to an analysis of these strands, which I have called "The Eight Credos of Challenger Brands."
The Eight Credos of Challenger Brands are:

1. Break with Your Immediate Past.
2. Build a Lighthouse Identity.
3. Assume Thought Leadership of the Category.
4. Create Symbols of Reevaluation.
5. Sacrifice.
6. Overcommit.
7. Use Advertising and Publicity as a High-Leverage Asset.
8. Become Ideas-Centered, Rather Than Consumer-Centered.

Although each Credo is important in itself, we will see that it is the relationship between all of them that makes the difference between a successful Challenger and a Paper Tiger. In particular, we will see that al-though most marketing books assume the central issue for brand success is marketing strategy, the eight credos suggest that successful challenger marketing is in fact made up of three critical areas: Attitude, Strategy, and Behavior. Having discussed each Credo in turn, therefore, we will look at the development of a Challenger process that encompasses these three areas. To this end, the penultimate chapter will offer a proposed outline for a two-day Off-Site Program that will attempt to kick start the Challenger process for a core group within a marketing or management team. Finally, I will close with some thoughts on the dynamics and spirit of the Challenger organization.
I made two key decisions early on. The first was to abandon any pre-tence of a statistically robust sample or scientific analysis: The sample is relatively small. I am unapologetic about this-I am not aiming at sci- ence or (god forbid) a formula. What I am hoping for us to derive instead is a sense of direction, a magnetic compass; and the sample, I hope, is large enough and colorful enough to offer that.
The second decision was to resist the urge to find entirely new case histories all the way through: Although I debated whether to include such relatively well-trodden ground as Saturn and Body Shop, it seemed perverse to leave them out altogether. The value in their stories from our point of view will not lie, after all, in considering them in isolation, but in taking all of them together; what Saturn has in common with Abso-lut, New Labour with Wonderbra, even Gandhi, perhaps, with the Spice Girls.
For those impatient to start reading the Eight Credos, they begin in Part II, but I would encourage the reader to try the pages that intervene. Although I am aware that it is only the author of a business book who ever reads more than 20 pages of it, the purist in me would still contend that the most common cause of marketing error is a failure not to come up with the right solution, but the prior failure to correctly identify the problem-and in the first section of the book, I will begin by painting a more detailed picture of the specific business hurdles facing second-rank brands as we go into the next century. And, more important, Chal-lengers seem to succeed not just through original marketing thinking and strategy, but by carrying through that strategy into Challenger mar-keting behavior. And the attitude, the driving sense both of opportunity and need that Challengers establish for themselves right at the outset of their enterprise, is what drives that completion. It is to creating that at-titude that Part I of the book devotes itself.

"Commercial incongruity is rife. Sainsbury's is a bank, Boots is a sandwich bar, and god knows what those pop-record people Virgin aren't into. But can anyone beat this flyer that came through my letter box today: 'Thames Water customers can now get cheaper gas from London electricity.' I feel faint." Letter to The Independent April 1998

In 1996- 1997 the international advertising agency TBWA commissioned a piece of research among their own customers-their existing and potential client base-to look at the principal marketing challenges they saw facing them over the next five years. The clients ranged from marketing directors to chief executive officers and were predominantly from the marketing companies behind well-known second-or third-rank brands in the United States and Europe. There was much talk among the people we interviewed of stress and change, of the difficulty of being asked to achieve more with less. But in particular they spoke of their having to confront and overcome entirely new kinds of marketing problems-types of problems that simply had not existed 5 to 10 years earlier:

1. Certain markets had moved for the first time beyond maturity to overcapacity. Even though the category was growing, the number of products and brands continuing to be introduced each year in surplus to natural demand meant that each individual brand was having to increase demand to maintain per-store sales. Quick Service Restaurants in the United States, for example, is increasing distribution beyond natural capacity at such a rate that each restaurant will naturally see an approximate 5% decline in year-on-year sales if consumer interest in the brand simply remains at the same level. Or look at the projected overcapacity looming over the automotive manufacturers: Unofficially, Ford estimates 70 million new cars are being produced a year worldwide, in a global market with a natural demand for only 50 million.

2. Overcapacity meant there was not enough food to go around. To make their numbers, the bigger fish started preying more aggressively on the smaller fish. They have already reduced costs, reduced head count, and pushed distribution just about as far as it can go. They have explored global resourcing, search and reapply, panregional marketing efficiencies-and discovered the limits in the level of returns they will yield: continuous reduction in operating expenses as a percentage of sales is impossible now unless their sales go up. And those sales have got to come from someone else: the shareholder has to eat.

