Two myths challenger brands waste too much time worrying about
In my experience, two common concerns many challenger business-to-business (B2B) firms have when it comes to building a thought leadership program are:
- Not being a market leader makes it hard to demonstrate thought leadership.
- Not being a well-recognised brand limits thought leadership opportunities.
In fact, time and time again, both of these concerns have proven to be anything but. I call them the two myths of thought leadership.
1. Not being a market leader makes it hard to demonstrate thought leadership
Let’s address the first myth: “We’re not a market leader.”
A market leader, by most definitions, is winning on sales or perhaps market capitalisation and, while a company can offer a superior product experience compared to the competition, that doesn’t make it a market leader in a strictly commercial sense.
However, going up against a market leader in a thought leadership shootout is not as daunting as it might first seem. Why? Because market leaders of any scale play defence when it comes to marketing.
What I mean by that is companies that lead markets often (not always) lose their innovative edge and their marketing courage.
A B2B firm when it first starts out is challenging the order of things. It has seen a market opportunity and it’s going hard to seize it. The culture is usually one of innovation, the business operations are agile, and a certain level of risk-taking is part of the DNA. Then, something changes.
To continue its growth, new capital is sought and the company goes public, or at the very least, is now ‘reputable’ and has a growing list of blue-chip clients.
As a crowned market leader, the company must move more cautiously. There are in-house legal teams vetting company messages, procurement departments are selecting safe suppliers (effectively removing an important source of innovation input), and people can be fired for saying or doing things to drive growth which were perhaps considered entrepreneurial only a few years before. They have become the defensive lumbering giants of the market just like the companies they sought to usurp years earlier.
As a challenger brand, you can use this to your advantage. How? It’s about marketing agility and volume. Market leaders simply can’t match your lack of bureaucracy and availability of relatively unfettered spokespeople.
Agility and focus can overcome slow-moving competitors that have a defensive mindset.
You can write, publish, and repurpose a constant stream of content to horizontal and vertical markets in the same time it takes for the market leader to get topics approved internally. You can simply overrun them. Yes, this play is resource-intensive, but it’s absolutely a winning approach.
To be honest, if you get your content volume (the right quality of content, of course) pumping, then you’re building a defensive moat to keep your own market challengers at bay. The barrier to entry in terms of marketing content production will be hard for them to match until they build up their own business’s critical mass.
2. Not being a well-recognised brand limits thought leadership opportunities
The second myth of building a thought leadership program is: “It’s hard to get share of voice against the encumbent brand leader.”
There are companies that, while not being market leaders from a sales volume point of view, are instantly recognisable brands. Think IBM, Microsoft, Deloitte, Verizon, Oracle, or similar in the B2B space.
If I were to ask you what these instantly recognised B2B technology brands are famous for, you are likely to say something along the lines of:
- IBM invented the PC (sort of) and a whole host of other ground-breaking technologies in the 80s and 90s which underpinned large parts of the tech sector
- Microsoft created Windows and the world’s most popular desktop office suite
- Deloitte delivers accounting services
- Verizon is a telecommunications company
- Oracle is known for database technology.
Of course, depending on your own vantage point, you might have a broader or more narrow definition of what these firms are instantly recognised for, (and I’m just picking these firms due to their iconic status, no other reason).
Now, if I asked you to tell me where most of their revenue or profit comes from today, how would you answer (without searching the Internet)? In many cases, you won’t know, or you’ll be guessing, (I’ll let you do your own research).
The point is, what these brands want to be known for now, and what they are mostly known for, are not the same thing.
It’s a function of the innovation cycle of established companies that they need to keep changing their business to remain relevant to changing market conditions.
I have an original International Business Machines (IBM) wall clock at home. Well, the case and face are original; the AAA battery tells me it may have had an upgrade in the workings.
It’s my reminder that no business stays the same. Innovate or die is not a metaphor, it’s reality. Large companies will innovate through strategic acquisition, research & development (R&D) or perhaps even being acquired themselves.
When this happens, the careful brand positioning and market focus which once made the brand leader a success is diluted, and then diluted again. And, there is only one thing harder than positioning yourself successfully in market. It’s successfully de-positioning your brand and repositioning as something new.
What does that mean for an up-and-coming challenger brand? A lot; it means there are hundreds of chinks in brand leaders’ marketing armour.
While they have an increasingly broad portfolio of solutions to market, and limited brand recognition in those new niches, a smaller, completely focused competitor with a clear value proposition will win in the thought leadership stakes more often than not.
Build deep, insightful, customer-aligned content in your thought leadership program and you can build context and relevancy with your buyers in a way that a multi-brand, multi-market, legacy brand leader will find hard to challenge consistently; they simply have too many lines of defence to protect.
In summary, these two concerns that market challengers often say they face are not as problematic as you might first imagine. In fact, I go so far as to say they are mostly myth, rather than reality.
A slow-moving market-share leader can be overwhelmed (in the marketing department, at least) by a high-volume, quality, content-based thought leadership program. And, an instantly recognised iconic brand can be outflanked by a hyper-focused challenger brand that stays on message and hammers away at the competitor’s thinly-spread marketing defence.
In my next article, I explain how to frame your thought leadership objective so you get internal and external clarity in your marketing approach.
Adam Benson,
CEO
The Recognition Group
This article is completely generated by the author. No artificial intelligence tools were used to create or edit this copy.
Other articles in the thought leader series include:
-
-
-
- Why it’s hard to make your B2B company a thought leader (and what to do about it)
- Seven thought leadership strategies B2B marketers need to know
- Recognition and authority – the two drivers of thought leadership
- What is people-led thought leadership strategy?
- Thought leadership marketing for companies that sell a process
-
-
This article originally published on LinkedIn: HERE
