Each bottle of Kernel is bottled and labelled by hand. Photograph: A Beer on the Downs

Kernel Brewery was started in 2009 by Evin O’Riordain, a man who had no experience of beer making and learnt all he needed to know about the craft and brewing process by searching on the Internet. “I started making beer at home about two-and-a-half years ago,” he told the Independent. “I taught myself to brew: it’s simple. There’s lots of information on the internet. Some of the information is good, some not so good.”

Prior to founding Kernel he worked for Neal’s Yard Dairy at London’s Borough Market and it’s clear that his knowledge of the methods used to produce and sell cheese heavily influenced his plans to produce and sell beer.

“It was when I went to the US that I realised beer can be different. If you look at the way good cheese is sold now, you know the cow’s name that made the milk, what the weather is like – that’s very important to us. It was only after I went to the States that I realised we could do that with beer.”

Today they produce 5,000 bottles of beer a week and are finding it difficult to keep up with demand whilst still brewing from their small premises under a railway arch in Bermondsey. They are now sold in some of the most fashionable bars and retail outlets across London, including Selfridges, the Michelin-starred Chez Bruce and Shoreditch’s Mason and Taylor and despite their growing reach and scale each and every bottle is still labelled and capped by hand at the brewery.

With no marketing budget or conventional resources, it’s purely word of mouth and online reviews that have propelled the brand to their recent level of popularity and demand.

Looking at the countless blog posts, reviews and write-ups on Kernel beers the first thing I notice is that it’s the quality of the beers themselves and the unusual taste of many of their products that has got people talking.  It was important for Evin that he created beers that stood out and were unlike others ready available.

“There’s a pub I used to go into, but I can’t remember the name of anything I ever drank in there because they all taste pretty much the same. And they’re created to be interchangeable, so that when one runs out you stick another one on. There’s nothing really to grab your attention.”

The branding and packaging is simple, uncluttered and almost utilitarian, enabling it to stand out from the competition in a market where the communication has grown increasingly loud, noisy and personality based. This no frills identity may also form part of a wider cultural backlash against the friendly, chatty, tone popularized by innocent, but subsequently used by banks and fast-food chains in more recent years. They don’t have a polarising POV or want you to ‘pop in for a chat’ they are just driven by a single and practical determination to make great tasting beer.

Kernel is also proving popular with non-traditional beer or ale drinkers. Much like in the US at the moment, the craft of beer making in the UK has become much more popular and people increasingly want to drink beer at home, in restaurants accompanying food, in trendy bars and in many environments other than the traditional pub.  Their audience tends to be younger and more creative than the stereotypical beer drinker and the very fact that they are independent, hand crafted and unable to advertise is often what makes brands such as Kernel appealing to this section of society.

Above and beyond the nice packaging, hand crafted and independent ethos its ultimately the quality of the beer itself and the strength of their product that has got people talking and creating such buzz around the brand. Ultimately, it’s the beer talking.

Sources and further information:

The Guardian – The case for bottled beer

The Independent – Special brew: One of Britain’s most wanted beers is produced by novices under a London railway arch

Protein – Rise of the beer makers

The Kernel Brewery Website

And it is Insight that most Brand Owners feel they are most short of. We can buy creativity, we can outsource innovation, we can hire social media strategists. But Insight remains something that we feel we need to be generating ourselves, at the very centre of everything our company does – and yet for all the money we spend on research, what we find ourselves served up with most of the time are very expensive truths, rather than brand-changing insights. Too much Washington, and precious little Hollywood.

And the reason surely is that we have far too monochromatic a view of what an insight is and where to find it – we tend to use ‘insight’ as a shorthand for ‘consumer insight’: something the consumer says or does that will open up a new possibility for us and our brand. Yet if one looks at brands that have really broken through in their categories, we see that there is a much broader range of sources of insight that we should be drawing on: Insights into why consumers have much stronger relationships with other categories than they do with ours, and what it would mean to bring some of those drivers into our category; Insights into what made the brand successful when it was most successful and what that would mean today; Insights into why our company culture is unique, and what element of that our consumer might find compelling . The kinds of questions, in other words, that we briefly consider in the first couple of weeks in our new job, and then get pushed aside as the heat to deliver this quarter’s results kicks in. Obvious, isn’t it? Yet hardly any of us do it.

So if we want to expand the horizons for our brand, the first thing we need to do is expand our sense of what an insight is. Look for entirely new sources of insight, and give ourselves the time and space to explore them properly.

It’s the only way to get to Hollywood.

This article first appeared in Campaign Asia Pacific in October 2010

Of course, we never did anything with it. We were just joking, weren’t we? A serious company couldn’t actually launch such a thing. It was only a way of blowing off steam in the middle of some complex strategy. I still love the idea though. And as surely everybody knows by now — though won’t design it into their processes in any systemic way — just joking around can be a really productive time.

Well Chris Lindland, the founder of Betabrand described the birth of his business this way: “it started as a joke”. And though it’s still a small, privately held business (so no sales numbers are disclosed), it has grown double digits every year since it’s birth 5 years ago and Chris has just raised money to fuel the growth of his joke. Betabrand is getting funnier everyday.

