Many (if not most) challenger brands can’t rely on multi-million-pound budgets to reach all audiences, in all channels. It calls for a more considered and balanced approach to build the market, and a brand’s evolution within it, one consumer segment at a time. In ‘The Rocky Road to Challenger Brand Success’, David Wadsworth, founder and MD of Cornerstone Design and Marketing, shared how smaller brands can compete without the millions when he spoke at Prolific North Live.
Even modest budgets can drive sustainable growth when spent consistently and intelligently.
Wadsworth’s rocky road presentation was essentially a blueprint for how a northern agency of a certain size – Cornerstone employs 35 and has a turnover approaching £3.5m – can help a brand triumph in a David and Goliath situation.
It’s based on the lessons learned over many years of launching new products and reinvigorating heritage brands and is backed up with case studies that show it works, one of which we’ll come to later in this article.
Turning a rocky road into a smooth highway is based on six fundamentals: strategy, vision, research, targeting, point of difference and commercial objectives.
It all starts with strategy – often misunderstood as standing for ‘what we can do’, but in reality, includes ‘what we choose not to do’ as we prioritise our core segment and target audience for growth.
“You can’t shortcut strategy,” Wadsworth told his Prolific North Live audience. “The brands that think they know the market but don’t validate it with data will fail.”
Wadsworth is a big believer in Field and Binet’s 60/40 rule – 60% brand-building, 40% activation – which cites that brands that maintain excess share of voice (ESOV), spending proportionally more on advertising than their market share, tend to grow share over time.
Of course, to achieve that, a brand has to know who it is targeting. Ultimately, a deep, data-driven, and empathetic view of an audience will help to ensure you are building a brand that fits into the lives of its target audience.
Another thing to consider here is brand identity. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once famously said, your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Do those sentiments align with what your client thinks its brand is?
A brand’s identity should be felt in every touchpoint: its tone of voice, the behaviours it displays, and the way it shows up in the world.
This is the point of difference, it helps a brand understand its market, the competition and its positioning to find a place within the market to call its own and where it can align its brand identity accordingly.
And finally, we have commercial objectives. Brands that win are usually the ones that understand marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.
Commercial pressure can sometimes lead brands into short-term, activation-based tactics (retail price promotions, short-term campaigns which aren’t given adequate time or depth of investment to perform).
There is no substitute for taking a longer-term, sustained investment approach, which is built on solid strategic insight and planning, a clear brand proposition, and creative executions that cut through the noise.
How we helped to make Pyrocalm Control into the UK’s fastest-growing heartburn medication in its category
‘There’s so much more to come from this challenger brand.’ Those prophetic words came from our original case study about Pyrocalm Control, which at the time, was a new to market, over the counter (OTC) heartburn and acid reflux treatment.
Fast forward three years and Pyrocalm had become the UK’s fastest-growing PPI medication1† in its sector with sales outpacing heritage competitors.
Our strategy took an iterative approach, each building on and enhancing the success of what had gone before.
As with any fledgling brand, initial budget constraints meant below-the-line PR and marketing had to do the foundational heavy lifting.
Since then, our marketing strategy has blossomed into national radio campaigns, targeted DAX ads, and a full-scale national below-the-line and out-of-home campaign for the brand’s new peppermint flavour – and Pyrocalm’s first ever TV ad on Channel 4 and Sky’s on-demand services.
The icing on the cake, however, arrived at the UK-wide OTC Marketing Awards in London, when our Pyrocalm campaign was named Best Niche OTC Marketing Campaign for 2025!
The long and short of OTC healthcare brand building – a white paper
David Wadsworth’s Prolific North Live presentation and some elements of this article have been taken from Cornerstone’s white paper for the pharmaceutical sector, which you can download here for more in-depth insight: https://cornerstonedm.co.uk/brand-building-in-the-uk-otc-market/
