To launch our ‘20 Years of Challenger Brands’ series, we sit down with insight and data expert Peter Field who has been obsessed with finding out what drives effectiveness for the last twenty years. Peter shares his take on the evolution of challenger brands and the lessons for marketers from his latest report with the IPA: The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness.

How brands drive growth

When eatbigfish started studying and writing about challenger brands twenty years ago, big brands would be reluctant to put this thinking to the test. It was largely seen as an interesting and seductive theory based upon some qualitative observations from particular brands who’d employed that strategy — and there was a tendency from some marketers to say that challenger brands were special cases — they had unique founders or unique circumstance. They’d suggest there was some reason why it would not apply more generally.

The work I’ve done over the last twenty years establishes quite clearly that challenger thinking is not weird or odd. It may have been something that only a few forward-thinking brands had realised, but it is how brands drive growth. It makes huge business sense. And over the last twenty years, I’ve watched this thinking relentlessly normalised. Bigger brands and more and more companies, particularly global blue-chip companies, have realised that this thinking simply can’t be ignored. In particular the idea of creating intense emotional connections around brands. From the evidence in the data I work with, these are hugely valuable associations for brands to make.

This understanding has grown and spread, in part due to eatbigfish and in part to the work I’ve done and many others around the world who have extolled the value in emotional brand-building and moving us on from old-fashioned models of functional, ‘reason why’-type marketing. In fact, it’s difficult to find a global multi-national brand these days that isn’t making use of challenger thinking. The mantra of building powerful, emotional brand identities is well heard and understood now, and that’s been an astonishing shift in twenty years I think.

Short-termism kills

Whilst we’ve moved forwards in terms of our understanding of the benefits of emotional brand-building, there’s also been a destructive counter-current in the world of business.

I tend to simplistically characterise it as short-termism and I think it’s partly due to the pressures many businesses are under and partly a result of a really dangerous mantra that has come from the world of digital communications and the big tech companies. It’s a misunderstanding that’s dramatically worked against the good work that’s been done in understanding what makes a great brand.

The danger — expressed most simply — is living by the quarter. If there’s one thing that leaps out from the work done by eatbigfish around challenger brands, it’s that these businesses knew building a brand takes time. Whether it’s BrewDog or Aldi, these challengers had a big vision, and weren’t going to settle for a good quarter or even be put off by a bad one.

Unfortunately, short-termism is the business climate of our time. We live in the short-term. The danger is that because so few in the c-suites of major businesses these days have marketing experience they don’t understand that imposing short-term disciplines on marketing kills brands. We’ve had ten to twenty years of an agenda led by big tech that says smart marketers don’t waste money on building brands. Smart marketers spend their money on serving pieces of information at the point of decision making that will nudge them over the line.

Businesses have become almost schizophrenic. They know now how to build brands — eatbigfish and others have taught us what powerful brands look like and that building a brand takes time. But the other half of an organisation is saying “forget all that nonsense let’s just use data to be ever-more smart-arse about this, and just get messages to people ever-efficiently at the last moment.” And those two perspectives of course run totally counter to each other.

Unfortunately in recent years, the digital side of these debates has been winning, because they talk the language of efficiency, they can show you some very impressive numbers around efficiency. But if you pursue efficiency solely you walk away from effectiveness, and we know this very well now. The most efficient way to use marketing and advertising is to achieve mediocre results at minute cost. That way you get immense returns on investments, but unfortunately you’ll do nothing in the long-term.

Long-term growth is reaching, not for low-hanging fruit, but the fruit at the top of the tree. It’s about bringing tomorrow’s consumers into your brand. If all you’re doing is going for the low-hanging fruit at the bottom of the funnel, you can kiss goodbye to that really profitable long-term growth. Numbers might look great — but often these are based on so-called attribution studies — well, we should really call them misattribution studies.

We know that only a tiny minority of the true source of sales is apportioned to the appropriate cause, which is brand and all the brand-building efforts that have gone on. They usually focus in on the last-minute, the last click, or the last steps in the purchase process and ascribe the sale to those - missing out on all the vital ground-work that was done years prior to that.

Thankfully, and increasingly, people are not taken in by this which is a fantastic development. But there’s a huge job to be done to ensure that the great work that’s been done on understanding how to build powerful brands isn’t neutered by this short-term “efficiency” thinking.

Brand-building by ‘doing’

Businesses have rightly realised that building great brands is much more than simply getting the ads right these days. There are enormous amounts of other things that brands need to be doing, particularly to a very sceptical, younger audience, who tend not to take things at face value and tend to want to check out the story behind brands.

That doesn’t mean to say of course that emotional, powerful emotional brands don’t have any value any more, which is the mistake that some people make. You still have to build those powerful, emotional brands, but you have to back them up with what you are doing in every walk of life, whether it’s Unilever trying to cut down on its plastics, or financial services organisations trying not to do any evil in one way or another.

All of these things have to be done, you have to put all of this right, and that in fact should make the job of marketing more powerful and more important. It certainly creates problems for marketers — who often don’t have control over many of those tentacles of organisations which can undo the good that they are trying to do.

I think it’s got tougher, but these are times when CEOs need to think like marketers more than they ever have. They need to get back to really understanding what ordinary people feel and do with brands, and I think when they do that they’ll realise there’s enormous potential for any business that thinks in a holistic way about the value locked in its organisation.

CEOs need to be prepared to say, “Do you know what? I’m going to take a few risks, they’re going to cost me; they’re going to get me in trouble with a few of my investors who aren’t going to like this much money in this quarter, or these two or three quarters, but, because I know it is going to pay back long-term, I’m going to hold my nerve and make the argument.”

About the author

Peter Field is a marketing consultant and former strategic ad planner. He specialises in data analysis and the link between creativity and effectiveness. His latest book ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’ urges marketers and business leaders to understand how overly sales-led advertising is negatively impacting their business in terms of long-term growth and profitability.