The original joke was “hey, what about horizontal cords?” – cords that run around not up and down. That was the birth of Cordarounds (that ultimately became Betabrand) and it was a way for Chris to shoot the shit with his fashionista friends. It became his schtick with them, a joke he repeated a few times before saying, heck I’m just going to go make some, rather than just talking about it. All he needed was $120 to buy material and get a seamstress to sew them up. His friends liked them and this gave him the confidence to make some more, then throw up a website and start selling them. Out of pocket costs for starting the business were really quite low and what could be the harm. As Chris said “I was at that point career-wise where I just wanted to do something funny”.

Lesson 1 from Betabrand: make a prototype as quick and simply as you can and go try to sell it.

Sometimes big business really overcomplicates things with its complex and largely flawed testing methodologies. How much easier and more real to throw up a website and see if anyone responds. Betabrand today, which launches a new product every week is constantly in beta, throwing up prototypes, going with what works.

What really helped Cordarounds catch on was the happy accident that followed the joke. As Chris explains it, the fashion world five years ago — pre Daily Candy etc. — worked around definite seasons of Spring, Fall, Holiday. Most of the big players made three major announcements at the same time each year. He launched, naively, out of season, when there was not much else for the Fashion journalists to write about. One of them got wind of Cordarounds “through a friend of a friend,” thought it was funny, and wrote about it. Cordarounds was written up in the New York Times because it was funny and because it broke the season convention of the industry.

Lesson 2 from Betabrand: Break a convention of timing in your industry to stand out.

One of Chris’s best sellers is a crazy, foil-like pant called the Disco ball pants. As he points out, you couldn’t open a store in San Francisco selling Disco ball pants and stay in business, because although he has found a large audience they are highly geographically dispersed. These pants have shown up everywhere from golf charity events to Burning Man. What unites such a broad group appears to be a ‘show off mindset’ – people who want to get attention. There’s a lot of them out there, just not all in one zip code. Disco ball pants are an internet-only kind of an idea.

Chris says, he’s not really selling pants, he’s selling conversation. “Attention-getting clothes make the party funnier,” he says. “My job is to give people the material for conversation — 50 jokes about horizontal cord pants. It’s 99% fiction and 1% fashion. We don’t do the quality and craftsmanship stuff because people won’t talk about that.”

Is there a better piece of advice for anyone in any business today in our super-saturated markets? If you’re not being talked about you may as well not exist.

Lesson 3: if you think of your business as “99% fiction and 1% _______,” how would it change the way you approach your marketing?

As Chris says, most of the time he approaches design with the questions, “What has editorial value? Will this create conversation? Is this forwardable?” His newsletters have a 45% open rate. Do yours?

Thinking like this lead to the Black Sheep sweater made from the wool of real black sheep, naturally. And to the commuter pants with the reflective pocket linings (genius – check ‘em out).

And there’s more to the success of Betabrand than a bunch of gag clothes. The products are genuinely well made, for instance, so there’s no buyers remorse once you’ve stopped laughing. There’s the fictitious bike gang called the Comanches. And Chris is a very web-savvy marketer, providing you with your own custom URL if you send them a photo of you wearing the gear, for instance — what better way for you to show off to your friends, than appearing as lead model for Betabrand.

But still, the core idea here is the very human insight that people want to share stories. So stop thinking about selling and start thinking about stories.

Final piece of advice: “nobody will read it if you’re just trying to get them to buy”. Think about that for a second. Then go joke around a little and make some money anyway.

I had read that he described his sense of his catwalk shows as ‘filmic’, and asked him what he meant by this – what he has taken from the world of film into the world of fashion. Until then he had been leaning back in his seat- witty, engaging, poised. But now his body language changed, and he leant forward. His voice became rather more urgent, more compelled, less reflective, as if rising to the challenge of that catwalk – and as if the challenge of that temporary theatre, that small catwalk performed to a tiny audience for just one afternoon, was a steeper and more demanding challenge than that of making a film that will be viewable by anyone in the world, and will last forever.

He said:

‘In a fashion show you have 13 minutes to convince a room of 200 people of your vision.’

He repeated the time:

‘13 minutes.’

He continued ‘And this is a very cynical, seen-it-all audience in this room. So you have to have an idea. And then you have to tell a story.

So you need a big start. Boom! Act One. Out it comes. And as you start to tell your story you have to really focus the audience. I turn the lights off and have a spotlight on the stage, otherwise they are all waving to their friends and checking their phones.

You start to tell your story and you move on. Boom! Act Two. On you take them.

I use music very deliberately to try to control the audience’s emotions. To help control the rhythm in the room. And after a while you can hear the breathing of the room (he inhaled and exhaled at this point). ‘You can start to feel them reacting together to your story. It is palpable. Till at the end as you finish they all exhale (and he exhales a big breath at this point) at the same time.’

He was a hugely stimulating speaker (I am going to write about how central having a point of view is to everything he does next month). And I was very struck by a number of things he emphasized in conveying his sense of how to communicate a vision. Struck by how useful they could be for us as owners and drivers of Challenger Brands when it comes to communicating our stories, convincing our own audiences of our vision. When it comes to translating our Saying into Doing.

It’s a little prosaic to spell it out, point by point, but indulge me while I do that anyway, because I think each is worth focusing on.

i) 13 Minutes

He didn’t say ‘you don’t have long’, or ‘you have around a quarter of an hour’. He said ‘13 minutes’. Twice. He knew exactly how long he had to make the impact he needed. And it was the tension between the time he had, the importance of success, and the lurking cynicism of the audience that gave an urgency and drama to how he decided to do everything that followed.

