Disappearing investment? Why Challengers in Tech need a can-if attitude
By Kirstin Piening
We all know what comes to mind when I say tech industry - most people picture Silicon Valley in the mid-2010s. This was a world of optimism and innovation, fuelled by the belief that you could bring the world of tech to almost any category, disrupt the status quo, and reap the rewards.
But – as those in the tech industry know all too well – plenty has changed since that image cemented itself in our collective minds. Growth at all costs and untempered optimism has been replaced by something a little more cautious. In 2025, investors are prioritising profitability and proven business models over moonshot ideas. They want a safe bet that has practical use cases and can definitely make them lots of money.
Obviously, this is not an ‘investment has slowed’ story. Anyone with half an eye open can tell you that. But it is an ‘investment has shifted’ story. 48% of venture capital investment went to AI-led businesses in 2024, for example. Given that the mainstream AI boom is a little over two years old, that’s a truly dramatic shift.
So, what do you do if you aren’t lucky enough to work in one of the tech industry’s current darlings? What if you work for one of the tech behemoths but in an emerging market or an underfunded product vertical? Or your scale-up is suddenly under far more pressure to prove its profitability, and fast? The natural response in a situation like this – when funding is limited, and you fell the pressure to show return on every $$ spent – is to lower your ambitions. Achieve less with less.
But that’s not how Challengers think. Teams and businesses with a Challenger Mindset see constraints as opportunities, and they find inventive solutions by using can-if thinking (i.e. we can do x, if y). And if anyone can thing inventively, it’s those in the tech industry. But what does that mean in practice? Everyone can use the words ‘do more with less’ but let’s look at some real-life examples – proof that lowering your ambitions is never the only option.
We can get outsized attention for our product launch if…
We think about our media very differently.
Samsung has been a longtime sponsor of the Olympics – often giving away phones to athletes who are competing alongside their traditional OOH displays. But in 2024, with budgets to promote their latest product (the Flip6) limited, the Samsung team decided to think about their sponsorship differently, using it as a platform to promote their latest product.
Not only did they gift phones to athletes, Samsung engineered moments to ensure as many people would see the athletes using these phones as possible: introducing the victory selfie.
The moment on a podium is often an anti-climatic one. The race has been won, the drama is over. But by introducing the victory selfie, Samsung created new opportunities for athletes to celebrate engaging, news-worthy moments – with the new Flip6 at the very heart of the action.
image: Samsung, 2024 Summer Olympics, women’s street skateboarding champions
image: Samsung, 2024 Summer Olympics, men’s saber individual fencing champions
Benjamin Braun, chief marketing officer for Samsung, said this about the impressive can-if activation: “Not even when Samsung launches products does it get the front page of newspapers or digital news, now suddenly it’s on the front pages.”
So what media is at your disposal that you could be using more effectively? How can you use creativity to get headlines (instead of paying for them)?
We can develop products quicker if…
We use the resources of others.
During the COVID19 Pandemic, when researchers were scrambling to learn anything about how to treat and prevent the virus, computer processing power was at a premium. Research teams needed to analyse hundreds of thousands of molecules to understand what might be the starting point for a vaccine – and they needed to do so as quickly as possible. So instead of waiting for more traditional resource to become available, they decided to look in a very different place – at the smartphone in your pocket.
By asking people to install a simple app that ran while users were sleeping, researchers were able to turn a network of smartphones into a virtual supercomputer – running through the millions of molecules in a matter of months, rather than the 300 years it would have taken a traditional computer.
What resources are at your disposal that you could make better use of? Are there partnerships that could help you achieve your ambitions?
We can take more creative risks if…
We introduce a new partner into the creative testing process.
image: Mailchimp
When budgets are tight, it can feel like the sensible thing to do to is go with the safer option when it comes to your advertising or marketing – particularly for B2B tech products. No risks might mean nothing bombs. But it also means nothing is going to be very interesting (see our latest research into the Cost of Dull on that!) Nothing will catch the eye of your consumers or break free of the B2B dullness they see all the time.
Email and marketing automation platform Mailchimp found a can-if solution to this challenge by bringing in AI as a partner to their creative process. By using AI to test and iterate campaign ideas with real-life consumers, it allowed the Mailchimp creative team to produce the creative work it has become famous for, without the costs of trying out a load of ideas in market or the risk of just trying one novel idea.
The result was a process that was faster and more effective than before, and it helped create one of Mailchimp’s best performing campaigns of all time.
So how can you make creativity the safer choice for your brand? How can you mitigate the risk that comes with trying something new?