B (5:44)

I think it's definitely a business book. Whilst Adam's background was in the world of advertising and marketing, I think it's a business book the way I think of it, because a bit like your clients you referred to. I joined Adam soon after he wrote that book and I remember reading it and thinking it just related to how I thought about all my favorite brands and businesses. Actually it just felt so intuitive. But one of the things that struck me was that when he wrote it, actually if you were in the world of business and you wanted to kind of show your chops, if you wanted to kind of get the credentials, you went and did an mba. And the MBA would have been studying what market leaders did. It was studying the big businesses and the best practices of those big businesses. And business in general was driven by a market leader mindset. You studied the best practices of those businesses and you followed that. So actually Eating the Big Fish was one of the very first books that assimilated insights and ideas from brands and businesses that weren't market leaders. So in that regard, you know, and actually the book itself doesn't just cover marketing, it actually covers kind of pre strategy. It's the conception of brands, it's about their continuity, about, you know, how they continue to succeed. So for me, very much a business book and a way of thinking about business which prior to Eating the Big Fish really wasn't covered that much. It was, it was kind of why it was such an interesting book was it was a manual that didn't really exist, pulling together insights from a class of business that wasn't really covered very much.

A (7:32)

Yeah. And it also seemed to me that it would be more of a business book because you can't just be a challenger by changing your marketing. The marketing alone was not enough. This had to sort of permeate the entire organization right up to the C suite, right?

B (7:47)

Yeah. I mean a lot of the businesses in the first book that Adam wrote were we're founder run businesses. And that is an interesting kind of insight. It was one of the things that we actually had to quickly move on from because people would say, yeah, yeah, it's easy enough for Apple with Steve Jobs or Orange the telecoms company with Hans Snook or Michael Dell, Dell Computers even how unbelievably, you know, Starbucks is in the first book is a challenger, you know, but Howard Schultz at Starbucks, a lot of them were the sort of cult of the founder and the power of the Founder was driving it. But definitely those people were very much about a combination of ideology and a very clear sense of something that was missing within the category and building a business to satisfy that. The marketing expression of that was a kind of natural layer on top rather than what the book was all about. It was very much a complete kind of soup to nut view of how a business should operate.

A (8:49)

Yeah, because it does seem like a brand like Mini back in the day, that was almost a marketing expression that turned it into a challenger. Although Mini had always been, I suppose, a challenger to larger vehicles, even back to its earlier days. Right, Yeah.

B (9:07)

I mean, I think if you were the sort of Mini versus Mighty, the small versus large, at some level, Mini has its, you know, challenge and baked into its DNA. But what was really interesting about that period was it was a very disruptive product. You know, in fact, I think when you were probably, you know, trying to get Adam to come and talk, it was kind of the relaunch of Mini because the original British Leyden car was not one that you necessarily wanted to drive too far. It was very cute. It wasn't reliable. BMW had bought Mini and what was really interesting was their willingness to kind of overturn, in a way, many of the sort of BMW orthodoxies. There was a wonderful marketing director in Mini in the States. And in fact she evidences one of the kind of key insights that Adam has in the book, which I always have loved since working here, which is essentially, don't endlessly study the category you're in for insights that look outside your category. And this is a woman who was working in the automotive industry and you would thought automotive marketing and everything around it is quite exciting. You know, it's a big category, lots of advertising dollars and marketing spend. But her observation was that it actually, it's all the same. It's really dull. So she took her inspiration from, you know, video games, from toys, from the world of play. And if you think about the way that, you know, Mini was marketed, it was very much that world that they drew inspiration from. So looking outside your category for inspiration is a real challenge of behav. And the Mini launch in the US was brilliant in that regard. And it was also brilliant because it challenged something. It was an opportunity in the land of the big. In the land of the big suv. One of the most famous sort of activation campaigns at the time, I'm sure it's in the book, and probably why you wanted to have Adam come and talk about it was that famous stunt that they did where basically they Put a Mini on top of an enormous SUV and they drove it around metro areas in the states. And it's just that visibility of, you know, the Mini versus the Mighty, you know, the David versus Goliath, that just epitomize the, you know, the truly Challenger spirit of the brand. But yeah, it's a great story.