So…Let’s understand exactly how long we have to convince our audience of our vision, how long we have to make the impact we need. And let’s use this fixed time frame to give urgency and drama to everything that follows. Note here that we are not necessarily talking about external audiences. It could be our CEO, our sales team, our R&D scientists. Anyone we need to enlist and excite.

ii) Act One

He is telling a story without words. So he sees each appearance on the catwalk is an Act. Each Act tells a part of the overall story. And these Acts are thus not simply connected, they are sequenced.

So…What are the five key Acts that will together convey our vision? What is the right sequence for them? How does this sequence of Acts build our story?

iii) Boom!

These actions are intended to create a sense of drama, and arresting Ford’s audience at the beginning of each act is critical. So his ambition for each one is to start with ‘Boom!’ A very striking word. If you wanted to have the effect of ‘Boom!’, you’re not talking about getting heads nodding, or quiet agreement. You are talking about really getting them to sit up and take notice.

So…What would it mean to define our ambition for each act as Boom! What kind of response would we be looking for, not just at the end, but at the beginning of each Act? How can we more theatrically engage with our audience right from the start of each element of our storytelling?

iv) The Spotlight

Even in a Tom Ford fashion show, if the audience can get distracted they will. He can’t allow that. Even drama is no guarantee of attention. Tom Ford forces his audience to focus their attention.

What is our equivalent to his spotlight, and where are we going to focus it?

v) Music

In reality, the notion of a viewer of our spectacle is wrong. Ford knows he will not succeed by engaging his group’s eyes alone – he has to engage their emotions. He is going to think about how he can use every sensory trigger at his disposal to do that.

What are the sensory triggers at our disposal? How can we use them to engage every sense to bring our audience along with us?

vi) Exhale

Ford has a whole new metric for emotional engagement. One that is – in his words – ‘palpable’: whether the audience breathe in and out at the same time. If they exhale together at the end, he has succeeded. If they don’t, it hasn’t worked as he intended it to. Hugely demanding, but very simple, very clear, very measurable.

So what is our metric for emotional engagement? That is hugely demanding, but very simple and clear and measurable? That is palpable?

And he has also denied himself something critical, that most of us rely on more than we should: he has denied himself words. I am not suggested that we do this ourselves, but I am intrigued by Pinter’s observations that ‘words are sometimes just a strategy to cover nakedness’ – and that forcing yourself to be less dependent on words requires you to have more substance, as well as more theatre (Rob Poynton talks about this in his short film this month). That if as Challenger Brands, and as owners of Challenger Brands, we thought more in terms of ‘Boom! Act One!’ then actually we would not find ourselves all too often dressing up the insubstantial, but the very opposite – pushing ourselves to greater substance.

Of course, there are also limits to this analogy for many of us. Ford has at one level a captive audience, for instance – they cannot leave the room. And that is certainly not true of our external audiences for us.

But then most of us are not presenting to as tough an audience as Nuclear Wintour, either.

Adam Morgan, Founder, eatbigfish

Last summer we went to interview the founders of Metro Bank, the UK’s new challenger to the big High Street banks. One of the founders, Vernon Hill has ‘previous’ on this (as they say in Jason Statham films): he has already done this very successfully in the US before with Commerce Bank. And what I loved about the way they talked about why they were starting was not the strategy or the constituent ideas, stimulating though they were. What I loved was the indignation about how poorly the High Street banks had treated the UK consumer. God knows how many times Vernon has talked about it, yet still his voice rises a timbre and the blood pressure appears to go slightly into the red every time you start him off on the subject again.

I think challengers need much more of that. Less talk about positioning and more about what they are genuinely indignant about in the first place – where the centre of gravity of their ambition, their purpose lies. This is one of the difficulties for large companies in talking about putting ‘purpose’ at the heart of their brands – they think it, but don’t feel it. You have to feel purpose. And that means feeling what you reject, what you are indignant about, as much as what you want to champion – before, very often, you are clear what you want to champion.

Indignation is, in particular, the mark of a very particular kind of challenger brand: the missionary. The brand on a mission to deliver something the world really needs, whether it realises it needs it yet or not.

The Challenger’s strategic canvas is much wider in potential stances for us to take than Irreverent little player vs. Monolithic and unscrupulous bigger player, although that is what many seem to narrow it down to.

Challengers do, by definition challenge something, but it is not always the market leader. In fact, for all that the David vs. Goliath is thought to be the archetypal challenger stance (Avis vs. Hertz, Virgin vs. BA, Pepsi vs. Coca Cola) in reality it is the most unusual narrative for challengers to tell. And we are going to need that width of possible challenger narratives to be very clear to us, not just to start fresh as we launch or relaunch, but to stay fresh in the story we tell to our consumer..

So for the next few weeks, let’s consider the broader range of challenger stances we can tell. Here’s a brief overview of each. And then in the interviews and subsequent posts we are going to explore a couple of them in particular a little more, and then look at how to use them.

The Irreverent Maverick
This stance could be described as ‘counterculture attitude in a box’; think Red Bull, Kulula or Brewdog. The Irreverent Maverick uses wit, humour and sometimes even shock tactics, to puncture the category complacency and attract a very particular audience to their brand.

