Not all rebellion looks the same. Here’s how to know which fight is actually yours.
By Tiffany Holland, Founder and Head of Marketing Strategy at Consiglieri
Every CMO wants to be a challenger brand. Ask what they’re challenging, and the answer gets fuzzy.
The word carries heat. It signals boldness, urgency, and relevance. It signals a company unwilling to play by outdated rules when categories are fragmenting and loyalty is thinning. When speed matters more than history, ‘challenger’ stops being a label and starts being a strategy.
The pressure is real. Externally, incumbency is less defensible than ever. Consumer expectations are shaped by platform-native experiences that are personalized, on-demand, frictionless. As cultural cycles accelerate, loyalty has stopped accruing through tentpole campaigns and started compounding in sustained micro-moments.
Internally, the friction is just as sharp. Growth targets remain aggressive while traditional channels deliver diminishing returns. Siloed operations slow decisions. Teams know the old playbook isn’t working, but they’re not sure what replaces it.
So “let’s be a challenger brand” becomes the rallying cry. But challenger to what?
Most brands are wrestling with multiple issues at once. Real challengers pick one battle and commit.
The question is: what’s your biggest battle—the market, the culture, or your own operating model?
Redefine the Rules of Your Category
A challenger brand, traditionally, disrupts its category at a structural level.
T-Mobile dismantled telecom contracts and hidden fees. Uber rewrote the mechanics of transportation. Airbnb reframed what hospitality meant. Fenty forced the beauty industry to confront inclusion gaps through product design, not just messaging. ChatGPT made AI accessible and conversational, changing user expectations overnight.
These brands shift what customers expect and how competitors respond. They align product, pricing, and positioning around a clear point of tension in the market. The marketing reinforces the change, but the business backs it up.
For this to work, leadership must support meaningful change, teams must align across functions, and the organization must be prepared to evolve how it creates value. The brands that pull it off are rarely the loudest. They’re the most consistent.
But not every brand needs to rewrite the rules. For many, the more immediate fight is for cultural relevance.
Design for Remixability, Not Interruption
Many of today’s most loved brands aren’t overturning industries. They’re mastering culture by designing for participation.
Buldak turned instant ramen into a global endurance ritual. The Fire Noodle Challenge transformed eating into performance—spice became spectacle, and spectacle became distribution. The product was designed to be filmed and shared, not just consumed.
Dove turned beauty into participation. From Real Beauty Sketches to #TurnYourBack, its campaigns weren’t just watched, they were debated, reposted, stitched. The message invited people to see themselves in it and influenced sales.
Duolingo built a sticky, habit-forming product that was mobile-native, gamified, and engineered around streaks. Then it layered on culturally fluent humor, turning reminders into memes and the owl into an internet-native icon. The experience drove growth; the personality amplified it.
These brands win by making participation the strategy. They design for shareability, create identities people want to signal, and move fast enough to stay fluent. The product must be strong enough to carry the attention. The organization must be fast enough to move with culture. The voice must be consistent enough to build recognition over time.
The feed rewards one thing: the discipline to show up, again and again, in ways worth sharing.
Rebuild Your Operating Model for Growth
Then there’s the path no one celebrates in case studies but everyone should study closely.
More often than anyone admits, the biggest growth barrier is the organization itself.
Sephora rebuilt its operating model around how customers actually shop. At the center is Beauty Insider, a loyalty ecosystem that now drives the majority of sales and fuels a powerful first-party data engine. That foundation enables seamless omnichannel integration, personalization, and creator commerce. While much of retail struggled through disruption, Sephora expanded market share and delivered steady growth— driven not by any single campaign, but by the system underneath.
Delta Air Lines focused on reliability and long-term customer value instead of competing on price. Investments in operational performance and the SkyMiles ecosystem (now a multi-billion-dollar revenue driver) created structural advantage. Its app, premium cabins, and service enhancements amplify that foundation, but the differentiation comes from consistency and disciplined execution. Over the past decade, Delta has outperformed many peers in profitability because it invested in the machine.
Go-to-market is a system. When brand, data, and operations are aligned, growth compounds.
It’s not the most glamorous fight. But with focus and sustained investment, it’s often the most powerful move a challenger can make.
Be Clear on Your Fight Before You Declare It
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a challenger. The ambition is healthy. The energy is contagious. But not every company needs to storm the castle.
The more important question is simple: What problem are you actually trying to solve?
Rewriting industry norms and absorbing structural risk is true challenger territory, but not everyone is ready for it. Cultural relevance and remixability demand a different posture as participation architect, not broadcaster. And when the friction is internal, slow execution, siloed data, and misaligned KPIs, the growth engine itself needs rebuilding.
Once you decide which battle is truly yours, commit to it fully. Build around it. Resource it. Operationalize it.
The brands that win aren’t the ones with the boldest ambitions. They’re the ones honest enough to name their actual constraints—and ruthless enough to exploit them.