A (11:30)

It really is a great story. That was back. That was Crispin. That did that work back in the day. What did it mean? What did it mean to be a challenger back then? And has that definition changed today? That's one of the things I wanted to explore in this conversation because it still feels fresh, but so much in terms of the new shiny things that we tend to chase in our industry have come and gone over the decades. It feels like Challenger isn't talked about a lot now. There's different language probably used, but it seems as evident and as powerful as ever today. But has your way of looking at what a challenger was and what it might be today changed?

B (12:10)

I think where we are today is that there are more and more and more businesses who describe themselves as challenges. You're right that the lexicon has expanded. Disruptors, startups, outsider brands, maybe all sorts of versions of the same thought. And it's a fairly simple observation, but clearly there are a very limited number of market leaders. Pretty much everybody else is a challenger at some level. So having a set of words to attribute to a much larger group of brands is one thing, but actually whether they are challengers by IR definition is completely another. So to try and answer your question, I think that the principles of being a challenger that Adam laid out over 25 years ago, we pretty much adhere to them consistently today. And in terms of defining what we view as a real challenger, however, the barrier to entry for small businesses and brands has lowered dramatically since that time. The Internet has changed that. The ability for a brand or a business to launch is much lower. The awareness of what other people are doing is infinitely greater. You know, our sense of how brands express themselves, the different, you know, the actual costs of promoting your brand has got lower. So I think that has massively accelerated the sense of people trying to disrupt, people trying to do something more different. One of the interesting things is that that has created its own sort of sea of sameness where the incumbent brands and the big market leaders represented the status quo. Nowadays, just as one example, hundreds if not thousands of small cosmetic brands, maybe even TikTok brands, starting up with their own Instagram accounts and a few SKUs of interesting products. But if you were to scroll through the Instagram feeds of all of those businesses, they would all look alike. So they may be individually interesting, but collectively they're all falling into the same tropes. So the role of a challenger in that environment, there's still a kind of sea of sameness to tilt at. There's still an orthodoxy to challenge. So many more challenges, many more disruptors, many more businesses doing interesting things. But I think the challenger principles still hold true for us. And that's when we're working with someone, we try and exact those kinds of principles and ideologies in order to kind of help those businesses stand out from the crowd.

A (15:01)

So if you're a challenger and you successfully scale as a challenger, do you eventually mature into a non challenger? I mean, is it something that is sustainable over the long term, or do you constantly have to reinvent it?

B (15:16)

Oh, yeah, it's a great question. Well, I mean, I think one of the dangers of working at Eat Big Fish is everybody conflates challenger with small with small, feisty, rebellious startups. And actually, that notion that challenger is a stage of development for a business is often something that we get asked about. For me, the most interesting challenges are scale challenges. So Nike for us is a challenger. Phil Knight famously said, we are the industry Goliath, but we only stay that way by acting and thinking like the industry. David Dove is a huge brand globally, but actually continues to exhibit challenger behavior in our way of thinking. Airbnb is a challenger and a disruptor at some level, but continues to exhibit. So scale challenges are the most interesting businesses for us, because for them, it's about mindset. If you are a scale challenger, you not only have the ideology and the thinking, but you also have the math to continue to lead the category. So if you're constantly evolving the category and moving the agenda forward, it's very difficult to be challenged. If, however, to your point, you do mature into a different stage where you become protective, you feel like you're playing by the category rules rather than leading them, then you become the challenged again, and that's the risk. But for us, studying big challenges is actually enormously rewarding because then you can say, look, this isn't a small thing for small businesses. This is actually adopted by some of the world's most successful businesses as a completely different way of thinking about the opportunity and how to lead.