The Missionary
The Missionary is dedicated to a higher calling. They are here to put something right. They want to share their love for their brand and grow its influence, but also to use their understanding of the category and brand experience to do something big, brave and beautiful in the real world.

The Next Generation
The Next Generation Challenger is challenging the appropriateness of the Market Leader for the new times we live in. It can be an elegant way to deposition a number one brand, positioning the incumbent as certainly perfect for a time gone by, while now being clear that the world has moved on, and so should our choice of brand. That was then, Ladies and Gentlemen, but this is now. Audi has done this brilliantly in the US at various points in recent years.

The Democratiser
The Democratiser believes in taking not from the ‘rich’ and giving to the ‘poor’, but taking from the ‘few’ and giving to the ‘many’ – opening up the beauty of great design, or the latest catwalk clothing, or the ability to become a broadcaster or news editor, and making it available to everyone. Challenging elitism and privilege. Think the new generation of ‘value’ brands and retailers.

The Real and Human Challenger
One of the qualities that many Challengers share is the ability to give a sense of the people behind their brand. These brands appeal to us at a more personal level than the market leader because they are making a human-to-human connection, rather than a brand-to-consumer connection, and as a result these brands become not just products or services but compelling characters in our lives. Challenging the facelessness of the category. Think innocent in the UK, Hunan TV perhaps in China.

The Enlightened Zagger
The Enlightened Zagger is deliberately swimming against a prevailing cultural current. They are not simply zagging while the world zigs for the hell of it, but have informed personal beliefs about the way the world should be that are different to those that are accepted by the mainstream. Challenging ‘conventional wisdom’ (rather than the status quo): I know the world buys into this, they say, but I am calling it for the BS it really is. Someone has to make a stand here, and it’s going to be me. Miller High Life has migrated brilliantly to this stance in the US.

The Visionary
This character is a preacher, not a fixer. Rather than trying to solve the existing problems in a certain category, they create a vision for the future, and then set about turning that vision into a reality. Of course, a Visionary can only be labelled as such in retrospect, once the rest of the world has caught up and the vision has become a reality.

The Game Changer
The Challenger brand that sets out to become a game changer isn’t simply setting out to challenge category convention (like the Enlightened Zagger or Irreverent Maverick) but to go further. They present us with products or services that not only change how we think about that category, but go as far as to change the way we live our lives altogether. Think Kingfisher bringing the quality of international business class to domestic flying to overtake Jet Airways in India.

The Peoples Champion
The People’s Champion makes a very specific claim – that it is standing up for the consumer, who has been exploited by the players in the category so far. The characters that are revered and honoured as a People’s Champion don’t simply claim this status for themselves, they earn it. As with all Challenger strategy and positioning, it is action, not image that counts. The launch strategy for the hugely successful online bank Skandiabanken in Norway, it was for years the default position of any Virgin brand in the UK.

And, finally, of course:

The Scrappy David
A powerful tale, because a binary battle we all can recognize: Good vs. Evil, Big vs. Small, Us vs. Them. To choose this stance and call out the competition as Goliath, belief, chutzpah and resilience are everything, as are the absolute authenticity of your own position as David.

He was simply open to the stimulus. Prepared to look beyond the usual sources of inspiration for his industry. He has a different outlook, and he knows that this is a sense – like seeing, hearing, smelling – that he can practise and refine.

Put simply, Outlooking is a skill you can learn to help you see opportunity. And many great Challenger stories start with an act of Outlooking.

‘Important Job Offer – Inexperience Wanted’
One would think that the more experience you have, the more easy it is to see opportunity. So that when you want to solve a problem, the most natural solution is to get a whole bunch of experienced people in a room and run at the issue. Experience = Knowledge and Insight…surely?

Yes, but…Experience can blind us too. Experience tells us that there are ‘rules’ and ‘codes’. We believe we know what can or can’t be done. We become closed to things that don’t fit our model of the world – the model that is based on years of experience.

However, many of the challenger stories we have researched, start with In-experience – people who have no experience of the business that they are going into, or deliberately bring a perspective from another industry or category. People with intelligent Naivety.

If you don’t believe me, consider the feelings you have in the first few days in a new job. Certainly a little fear, but also huge excitement and clarity of thought. You have the energy to change things for the better. You see things with fresh eyes, and a million questions – small and large – occur to you.
‘why do they segment the category that way?’
‘why can’t people buy the products directly?’
‘couldn’t we sell things cheaper and yet make more profit?’
‘why are we structured this way?’
‘couldn’t I bring some of my knowledge from other jobs to this industry?’

But as time passes, and you become more ‘experienced’ , the questions recede and you come to understand ‘how things work’ in your category or business. And as your sense of certainty increases, the energy and enthusiasm wane a little.
You’ve lost your intelligent naivety. You’ve stopped looking out.

Regaining our Intelligent Naivety
So, what skills and techniques can we adopt to regain our intelligent naivety?

Look beyond the borders of your own category for Inspiration
Many of our favourite challengers practise this. Jonathan Ive, the Chief Designer at Apple, often applies this principle. In revolutionising the aesthetics of the computer world with the iMac he found that the industry was incapable of producing truly vibrant translucent plastics. He turned to a confectionery maker for advice and inspiration. The iMac was often described as ‘yummy’ looking as a result – ‘a gumdrop of a computer’.