So the brand leaders turn on the smaller fry. We see Gallo, for in-stance, in court charged with imitating a little too closely with their Turning Leaf brand the minor success enjoyed by a fringe player in a market that Gallo dominates. We see Coca-Cola, unable to dominate Pepsi in Venezuela the way it did in the rest of Latin America, simply buying Pepsi's Venezuelan bottler and putting the world's number two out of business in that country overnight. In the summer of the same year, 1996, that same brand leader, Coca-Cola, offered the franchisees of McDonald's restaurants four digit bonuses if they dropped Dr. Pepper in favor of selling solely Coca-Cola's own products. Merely buying back the franchisee loyalty cost Dr. Pepper's parent, Cadbury, $6 million. We see British Airways, still awaiting the outcome of their proposed alliance with American Airlines, announcing they were to set up a subsidiary division offering a no-frills service branded "Go," specifically to compete aggressively in the segment pioneered by such small-scale entrepreneurs like Ryanair and Air UK.

These are fairly full-frontal assaults on a second-rank brand. But as Sun Tsu observed, a frontal attack is rarely the most effective strategy. Ask the British Office of Fair Trading, who in May 1997 began to investigate Dixon's, the United Kingdom's largest electrical retailer, over claims that it had been using an "unfair and anti-competitive" strategy to pressure the developers of out-of-town centers into denying floor space to Dixon's newer and lesser competitors. In the summer of the same year came Compaq's deposition to U. S. Attorney General Janet Reno about Microsoft.

3. And as well as turning their attentions downward, the Big Fish turned them outward. The clients we spoke to faced entirely new kinds of competition-the brand leader from another category attempting to enter as a second-rank contender from the flank. One footwear manufacturer in Europe pointed out that their five key competitors hadn't even existed 10 years ago. Baskin-Robbins spoke about the impact McDonald's selling frozen yogurt and desserts had had on the casual walk across the road for ice cream after a cheeseburger. The photographic industry talked of Hewlett-Packard and printers as the threat in the digital age. Gas retailers in the United Kingdom talked of the threat of grocery chains-and now the number-one and number-two gas retailers in the United Kingdom are in fact those same grocery chains-Tesco and Sainsbury.

4. As the big players moved downward, the retailers moved up-ward. Marketeers in the research felt the ambitions of the retailer in their market were impacting much more dramatically on their own marketing requirements. Gaining market share from branded rivals was no longer enough-the retailer they depended on required them to also grow the entire market if they wished to retain quality distribution. Private labels flourished in certain countries (from jeans to bleach to stereos); in some, retailers had become considerable players in categories like financial services.

Now when the effects of each of these business dynamics are discussed in the press, the analysis is usually in terms of its implications for the brand leader. Forbes will discuss the implications of Hewlett-Packard's entry into digital photography, for example, in terms of its likely impact on Kodak. The San Francisco Chronicle will note the success of JCPenney's own label Arizona Jean in terms of its effect on Levi's. But ask yourself this: if Hewlett-Packard will seriously impact Kodak, how much greater will be its effect on the number-two brand, Fuji? And when Kodak and Hewlett-Packard become one and two, where does that leave the threes and fours, like Konica or Agfa? Or if Levi's is suffering in JCPenney, what has the success of Arizona Jean done to the sales and margins in that store of Wrangler and Lee-assuming that there is now a reason to stock those second-rank brands at all? Brand leaders moving across categories, pushing outside their territory to boost flagging home volume, means that we as a second-rank brand may swiftly find ourselves with not one, but three brand leaders in our category. It may not matter that two of these are, technically, brand leaders from other categories; the point is that if there's only room for a handful of profitable brands, then the existing middle ground is an increasingly vulnerable place to be.

When you look at the collective implications of these four marketing problems taken together-and add the velocity at which the marketeers we spoke to felt they were occurring-the simple conclusion is surely this: in the future, the middle ground will be an increasingly dangerous place to live. To allow yourself to continue to be just another second-rank brand is, by default, to put yourself into the mouth of the Big Fish and wait for the jaws to close. Caught in the new food chain between the new hunger of the brand leader, the speculative sharks from other categories, and the crocodile smile on the face of our retailer, the only path to medium-and long-term health is rapid growth. We are not necessarily seeking to be number one; there is a perfectly healthy living to be made as number two or three in our market (or large market sector). But to be one of those brands, we have to put some air between ourselves and the competition. We cannot be just another middle-market player; we have to be a strong number two.

And we can't get there by behaving like a smaller version of the Big Fish.