A (17:06)

So you mentioned there, when you were referring to Airbnb, you said, well, they're not a challenger. Maybe they're a disruptor. What's the distinction in your mind between those two terms, you know, it's probably.

B (17:17)

In that world of, you know, terminology, some, you know, your disruptor is my challenger and vice versa. I think if I was making a distinction, I do think that disruption implies a couple of things. One very often disruptors. I think true disruptors go back, you know, to Clayton Christensen's view of kind of disruption theory and the idea that they have a technological, you know, a technical advantage at the heart of them, a tech basis and offering, and quite often changing the value paradigm. So, you know, as a platform, Airbnb, aggregating all that information together, it has a sort of technology at the heart of it and a capability. And it disrupted, you know, that business. But equally it has an ideology about belonging anywhere, you know, that has driven a lot of its growth. So it's not just an extraordinary technology that disrupted a particular category or industry, but it comes with something, something else. So I think, you know, they're a lovely fusion of the two. I also think that disruption sometimes implies, you know, literally, you know, pulling apart the orthodoxies of a category. And I don't think that's necessarily what challengers are trying to do. They're often doing what they do. Well for us, it's important that they do what they do built on the rock of what is true about them as a business and the ideals that they have as a, as a business. So there's two small distinctions, but I'm sure I can fill column inches on that topic. But equally, the distinction is probably marginal. I think importantly, challenges are about ideology, whereas I think disruptors are often about technology.

A (18:59)

It's interesting because when I look at larger companies and obviously eat big fish is we're not just talking about a book from 20 years ago. You guys are an active consulting practice today, working with brands around the world. I was intrigued when you said that more mature brands are the most interesting challengers, but they must be the most difficult to culturally adjust to a challenger mindset because of their size. No?

B (19:31)

Yeah, absolutely. I think it does take something to kind of keep a challenger spirit and a challenger mindset alive. It's one of the reasons why actually we as a business operate in the way that we do. So we are not a consultancy in terms of just taking a brief from a client, working on it in isolation. We have always worked through facilitated workshops and cross functional processes at the highest levels of organizations. Because actually, really what we're trying to do is build conviction and belief and ownership in that group. And that requires, I mean, it requires people to get their Hands dirty on the solution. But you're right. If you're going to move these large institutional incumbent organizations, you really do have to operate at the highest levels of the organization and build the argument there.

A (20:30)

So do you find that you have to, or that you are often helping the brand or the company understand its basis of being a challenger? Or is it more that they come to you and they say, we've identified the basis of being a challenger or whatever that space might be. We need your help to sort of institutionalize, to culturate it, to understand how to roll it out. How does it tend to look these days?

B (20:59)

I think it's a mixture of both. I think there's often an instinct that an organization is stuck in some way or might have had a challenge in DNA historically and has become, as you described, they've sort of become an incumbent. They become incumbent in their think. So that's very common. I think we want to connect them back with what's true about that business and give some legitimacy to act in a challenger way. So more often than not, I would say people don't really have a clear sense of what challenger would look like when they come to us. But I think part of the important. One of the key principles in the book that Adam wrote was the notion he loves to. In fact, we're guilty of loving analogies and metaphors. So we have this notion of a lighthouse identity as the way we think about positioning. And I think the idea of a lighthouse is it's built on the rock of what is true and foundational about a brand. It may be that you're reinterpreting that truth for a current context, but it shouldn't just go, okay, well, there's an opportunity over there, so we're just going to go and change what our brand is all about. So it's built on rock. The lighthouse analogy is that it's a set of beliefs that the brand and business has and that you project those beliefs really consistently and insistently and that people navigate by those beliefs. So if some people don't like those beliefs, they can sail on by. But for the people who are drawn to it, they'll be very strongly drawn to it. So I think on that point, Adam used to tell a lovely story about his dad, who he said had never, ever been into the body shop shop. But even so, he could tell you what the belief system of the body shop was, even though he never even entered its doors, because that lighthouse was so clear in those days and it projected that sort of belief system and conviction of the business. So I think if you're working with someone, you may need to bring them back to some of those truths and then re articulate that lighthouse for the current context. But we're not about going, let's look for the white space in this world and let's move your brand to a different rock. That's not what we're about.