Appearing on main streets around the world are Lush cosmetics stores. These are not the sanitised marble clad white environments that we find in department stores but more resemble a green grocer or a deli. As theatres of colour and sensory overload, they look nothing like other cosmetics stores. The inspiration can be traced to an entirely different category.

Add a new emotion to people’s experience of the category
When you think ‘computer services’, you don’t immediately think cool or fun. But for anyone who has encountered an original Geek Squad agent, you will recognise the power and loyalty driving potential of that business, as they turn up in their Geek Squad cars looking like something from ‘Men in Black’, and flash their agent badge before fixing your hard drive. Geek Squad really does put ‘cool’ into IT.

Or who could have thought that socks could be scary. Burlington recently parodied the horror genre to make their iconic socks more relevant to a younger generation, http://sockhorror.burlington.de/ .

Attach your story to a bigger issue – something to set tongues wagging
In Europe the diesel car is well established. In North America less so, where – despite all the huge advances in these engines, and the mileage benefits – it still carries a reputation for dirtiness, noise and a lack of performance.

Despite this, Audi in North America believe the diesel market will grow and offers huge potential. They were clear however that the traditional rational arguments for diesel engines were falling on deaf ears. With the launch of the Audi Q7, they chose a different story to engage with. They identified that if 30% of Americans shifted to diesel in the US, then American would no longer need to rely on Saudi Arabia for any oil. They expected some 10% of their sales to be diesel vehicles. In fact, over 40% of their sales have been diesel.

Flip the conventions of the category
Sometimes people associate being a Challenger with breaking every rule and code out there. We wouldn’t ever recommend that but…as a place to start a process of looking for new opportunity and a way to outlook…you can do worse than list all the category conventions you can think of, then flip them and ask the question – ‘Is there any potential benefit in seeing a category convention from the other side of the coin?’

One of the greatest examples of this was Saturn cars – ‘A different kind of car company’ – who inverted many of the conventions of the car industry in the USA: from where it was made, to how it was sold, to the emphasis on a great ownership experience. Saturn was an off shoot of General Motors and achieved such success for a time that its parent company struggled to reconcile managing two very different business models. But the freshness of thinking that led to Saturn can also be seen in the inspiring interview with Hugo Spowers of Riversimple on the site this month.

The business model success of Ryan Air is inspired by similar thinking – flying into regional airports, making revenues from helping to develop those airports rather than paying exorbitant landing fees, and even charging for spending a penny. Flipping irritating at one level, yet flipping successful too.

You can see another great example of a business that has flipped conventions in the interview with Gav Thompson of giff gaff.

Outlooking is a skill to nurture
Challenger success depends on the ability to be open to opportunity. Always. To do this we need to recognise that experience can be a constraint at times rather than an enabler. We need to find ways to systematically regain our intelligent naivety.

Outlooking and the techniques we have touched on here, forces us to put on new lenses. It forces us to see the world from a different perspective, and opens the senses to new possibilities.

Some challengers seem to be permanent outlookers; for the rest of us it is a skill we can practise.

Hugh Derrick is a partner at eatbigfish.

“The culture of the Stride team was like a snowball made up of a thousand tiny things. It grew as more people and experiences contributed to it and shaped it in a unique way. But, if I had to boil it down to just a handful of things that characterized the unique culture of the Stride launch team they would be:

We believed in the opportunity.
As a team we recognised and embraced the once in a life time opportunity that we had to create a new brand from scratch. We saw the magnitude of the challenge as a brilliant opportunity rather than an overwhelming insurmountable task. We didn’t focus on how many new brand launches fail; we believed we were going to be the one in a 1000 that succeed.

We took it personally. Picture a very small team. First just me. Then me and a market research partner, then we were 3, then 4 on the team. We all took the success of the project personally. If it didn’t go well there was no where to hide. We felt personally accountable to the business for the project and that motivated us. It meant not going the extra mile, but going the extra 10 miles, everyday.

The other aspect of taking it personally is that we all felt accountable to each other on a personal level. If any one of us failed to deliver we would let the team down. And this level of commitment and effort meant that the lines between work and personal lives began to blur. We know each others personal lives very well, so we were able to support each other in a way that helped us each to balance work and personal lives.

We had a crystal clear mission.
As a team we were completely aligned on our mission and we did what Adam would call ‘hunting as a pack.’ This gave meaning to what at first seemed very ambiguous and unclear. Gradually we recruited more and more supporters with our clarity of mission. Importantly this included all functions of the business and at all levels — senior management, legal, regulatory, etc. We tried to make our stakeholders all feel like insiders who were complicit in delivering our mission.

We had a clear enemy.
We focused our energy on dethroning the king of American chewing gum: The Wrigley “BIG 5.” We challenged the unforgiveable injustice of Wrigley selling inferior chewing gum to millions of Americans and getting away with it for the past 100 years. We didn’t bash our enemy, but built our brand to deliberately exploit the weaknesses of the enemy so that the consumer would be attracted to our brand as a clearly more appealing offer.

We were one team.
We were all in it together. There weren’t functional silos. After the first few months of the project, there were times when you might not be able to tell who came from which function.

