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In a climate of increasing distrust of all big institutions, including the world beyond marketing, the People’s Champion narrative has become increasingly common. Brands championing
their people’s interests over the past few years
have ranged from money transfer challenger TransferWise lobbying to stop hidden fees and misleading pricing in foreign exchange, to low- cost airlines such as South Africa’s Kulula, whose consistent campaigning for what’s right for ordinary South Africans has always been under the mandate that they are ‘for the people’.
Claiming a mandate, though, is relatively easy – how a People’s Champion credibly becomes that
agent of change is where the evolution of this narrative has really come over the last few years. Because what used to be ‘a brand for the people’,
an outspoken campaigner, has now frequently evolved to become ‘a brand powered by the people’, where the challenger uses digital platforms to enable its communities to help deliver better solutions to their frustrations with the category
and the establishment.
As we discussed at the beginning of this book, big business is under the spotlight – companies get too big, stop caring about consumers, become distant, lose touch. Or so runs the challenger narrative. But when a challenger is in a very real sense powered by its people – think Avaaz and ‘people-powered politics’, giffgaff and ‘the mobile network run by you’ or Glossier and its ‘people-powered beauty ecosystem’ – that category and its consumer have
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