Challenger vs Leader

Had a talk a while back with a smarter man from London who was posing an interesting theory, albeit limited to the field of telecoms. He was saying that there is a challenger type of communication and a leader type of communication. These however, i felt had nothing to do with the actual market share of the company but rather with the company culture. You chose to be a challenger in attitude even as your market share entitled you to act/communicate as the leader.

Challenger communication was all about pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in your category, all about questioning the status quo and conventions. By choosing to be a challenger you pushed your product people to bring out better stuff, to improve existing stuff, to move more and to redefine things as the consumer knew them.

The obvious question was 'why'? Why would you want to be the challenger or act as the challenger when in fact this meant more work rather than more money placed on TV. The answer he seemed to say was simple: progressive consumers followed challengers because they associated the challenger status with better value for money and better brand universe for loyalty displayed (okay, rather fishy paraphrasing there). And progressive consumers were engaged and spent more.

So the 80/20 rules might actually work macro as well. Of 100% consumers you have about 20% who are progressive ones and who make up for 80% of consumption while the remaining 80% use basic services seldom and determine stable but minimal ARPU.

What will you do? Push a bit farther and get the big spenders or stick with the many with tight pockets?

Casinos in LV have found the answer and so has Virgin Airlines.