We played by our own rules, and agreed these rules of play with company.
Notably, the rules were a bit different from the other teams in these ways:
We did not spend much time at all on bureaucratic processes. This enabled us to focus our energy on cracking the brief for our successful challenger brand. The project was thinly resourced, so the company didn’t have a lot invested in it financially for quite a while. Basically, the project didn’t need the heavy governance process that tends to slow down other innovation projects where financial risk needs to be carefully managed. Imagine…no IPM documents, no project governance meetings, on massive PowerPoint decks… heaven!

We managed senior stakeholders personally.
Sometimes one at a time, sometimes a couple at a time. We mostly did this without PowerPoint (Can you imagine!?) I reported directly to the President, which gave me un-paralleled access to the key decision makers. The project moved at lightning speed because we made decisions quickly. Finally, when it was time to make the final go/no-go decision and we asked them to open their wallets, the leadership team already had a lot of skin in the game. We asked the senior leadership team for their “monolithic alignment” in support the launch, and we got it.”

Lynne Vandeveer is currently Director of Marketing of the Gum & Candy portfolio at Cadbury plc.

Please advise.’

‘Dear A.N. Other

To paraphrase Mr Jobs, ‘it is more fun to join the Pirates than the Navy’, and there is no doubt that this sentiment helped his Apple cohorts establish a sense of unity when faced with the Microsoft Armada. But what about when the Navy is your own corporation and you want to be the Pirate?
The Pirate Navy comparison is a vivid one but amidst the eye-patches, wooden legs, black-beards, and drunken brawls (let alone the surreal worlds of Captain Jack Sparrow), there are a number of valuable lessons and real commercial gain to be realised by those who want to establish a Challenger Republic within a larger corporation. Here are three.

‘No Prey, no Pay’

Follow the money. It’s all about the treasure.

The reason that brands like Axe/Lynx within Unilever, Yorkie within Nestle, giffgaff within 02 are allowed to behave in ways that are different from – and often at odds with – the mother ship is that there is a commercial rationale for them to do so. Each of these brands has been able to articulate clearly why behaving more like a beer brand (Axe), seeming to alienate half the population (Yorkie’s ‘It’s not for Girls’ approach) or handing over service to the community (giffgaffs open source service approach) has greater commercial value to the business than following the same brand instruction manual that other brands in their portfolios follow.

For Pirates, achieving the commercial prize is everything. There is no Navy Quatermaster to hand out a salary. This underlying drive is also true of successful Pirate teams within the Navy. Above all, it’s delivering the goods that enables these Pirates to flourish and to challenge the normal codes.

More Privateer than Pirate

People have heard of Pirates, but few can distinguish them from ‘Privateers’. Privateering was a distinguished practice whereby a sovereign power granted its commission and recognition to private armed vessels to prey on enemy shipping. And it wasn’t only sovereign powers but also wealthy individuals who bestowed their patronage.

Some of the most seemingly noble people in the land turned to privateers, and many of the most successful had patrons who set them up, occasionally funded, and as the noose tightened, sometimes intervened to save a life. Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, was known to have special considerations with the governor of North Carolina allowing him safe passage into Carolinian harbours provided he left English shipping alone. The patron of the 18th century privateer would have walked a fine line but their importance should not be under-estimated.

The same is true of the modern day Pirate – they need someone at the very top to understand clearly the need for a different approach, and to act as an active sponsor. This helps turn a pirate into a privateer – a deliberate act of controlled disruption.

Pirates within the Navy will inevitably cause waves: waves that may be required to achieve their objectives but that will rock the larger boat.
The active patron is an essential component – providing approved rope for the Pirate, while ensuring he can disrupt without hanging himself.

Hunt as a Pack

Despite the odd press-gang, the Navy is a traditional hierarchical corporation, with employment contracts, promotion through the ranks, and the opportunity to do well if you follow the correct procedure. By contrast, the image of a Pirate ship is at first much more anarchic and selfish but on closer inspection they have some unique qualities which hint at their extraordinary success against often insuperable Navy odds.

Without the security of a Navy salary, Pirates knew that the prize (the prey) was paramount. They also well understood that to achieve their goals they would have to work as a team. All for one and one for all.

They cemented this sense of common behaviours in what were called ships ‘Articles’. These were a horizontal contract drawn up and agreed upon by all the crew on the pirate ship – not simply the Captain: they set out the way that the crew expected one another to behave in pursuit of their goal. Not the strategy, not the plan, but the behaviours.

The team at Axe invest a huge amount of effort in their team culture – and have developed a self-fulfilling sense that they are different to the Navy. People are recruited onto Axe – because they are an Axe person – not simply because they have been a success elsewhere in the Navy.
The history of the seas, the world economy and how the world’s borders are shaped owes an enormous amount to Piracy – a challenger movement amidst the world’s sovereign navies. In the same way some of the world’s biggest challenger brands exist within Navy parent organisations – and continue to thrive.

Pirates were, and are today, commercially motivated teams operating in high risk high return ventures. The hyperbolic world of Pirates still engages us today, but if we look under the celluloid veneer, it can also teach us some valuable business lessons, and offer some clues as to how Pirates can live in commercial harmony with their Navy colleagues.

For Fun & Profit.’

Hugh Derrick is a partner at eatbigfish

The first, a study by the Université Pierre et Marie Curie published in May this year, reported that the human brain ‘is fundamentally unable to cope with three things at once’. In situations where people are faced with multiple choices, the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPC) – the part of our brain that drives our behaviour based on the value of rewards – apparently divides itself in two, each half dealing with one choice. But it cannot divide into more than two – so any choice between three or more things needs to be simplified before it can be made.