A (23:21)

I guess that the one that. The concept. I'm giving air quotes here, the concept that distracted so many of us for so long over the last decade was purpose. And I'm not a fan of that term because I didn't know what it really brought above and beyond positioning. And I'm wondering, was purpose a distraction for a challenger or was it another way or another basis of being a challenger? Or how did you guys think about it? Because it dominated the way we all thought for a good 10 years.

B (24:00)

Yeah, it did. And I think it continues to do so. And it's wrapped up in so many things. The move then to kind of ESG and a wider kind of systemic move, which maybe we're shifting a little bit away from. I think the Venn diagram for us would be that challengers have a strong set of beliefs and convictions that they project. When does a belief become a purpose? I don't want to fill your podcast with that question. And so. But I think there is an overlap there. Okay. But I think one of the things that sort of for us was always interesting is. And it was often the debate about purposes. You know, is this really a brand or a business that has any credibility or right to have a purpose? Is the purpose really of meaning at all? And more importantly, is there any action behind expressing a purpose? If you don't act on it, then candidly, it's a document somewhere in a file.

A (25:15)

And also the idea that I would suggest that the premise of the desire for purpose was false. I think that the assumption that consumers wanted purposeful brands was a false foundation for this to be built upon. And I think that the questions that were in research that resulted in outputs that gave people that impression were not based in a reality. Anybody is going to say, yes. If you say, would you like a company to be this way or that way? Yes. Yeah, nice. But may not be a primary motivation for purchasing them. So it didn't feel to have a credibility.

B (25:58)

Yeah. And that's where. Yeah, I mean, much more eloquently put than me. I think that question of the sort of credibility filter for consumers and people was. We have become very sensitive to that as People, it's like, no, I do not need my paperclip to have a purpose behind it other than keep. So you're right, and I'm sure you're right that there was with, you know, research methodologies and questionnaires and probably consultants, you know, advising that everyone needed a purpose. On the other hand, I do think that if you can, you know, some of the businesses that, you know, who wrestled with this question during that period are probably the better for it. You know, some of the banks, you know, that, you know, were completely disconnected. Those that have actually, you know, put their money where their mouth is. Some of the businesses around communications that actually, if you just think about some of the wider issues in society, whether it's inequality or bad communication or mental health, for the businesses that have a footprint in those areas that could actually do something, I think there were some benefits. But I think coming from the place that we came from, most of the businesses that we had understood their purpose and they also understood the altitude of their purpose. A chocolate bar isn't going to change the world, but a chocolate bar can bring joy. So it's understanding that altitude is important.

A (27:35)

So when you look at what we're dealing with today, do you think that the perception of Challenger needs to be updated just so that it feels fresher and it isn't in people's minds? As a dated term, given what we've gone through with purpose Challenger. Is Challenger still resonating as strongly as it once did as a term that gets the door open for you guys?

B (28:02)

Yeah, So I think it is still. I mean, I think it is. I mean, you know, I'm still utterly committed to it as an approach. I think it's a fair question.

A (28:11)

And I don't mean as an approach, I just mean as a label.

B (28:14)

As a label, yeah. I think. I think the downside. I'll start with the downside is that as you've alluded to earlier on, there's just everybody calls themselves Challenger and very often they call themselves Challenger by function of market position. I'm small, I'm going up against other people. I'm a challenger. I'm not market leader. I'm a challenger. I feel like I'd like to be like liquid death. I'm a challenger. So I think that that kind of simplicity of understanding leads to it being kind of everyone's a challenger. That is a risk. I think what we find, though, is that when you have the time to sit somebody down and say, are you doing any of the following? That their understanding of Challenger changes quite dramatically. We've had a conversation today. Most people would say market leaders are not challengers. That's, I think, a limited point of view, actually. That's the challenges that have probably evolved those markets more than anyone else. And the bigger they are, the more impactful they're likely to be. So I think it's devalued possibly by the plethora of challenges that exist today. But I think the meaning of the approach is equally resonant. So that presents an interesting challenge for us as a company, which is getting that, that more nuanced message through that noise. But it hasn't led me to believe that it's not as powerful as it used to be. I think it's still incredibly powerful.

