Little Things: Icebreaker and the Baacode

Read the story and make your own book.

Keep it Real: Howies and The Giant Label

Read the story and make your own book.

Show the Love: Green Thing’s Glove Love

Read the story and make your own book.

Surprise, Surprise: Ted Baker and the Mirror Message

Read the story and make your own book.

A story about Ben Wilson, an artist who finds a new canvas for his creative communication on the streets of London.

A New Canvas is one in a series of short films commissioned from the BA (Hons) Graphic Communication course at Bath Spa University. This film was made by Zoe Coles and Emma Morris.

www.artbathspa.com

www.emmamorrisillustration.com

www.zoecoles.co.uk

Sign up at www.dothegreenthing.com

We kick off with a series of articles around the topic from eatbigfish. Then we’ve got an interview with Naresh Ramchandani from greenthing about the need to over-commit time, energy and creativity to succeed in the disposable world of digital media; a story about an artist who finds a new canvas for his creative communication on the streets of London and a ‘print and play’ exercise that forces a new filter for Challengers selecting communication media.

We’ll be adding content throughout the month and will be letting members know whenever we start a new subject, so if you’d like to become a member and keep up to date with the Challenger Project, then just join the community and we’ll keep you in the loop.

And we’re always interested to hear about Challengers, especially those that we may not have come across yet. Are you a Challenger we’ve not yet met? Please email us and tell us your story.

NEXT MONTH:

Next month is all about the power of ‘Saying vs. Doing’ when it comes to communication. So if you have any brand examples that illustrate when:
- words work wonders and/or when its action that counts
- saying acts as a substitute for doing
- brand behaviour contradicts the rhetoric
- inaction speaks volumes

Or any other ideas that you’d like to share around the topic then we’d love to hear from you.

eatbigfish

For any Challenger brand thinking about digital media the thought process needs to follow these three simple steps:

1. What do we believe in that no one else does?
2. Are there enough people who share these beliefs so strongly that they are prepared to go advocate for us?
3. How can we use digital media to reach them more efficiently and effectively with the tools they need to do the advocating?

No single one of these steps is enough. 1 and 2 have always been necessary for Challengers, step 3 is fast becoming a core competency too, one that didn’t exist 10 years ago.

But if you’re relatively new to Challengers it is worth revisiting 1 and 2 first, because the case for them is only becoming stronger and it’s hard to do 3 right without them.

Necessary.

When Adam Morgan first coined the term ‘lighthouse identity’ in 1999 he was inspired by watching Challengers create belief-driven brands. Challengers held strong convictions about their role in the world, were out to right wrongs, mix things up, and they let the world know it by projecting a brilliant beam of belief in their every action. Consumers navigated by those beliefs. This method stands in stark contrast to the ways of the leader, who tend to reflect back to consumers their needs. Leaders navigate by consumers. Challengers ask consumers to navigate by them. This is not a ‘right vs. wrong’ discussion, simply an observation about how Challengers build brands differently to leaders — out of necessity. No David can out Goliath Goliath.

This approach was a tad controversial at the time. Many potential clients of ours found this lighthouse method hard to get their heads around at first: “you mean, talk about ourselves, not them . . .?” Yes. Well actually, “talk about us — you and your zealots and where your missions intersect” is perhaps a more accurate statement. It’s a sometimes subtle but quite profound shift in orientation from the simple “mirror the consumer need” school of marketing. The Challengers we studied — Jet Blue, Southwest, Umpqua, Camper, innocent, method, for example — all think in terms of a cause, comma and have perhaps been prescient once again, with the rest of the world now catching on. Challengers do seem to have a knack for that. If you want to glimpse the future keep your eye on the Challenger.

So pundits are now providing the data to back-up lighthouse thinking. John Gerzema’s great work in The Brand Bubble using years of BAV data shows the precipitous drop in trust of brands. There’s an unspoken process of “how can we trust you if we don’t know what you believe in” going on here, especially when consumers see a disconnect between beliefs and actions in much modern marketing.

Rose Cameron of Euro RSCG has written that 78% of consumers want brands to be “beacons” creating a shared vision.

Millward Brown’s 2007 study for P&G trawled through BrandZ data on 25,000 brands before concluding that the 25 brands that have created the most value in the last seven years “serve a bigger purpose” and are built on ideals: “Not about what people buy, but what they buy into”

And some of the sharpest bloggers are weighing in too…

It is clear that the culture around brands has shifted markedly — consumers are looking for something to believe in, whether you’re a Challenger or not.

Easier

But now to the easier part, point 3. A belief system is necessary but not sufficient.

Ten years ago Challengers simply couldn’t afford to make a commercial and air it. Now, as everybody knows, digital camcorders are cheap and youtube is free. If, like Tom’s Shoes, you have built a clearly differentiated lighthouse brand, you have the brilliance and intensity baked into your proposition to start to create “the word”. Over 200,000 people will watch your “shoe drop” video from Argentina and some of them will join the 187,000 fans on Facebook. Once there, they will amplify your message 100x, with all the credibility that comes from one person talking to another about something they care about. At this point, your brand is a co-creation.

Perhaps easy for Tom’s, which has a “real” cause built in. But baby brand Graco shows the power of internal engagement with a CHallenger lighthouse identity, as it elevates the importance of parents’ instincts in its ‘From The Heart’ positioning, and allows the bloggers on staff to use their own personal experiences to project the brand’s beliefs. This has become a big success for Graco.

Yes, because it creates a lighthouse, but also because the humanity of the big corporation shines through, too — “thank you for welcoming us into your personal lives and opening your hearts to us”, as one blog comment reads. Illustrating that the power of a lighthouse is not simply the ability for the brand to connect with the consumer but the connection between the consumer and those employees who are truly brand believers.

‘Taking it personally’ is the mantra of the lighthouse keeper and so beware a brand whose people genuinely do; it’s powerful and unexpected stuff.

The proof being that the word quickly spread for Graco leading, among other things, to a Today Show spot thanks to a recommendation by one of their fans.

The Graco case study can be found here.

And finally, a shout out to a real small Challenger called Big Rock beer that appropriately named their brand after an “erratic boulder” a term from glaciology that drinkers of Alberta, Canada have come to know as well as their favorite microbrewer. We know what they believe in not only because they tell us on their site, but more importantly because their fans on Flickr do.

Take a look here and at their fan page on Facebook. There’s nothing especially flash going on here, just a group of committed fans getting together inspired by a small beer company in the “spirit of the authentic and the independent”, and creating a lot of content that sits neatly at the intersection between what the brand and its audience believes.

So yes, a good time to be a Challenger. We can reach out to millions for the cost of pennies, and arm advocates with the case for change in less time than it took you to come up with it.

Yet the critical thing that often gets lost is the hurley-burley of the New Media circus is how you use them in service of your brand idea. The same kind of thinking that drove Challenger use of old media still applies.

There is nothing intrinsically sharper in digital tools in and of themselves -without carefully considering how to use them to change the rules in your favor, to project beliefs, to provide striking symbols of reevaluation, any New Media, digital or otherwise, becomes less a powerful lever, more a blunt instrument.

Mark Barden, West Coast Partner, eatbigfish