As Jim Prior at The Partners observed in this blog post shortly after this study came out, it seems that this theory reflects what we see in the brand world. The choice for the consumer in almost every category, no matter how many brands there are in it, often seems to boil down to a choice between just two – certainly in popular culture (Prior cites Pepsi vs. Coke, Burger King vs. McDonalds, Nike vs. adidas). And clearly it is in the challenger’s interests to reduce the perceived choice to that of being just between two brands – in reality their biggest hurdle in over-saturated categories (there are over 500 oralcare SKUs at an American Drugstore chain for example) is visibility and consideration among the static and confusion, static and confusion that otherwise simply serves to preserve existing consumer habits and the status quo. Small wonder that one sees challengers like Apple (a leader with the iPod, a challenger with the Mac), Virgin and most recently Dunkin all deliberately set out to reduce the choice in their category for consumers to just two, by consciously pitching themselves as the Challenger brand going up against the Market Leader. Look, they say. It’s very simple. You can buy this, or you can buy that. That’s all you have to decide.

Challenger brand owners often flinch from this classically direct strategy, either through fear of bringing down the wrath (and spend ) of the leader on their heads, or in the belief that it leads to ugly tactical marketing, which can then drag the consumer’s relationship with the category down. Yet in reality it is possible to do it in a range of tones, from the muscularly persuasive (Powerade), to the winningly charming (Mac), and indeed put it either at the centre of your strategy, or as a component thrust in a bigger campaign (Dunkin). And it is also possible to do it in a way that benefits both sides, as Roger Enrico of Pepsi famously claimed the Cola Wars did.

For the strategic advantages, if you do it well, are considerable. They include:
- Reminding habitual purchasers that there is a choice to be made
- Putting your brand in the key consideration set
- Radically ‘simplifying’ choice in the category
- Redefining the criterion for choice in the category (‘when choosing between these two, this is the question to ask yourself…’)
- Using the opponent as a counterpoint to illuminate your own virtues
- Luring competitors into a response, to spend their money talking about your agenda

Oh, and your Medial Prefrontal Cortex loves it, it seems.

Clearly, however, deciding to set up a two horse race is only the beginning. The second fundamental question to resolve is what is the consumer’s reason will be for choosing us, the challenger in this situation. In the examples we looked at above, we see a variety of strategies here: the Mac plays on product superiority and user identification, for example, while Dunkin set up against Starbucks as a People’s Champion with better products. But the second piece of research lays out more formal and rigorous thinking around a different kind of narrative entirely: perhaps the most classic of all challenger strategies: playing the Underdog card.

The study in the Journal of Consumer Research, by Neeru Paharia, Anat Keinan, Jill Avery and Juliet Schor formally analyses what the authors call an ‘Underdog Brand Biography’ and attempts to understand how and why people respond positively to an underdog backstory in marketing. The authors argue that there is an emerging trend by brands to share a historical account of their underdog status, and look at why that is, and where this strategy does and doesn’t work well. You can find the abstract of it here: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6464.html#pub-2.

If one was picky, one might be tempted to question it being ‘an emerging trend’, given that so much of the model fits what almost five decades of underdog brands from Avis to the early Apple to Snapple to Ben and Jerry’s to innocent have been doing with some success from 1962 onwards, but this is a minor cavil: the emerging range of media channels available to a challenger certainly make it easier than ever before to share one’s story on the one hand as a brand, and to access it as a consumer on the other, and the proliferation of new brands presumably means that these backstories are indeed more common than ever before. And what I really like about the authors’ ambition for the study is the desire to formally prove both the advantages of taking such a stance (from purchase intentions to the effect on brand loyalty) and the four variables in the degree to which people identify with it (whether they see themselves as underdogs as well, for instance).

So my challenge to us is this. Yes, the socio-digital world makes easier than ever before (in principle, at least) to share your Underdog Brand Biography with those that might be drawn to you. And, yes, one does see a number of the newer challengers sharing their backstory in this way – a photo of the founders, stories about how they got started, a statement of their passions and mission, deft sketching of the mountain they have to climb, close with some encouraging early signs of success, and off you go. And, yes, this clearly this is a great human interest story, and a useful start.

But is it enough?

Because of course what is so interesting about putting these two bits of research together is that they lead one to think much more seriously about the strategic imperative of starting a two horse race. Of really leaning into that clarity, and the implications of setting yourself up against the market leader. How to redefine the criterion for choice. How to make the consumer not only engaged in the race, but someone who wins when you do. And how to make the media follow it as enthusiastically as the latest football results, or Cheryl Cole’s malaria.

Two bits of research, that 48 years after Avis defined the classic two horse race, and turned around its business in doing so, spotlight its advantages for a challenger more brightly and more rigorously than ever before.

Saddle up.

His name is Jont and he writes ‘achingly lovely melodies’ says Uncut and is ‘rather marvellously like Bowie in his happier moments’ says Artrocker. Put better than me but you can check his music out yourselves here.

But Jont’s music is only half the reason I like him. Not because it’s half-good but because it’s only half the story. And it’s a real Challenger story.

So he’s a young bloke trying to succeed in an industry which is not only famously difficult to break into but is famously broken itself. And of course that is a struggle. Like so many other unsigned indie dreamers he is up against the mainstream music machine with no budget and no backing and he knows he needs to think and behave very differently if he is to succeed.

