Executed correctly, a strong media strategy can be the rocket fuel behind a challenger brand’s growth story. It allows a brand to pull ahead of the competition, establish itself as a clear category leader, and move closer to the elusive exit chased by many founders.
Yet in today’s fragmented media landscape too many early-stage brands are burning through precious capital by copying the wrong marketing playbooks. For big brands with national awareness and mass distribution, the game is relatively straightforward. For challenger brands, there is no such thing as a cookie-cutter approach – strategy must always be tailored to each brand’s unique circumstances.
Play to your strengths
Wild is a good example of a brand that has got it right. In its early days, the brand was built through a digital-first strategy. Performance-focused, the unit economics as a high-value subscription product allowed for this. Only once retail distribution became meaningful did Wild expand into top-of-funnel awareness channels such as OOH and TV. By layering this in, it built a full-funnel, channel-agnostic marketing machine that ultimately culminated in a reported £230m exit to Unilever.
On the other hand, Crosta Mollica has always been a grocery-first brand, so a performance-first approach would have made no sense here. Instead, it has focused on driving mass awareness via distinctive assets and a targeted strategy, such as its sponsorship of Channel 4’s ‘Food’ programming to help boost that all-important grocery ROS. As a result, the business has hit £90m-plus RSV in UK grocery in its first decade.
An interesting outlier, Jubel has never spent a penny on traditional media. It has instead focused on building community and activations in on-premise stockists to drive impressive grocery ROS (although, I would argue that it is getting to the stage where the brand will be hamstringing itself if it doesn’t begin to layer on a media strategy, given its recent impressive growth).
But you only have to turn on the TV, head down into the London Underground, or have a quick scroll on Instagram to see challenger brands spending inefficiently and executing a media plan that makes no sense given their position in the market.
Distribution and awareness
It’s imperative that challenger brands understand where they are in their lifecycle. One of the best measures is to use two key metrics: weighted distribution and promoted brand awareness. The intersection of these provides the answer to the classic existential question – ‘how do I know where to spend my marketing budget?’
The calculation offers a clean way to measure accurately Byron Sharp’s ‘Mental Availability, Physical Availability’ theory, but in a way that is achievable and scalable for challenger brands.
So how does it work? In short, until a brand’s weighted distribution exceeds 30%, major ATL activity – such as OOH or TV – rarely makes sense. With distribution that low, spending heavily on awareness is wasteful if potential customers can’t get hold of the product. On the flipside, once distribution reaches 30% (or ideally 40%–50%), it becomes risky and inefficient not to support with strategic, awareness-driving media.
Most successful UK challenger brands (£15m-plus in RSV) have typically promoted awareness within a nationally representative sample of 20%-40%. But if brand awareness outpaces distribution, then money is being thrown down the drain.
Getting this balance right is where the magic of efficient growth lies.
Joe Benn is director at MNC
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