The Big Fish is a Different Kind of Animal
It may be thought at this point that I'm going to talk about the advantages of critical mass-the advantages at consumer, company, and competitive levels the brand leader enjoys over every other player in the game due to their size advantage. Well, these are of course enviable advantages: Who would not want the distribution power of Anheuser-Busch over the trade, or the ubiquitous consumer visibility of Coca-Cola, or the Research and Development resource of Procter & Gamble? But this is not my point. Nor is the preference the social acceptability of the brand leader lends it for the uncertain consumer; nor indeed the formidable trust and reassurance it enjoys; nor yet the power of its monstrous marketing budget relative to ours. These are odds we know and understand. These all merely lead us to talk generally about "trying harder" and "differentiating in our advertising," and "focus." Everything we are already trying at the moment.

What I am going to talk about is how, even knowing all this, we are still underestimating the situation: The true dynamic is actually worse than this. For it is not just that brand leaders are bigger and enjoy proportionately greater benefits: the evidence we are going to consider suggests that the superiority of their advantage increases almost exponentially the larger they get.

The Law of Increasing Returns
The easiest way to illustrate this difference is to map out the brand-consumer relationship into three stages (albeit rather crude ones) and look at the relative performances of the brand leader at each stage relative to a second-or lower-ranked brand in the same category.

Stage One: Consumer Awareness
First, awareness. Who does our target think about first?
Top-of-mind awareness, sometimes called salience, is the proportion of consumers for whom a certain brand comes to mind first when they are thinking about your category. An acknowledged key driver of purchase in lower-interest or impulse markets, like burgers and snacks, top-of-mind awareness is also an underestimated factor in shopping higher-interest categories. General spontaneous awareness, on the other hand (the pro-portion of people who are aware of your brand at all without prompting), is obviously important at some level to a brand's success-people rarely buy an unfamiliar brand-but tends to reflect brand size and share of market: it often corresponds roughly to market share.

The assumption marketeers generally make is that the relationship between the two is a linear one-one's total spontaneous awareness and top-of-mind awareness will rise in roughly equal proportions. Figure 1.1, however, taken from work done into the relationship between the two among packaged goods brands in France by the advertising agency Lintas (now Ammirati Puris Lintas) in 1990, 2 shows otherwise.

What is striking here is that top-of-mind awareness increases quasi-exponentially in relation to total spontaneous awareness. That is to say, if I as brand leader am twice as big as the number two or three, and spontaneous awareness is linked to market dominance, my top-of-mind awareness is on average close to four times as great. And by the same token if I as brand leader starting from a higher base increase either of these, my re-turn will be almost exponentially greater, gain for gain, than a Challenger making the same gains lower down the scale.

Not only, it seems, do brand leaders have more muscle and resource to start with, but it earns them almost twice as much top-of-mind awareness in return. Udo van de Sandt, the French Strategic Planner whose work this was, found the same relationship existed between "spontaneous brand awareness" and "usual/ preferred brand." We may have to differentiate more sharply than we thought.

Stage Two: Shopping What happens when the consumer leaves the house?

What happens is that this "Law of Increasing Returns" is translated directly into shopping behavior. Imagine our consumer is shopping for a truck, for instance. Well, from a marketing point of view, you would expect that the more you advertised your new truck, the more footfall in store you could generate compared to the competition. And this is true, up to a point. If one takes the U. S. compact pickup market, for in-stance, and plots the relationship between advertising spend and shop-ping (Figure 1. 2)(figures are not shown in sample chapters on the Web), there will be a close fit along a straight line for every brand-except the Ford Ranger. It alone does not obey the normal laws of proportionate returns.

Why? Because the Ranger is the compact pickup segment leader and as such enjoys a dramatically higher share of shopping even when sup-ported by a comparatively low share of voice. It looks as though, as an ambitious number two, we will need to be a greater source of differentiation not just into our image, but into the shopping process. We cannot compete effectively with the brand leader under the existing rules.

Stage Three: Purchase and Loyalty
So a picture is emerging. It translates even into purchase and loyalty, albeit in a less dramatic fashion.

"Double Jeopardy" is a brand phenomenon that has been studied and modeled by researchers in marketing for over 35 years across a variety of markets in cultures as diverse as the United States and Japan. It refers to the combined effects of two benefits that high-share brands profit from relative to low-share brands. The first of these benefits is the obvious one: high-share brands enjoy higher penetration (i. e., simply have more buyers) than low-share brands. The second, more interesting observation is that the buyers of high-share brands buy them more often than the buyers of low-share brands purchase those same low-share brands (see for example Figure 1.3). (Figures are not shown in Sample Chapters) The cumulative effect of these two factors taken together leads to relative scale of increase in the number of purchases tending toward the exponential effect observed in the work on salience shown in Figure 1.2. (figures are not shown in sample chapters on the Web) (Some researchers, indeed, have claimed to observe variances for very high-share brands greater even than this.)

