Page 120 - Overthrow_Black&WhiteVersion
P. 120
The Irreverent Maverick narrative works particularly well for a challenger where the market leader, and perhaps the category as a whole, is serious to the point of being tedious. Dollar Shave Club’s now legendary viral video ‘Our Blades Are F***ing Great’ (currently at 25,842,263 views on YouTube) was genuinely funny, delivered by its stand-up comedian founder. While DSC had a serious underlying point to make – there must
be a better way to get a decent shave, and they’d found it – their strategy as a challenger was to breezily puncture the po-faced pretensions of
the market leader. And a chunk of the world
loved them for it.
Each of these 10 challenger narratives are not simply ‘positionings’: each of them represents,
in effect, a genuine internal as well as external culture built around the demands of the narrative they are looking to tell. And the Irreverent Maverick is no different: behaving consistently
in this way puts high demands on its own culture – an appetite for the media spotlight, a management acceptance of the downside possibility in taking risk, keeping one’s lawyers playing offence not defence, and recruiting for attitude as much as skill base.
119