A (29:55)

So if you were to look at Eat Big Fish as a consultancy, if it had opened in 2025, where would the conversation be in terms of challenge? Would it be challenge number one? And then would it be pointed at certain faults that you see either in the way businesses are structured, the way that they're messaging in product development, or in communications like you just referenced. That sort of the complexity of communications has become so much more. But is there obvious things now where you're like, God, we see that there's a lot of dysfunction in this particular dimension of the business and if we could just get at that, we could turn that business around. Does that make sense?

B (30:42)

Yeah, it does. And it's a great question. I mean, I think if I oversimplified it, when Adam wrote the book originally, I would have said there was a pervasive view about how business worked at that time. In fact, alongside the kind of let's study business leaders, I think there was a huge focus on letting you know on consumer research. And let's, let's do what consumers want. If you give consumers what they want, you will grow your business. So there was a lot of kind of listening to the consumer. And what Adam's book did very clearly was, you know, you take a brand like Virgin, you know, you couldn't say that Richard Branson didn't understand his consumers very well. But you didn't always give them what they wanted. He gave them what he wanted, or the Virgin brand wanted to give them in that space. So there's a sort of counter orthodoxy view that was being represented by the book. I think today. To your point, what are the things that are kind of those big buckets, big business and consumer stuff, consumer research being very prevalent at the time. I think some of them are being touched on by the Work that Adam's doing with the cost of Dahl. So just to be clear, he's done work last year on what the cost of dull content looks like. I don't know how familiar with that work you are.

A (32:10)

I think you spoke to him, but, yeah, very familiar. Yeah. Well, yeah, starting out with System One, and then he's now working, I think, alongside Karen Nelson Field.

B (32:20)

Exactly. But the first bucket would have been about boring content. And so the system one work really showed that over 50% of what we consume is essentially boring. So that's just extraordinary amount of communication that's being put out there that that's having no impact. And then this year, he's moved on to the question of effectively dull media. And as you say, with Karen Nelson, Field has been exploring the impact of what low attention looks like and actually our lack of attention and how that impacts building brands. And these are taking on orthodoxies. In today's world, you don't need brand building. You can just chuck out any ad creatives, continuity of brand. All of that is sort of challenged by the content piece. The media piece is really challenging. It's a big challenge to kind of media agencies in the way that they buy and the sort of, as I said, the transparency and the techiness of that way of thinking and performance marketing. And he has interest in moving into another field in the future, which is around product and innovation. So I think in a world in which go back barriers to entry to get things to market, how do you actually build interesting and successful product? In today's world, you all have, I'm sure, you know, there's a sense in which people are seeing, actually we need just go back to some of these basics. Great products are essential at the heart of these things, but also the finding the balance between novelty and familiarity and some of these other areas. So I think it's interesting, it's a good challenge to say, if we launch today, where would we have picked our fights in this world? I still think what I find compelling about the first book, and as I said, I've been doing it for a long time, is the best brands in the world adhere to the principles that Adam laid out in 1999, almost without exception today. And if somebody launches according to those principles, I think I'm probably quite likely to be interested and engaged by them. And in that regard, that playbook still feels very relevant. But I think the, you know, what are today's battlegrounds? You know, content, proliferation of media and overload, you know, the barriers to entry. I think in future I think it will be about commerce. You know, I think it's about how we buy and where we buy, you know, and whether things like advertising is the way you build a brand or whether, you know, immersive experiences are the next frontier. I think these are the things that will become. Become much more interesting. And if you were studying challenges, if, you know, as we do, as we study challenges, there you want to look at that. One last area I think is not anything to do with the external facing side of the brand, is actually the culture of building brands internally. You asked about ownership and alignment, and one of the key pillars that we have is that great strategy is essentially social. So, you know, you build it together. It's. I know that sounds like you. It's the lowest common denominator. But of course, you.