The Consequence: Profitability What, of course, all this leads up to is brand leaders making more damn money than we do. Figure 1.4 (figures are not shown in sample chapters on the Web)is taken from the PIMS database; it shows the return on investment for a brand leader (split into two different kinds-dominators and marginal leaders) compared to second-and third-ranked brands.

Look at service businesses, the fourth column in Figure 1.4: While a second-rank brand makes a fifth as much profit again as a third-rank brand, a brand leader that dominates the category makes twice as much profit as either of them. Or take durables: A second-rank brand makes twice as much as a number three, but a dominator almost doubles that again. I bring this up not just as a stockholder issue, but as a further compounding of the difference in resources between us. Those with an aversion to data tables may find the profitability of a market dominator illustrated a little more vividly by the remuneration of Roberto Goizueta, the late CEO of Coca-Cola, who became the first CEO to earn $1 billion in salary and bonuses alone. That has yet to happen at Pepsi or Dr. Pepper.

If profit allows a company to make choices, to invest resource in finding sources of future competitive advantage, then this disparity serves to widen the discrepancy between the chips the brand leader has at their disposal and the pile we have to play with. And as we have seen, each of their chips seems to win them twice as much as ours. Which is one of the reasons why so many Brand leaders in FMCG markets, for instance, are exactly the same brands that were market leaders 60 years ago.

So what?

The point of all this is not to suggest that it is hard for a second-rank brand to catch the number one; as we will come to see, that is rarely their objective anyway. Nor is the point that at a crude level we as second-rank brands are outgunned more comprehensively than we thought (though we are).

What the Law of Increasing Returns means is that we have to swim considerably harder than the brand leader just to remain in the same place. Up to now this has largely translated itself into conversations about relevance and focus: decisions about communication strategy and customer targeting.

But what if staying where we are in the future will not be enough? What if profitable survival in our category requires the achievement of rapid growth, in a probably static market, in the face of three new kinds of competition? Knowing that to follow the model of the brand leader is to help them increase their market advantage?

It would mean that we would need to abandon conservatism and incrementalism and start thinking like a Challenger just to survive healthily. It would mean we would have to behave and think about the way we marketed ourselves in a completely different kind of way. Find a different way of thinking about our goals and strategic objectives. Require, in fact, a different kind of decision-making process altogether.

A Bear Stearns analyst was quoted approvingly recently in Financial World for commenting, "There is a certain trust associated with the McDonald's brand name." "Of course," continued the magazine, "[ the analyst] has paid McDonald's the ultimate compliment a service brand could hope to receive."

A service brand? Any service brand? A brand leader, maybe, but certainly not a number two or three looking for growth. The currencies of reassurance, simplification, and trust, though they may well have been adequate until relatively recently for brands like AT& T and IBM, are woefully inadequate as the basis for the kind of relationship we are going to need with our consumer. Facing the Law of Increasing Returns, number-two brands are going to need to deal in altogether more potent currencies: those of curiosity, desire, and reevaluation. To succeed, they are going to have to create an emotional identification, a strength of belief in the brand, a sense that we are one to watch or explore-active expressions of choice and loyalty that will make someone walk by the big, convenient facings of the brand leader and lean down to pick out the little blue can at the side. As a second-rank brand, we don't just want to create desire, we want to create intensity of desire. Harley-Davidson's legendarily loyal customers, for instance, are not putting their trust in the brand's motorcycle engineering-they can buy a higher-performance bike at a highly competitive price-nor are they people who appear to be desperately in need of reassurance or simplification. They buy one because they want to feel Bad. And no other bike in the world lets you feel Bad like a Harley.

And what this demands is a different kind of marketing altogether, a different approach. We will come to see that it will demand a change, in fact, not just in strategy but in the attitude that precedes that strategy and the behavior that follows. Fundamental to each decision taken and each way of thinking will be the concept of Mechanical Advantage- the physical principle describing a machine that manages to create greater output from the same or lesser input. Getting more results, in short, from less resource. Not only is this going to be the framework for our entire way of thinking, but it is also going to be the brief for the way we rethink the internal working structure, processes, and behavior of the company and people behind the brand.

And at the heart of Mechanical Advantage in marketing-its currency, in fact-are ideas.