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C. Marketing: new media channels, and the ability to make more targeted consumer connections, allow brands to be built without a large upfront media spend.
D. Talent: there has been a significant shift of high quality management and specialists from large companies to smaller challengers, drawn in part by the attraction of being part of a more exciting, faster-moving internal culture. And the new generation of graduates, Melloul feels, now aspire to become ‘kitchen entrepreneurs’ as much as tech entrepreneurs.
E. Investment: the access to finance from companies like Verlinvest allows a challenger to scale quickly and relatively easily when they need to, without having all the coordination and governance cost of large organisations.
How does an investor choose which challenger to invest in?
With these drivers moving in their favour, the number of small, hopeful brands in each category has predictably increased. Melloul notes that this now makes it harder for an investor to pick the challenger that is going to win – there is no longer the relative ease and simplicity of ‘one first mover’ to bet behind. Beyond really understanding the market dynamics of the category and the
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