A (35:39)

Now what do you mean by that? Is social social meaning it's a collaborative process?

B (35:44)

Yes, it should. In our book, it goes back to, you know, the way that we build our kind of workshop processes. They feel entirely analog in today's very high fast digital world. They feel heavy and overloaded. But almost without exception, every client who gets to the end of it said, wow, that was efficient. Wow. Everybody's briefed and on the same page, there's a huge sense of ownership and understanding and excitement.

A (36:09)

So when I look at what Adam in particular. Because you're a partner with Adam. When I look at Adam and what he's doing now, it would be easy to assume that Adam is becoming obsessed with effectiveness and waste, which isn't really a Challenger dimension. And of course he can evolve like everybody else evolves. But how do you guys articulate that as you think about it, in the construct of eat big Fish and Challenger, is it something that becomes. Because it's like an outputs versus inputs conversation. The Challenger mindset is like how you operate and then it's like how effectively you operate. I suppose one's a comms evaluation and one's a business process. Structure and focus.

B (36:58)

Yeah, thank the Lord. I think you're spot on in the sense that he's evolving. I would say that there are a couple of things. One, I think for us, we have talked about things like thought leadership and the kind of the more executional downstream parts. So, Adam, in the research that we do, we're very often talking to clients and businesses who are talking about their execution in order to evidence their strategy. So we've been immersed in the idea of execution for a long time. But actually, as you rightly say, our process is probably more upstream. It's more building that initial strategy, getting it out. So what's wonderful about the work that Adam's doing now is it's giving us not just theory but also with the partners that he's working with. Absolutely. Evidence rich data to support how you need to think about. So we talk about thought leadership, we talk about fame and entering popular culture and those principles that were established in the book. You then start to look into the System 1 data and the best in class work that they've got or you talk about real attention and creating strong preference. You look at the attention work that Karen's doing, you can start to actually make the links from what you're doing strategically to how you need to execute. So the body of work that he's focused on now for me has given us real rigor in that sort of downstream execution area. You're right. I think the journey that Adam sort of went on is one of the things I've talked about a little bit is categories becoming more and more similar. This flooding of content. People talk, talk, I'm sure lots of your guests talk about it. That just sense of a sea of sameness in other areas. So Adam's podcast called let's make this More Interesting was an attempt to talk to people in all sorts of walks of life about how you break that, how you create interest through different skills and disciplines. Be you a classics professor or you're head of drama at the BBC or whatever it might be. The guest he invited onto that was to get at that issue of how do we break through this sea of sameness. And then the Costa Daal was just inverting that thought because what we've learned as Marxists through history is we're pursuing interesting, we're pursuing creative. We kind of understand that narrative. But then he, as you know, applied the sort of Daniel Kahneman loss aversion principle and he said let's not be about the gain of interesting. Let's be about the loss caused by being boring and dull. That seems to have much more traction. If I can put a cost on being dull dull, then it's much more tangible than the benefit of being interesting. There's a real cost to being dull.

A (39:59)

It is Hugh Derrick, partner at Eat Big Fish in London. Hugh, thank you for coming and spending some time with us on this episode. It's always great to. I always worry that in our quest to find the next shiny thing that we tend to forget at the things that are really good. And I think that this whole Challenger principles focus I think is really good. And I love that it's been tied to effectiveness on the tail end. I think that can only increase the enthusiasm for it. So I appreciate you coming on today. Thanks so much.

B (40:38)

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

A (40:41)

And we'll see everybody on the next episode.