Twenty years after author Adam Morgan coined the concept of the challenger brand in Eating the Big Fish, global media network PHD OMNICOM MEDIA GROUP has announced it will again be collaborating with the leading expert on the subject in a new publication, Overthrow II – 10 strategies from the new wave of challengers, co-written by Morgan and Malcolm Devoy, PHD EMEA’s chief strategy officer.
Drawing on the insights and experiences of today’s challengers disrupting the status quo, Overthrow II identifies 10 different challenger types including: Real & Human, Feisty Underdog, Local Hero, Next Generation and Dramatic Disruptor. The book follows the previous collaboration between PHD and eatbigfish in 2012, Overthrow – 10 ways to tell a challenger story.
The new book carries interviews with some of the freshest and most interesting contemporary examples around, including Oatly, BrewDog, COPA90, Tony’s Chocolonely, Mailchimp and Xiaomi, and looks at the strategic principles that each follows, the media behaviours they practice, and draws conclusions about what these challenger types have in common when it comes to marketing behaviour.
Common to many of these challengers today is a very simple shift in understanding what a challenger is: not a brand that challenges somebody, but a brand that challenges something; something they feel needs to change.
Financed by a new type of investor, harnessing emerging structural changes and new ways to build relationships with their consumers, these new challengers have generated an enormous energy and excitement in their marketing and business community.