ATTITUDE:
And it starts with attitude. Jont has absolute faith in his own music. He is a true Believer – not only in his ‘product’, if you like, but in himself and also in others. He is an idealist and an optimist but crucially he’s an opportunist too. Open and able to see everything as an offer – willing to meet and talk, ready to say yes, to empower himself and others to try stuff out. Naive maybe but intelligently so.

And it’s how stuff happens.

….Like the time in LA when a conversation with a stranger at a free gig he put on ended up with him having a song included in the Hollywood movie Wedding Crashers. Not an obvious fit and therefore not in the actual film itself no, but in the credits. A sort of downside as none of the mainstream American Crap Comedy fans who actually paid to see the film got to hear the song as they had already left the theatre. But then this turned out to have an upside too. The Indie Kids, real cinema fans and potential Jont fans, working as cinema ushers across America that summer heard the song while they swept popcorn and picked up rubbish and fell in love with each other. And happily they fell in love with Jont’s song too and they weren’t shy about it. They told Jont, they told their friends and helped this young music maker to grow his support amongst just the right sort of crowd. Jont was appreciative of course but also opportunistic. He wrote a song called For The Ushers and put it out there as a thank you. And of course they loved that even more. The story and the song became a sort of conversational currency for many and an access point for more people into the community and the culture that Jont was beginning to nurture.

BEHAVIOUR
So actually being opportunistic is not just an attitude for Jont it is a practice and a behaviour that he takes very seriously and dedicates himself to. After all for the Challenger opportunity is something you create rather than take, down to a conscious behaviour more often than happy accident.

Of course when it comes to Challenger behaviour Jont points out that it is also down to ‘a lot of hard work’. He is not just committed to writing and recording in his spare time but over-commits to it all of the time. And he clearly doesn’t stop. ‘When will he?’ I ask him ‘What’s the ambition? What does success look like?’ Jont laughs and I am only slightly surprised to hear that it looks like a ‘a big label, a world tour, sponsored and supported to play in front of millions of crying fans and not able to get a cup of coffee from Leila’s on the corner without a mob’. A pretty conventional measure of success then yes, but it turns out he has a pretty unconventional plan to achieve it. And one that many are happy to help him with.

STRATEGY
Like so many others in his generation Jont uses the internet to share his music ‘freely and with a spirit of honesty and openness’. A strategy although at odds with the industry’s traditional obsession with ownership, protectionism and exclusivity does suit the principles of the online world and the spirit of his many dedicated fans that are growing in numbers from Bethnal Green to Brooklyn and beyond. Like so many MySpace musicians, Jont hopes that in this way fans will act not just as an audience but as promoters and distributers too – as indeed they often do. But Hope is not method enough for Jont. Instead he has found a very simple and yet very powerful way to harness the structure of the internet and the openness of his fans not just to share his music in the virtual world but to formalise an alternative strategy to create breakthrough and find success in the real world. A clear and fixed plan that is at the same time fluid and open, a clear set of rules to play by although they are new ones.

It is called Unlit – the name of Jont’s zero budget world tour that allows him to play to new audiences at every gig and build a network of fans, distributors, promoters, event organisers and marketers from the streets up. The simple concept of Unlit is that Jont maps out a tour route across different cities in Europe and America and his online community of fans, who like his music and this method, can volunteer their homes as a tour venue for a night of Unlit music and magic. Jont describes it as a ‘cross between a gig and a house party’ put on by a ‘certain type’ of fan who is willing to open their house up, not as a private gig for friends, but as a genuine public venue complete with an open door policy to the Jont community from across the city and to strangers on their own street. ‘People love it or hate it’. He says ‘ It’s pretty self selecting in terms of hosts and venues’.

The value to the hosts Jont says is not just to hear great music and meet great people in their own front room but to be part of a ‘culture of openness, to really connect’ with like-minded once-strangers in ‘real time and in real space’. It’s a new idea in the digital age, in an increasingly closed culture of fear and suspicion. But it’s an old idea really – an open and trusting way to behave – simply opening your door to your community.

The value to Jont is clearly not commercial at this point but this is just the beginning. Unlit is about building momentum for his music and his message from the streets up. Literally. It’s a global tour at a local level. And it’s not just about performing, and the perfect pressure to constantly write and record new music, but the ability to genuinely get feedback. Not just the instinctive feedback from a big crowd but also the intimate feedback from an audience able to share their own thoughts and ideas with the performer in a two way conversation after the gig. ‘I change stuff, I get lots of ideas, contacts and connections …always leading to something new and different’. Always something bigger.

So like so many others it turns out, after hearing Jont talk on the radio, I feel compelled to show my support not just for his music but for his own personal courage, determination, creativity and commitment. I identify not just with his music and his underdog status but his beliefs, his behaviour and the culture that he had invited us all to be part of. Meeting him the other confirms all this and so yes, tonight is the night. The best gig in town will be going on in our garden at 58a Wickham Road, Brockley. London SE4 1LS.

I don’t have much experience as a venue manager or tour promoter but I do pour a very nice glass of beer and might even put out some cheesy snacks. So Challenger people, forget your usual Tuesday night plan or bring them along. Head to my house. Hope for nice weather. Come and say Hello.