Book Summary: Eating the big fish: How challenger brands can compete brand leaders. - By Adam Morgan

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Stage 1: Attitude and Preparation

The First Credo: Break with Your Immediate Past

Much of what has been written about brand management concentrates on consistency over time - recognizing your brand equities, and maintaining them through your marketing activities.

This is in fact out-of-date thinking in the new marketing world. Challenger brands deliberately break with their own pasts (if they have one) - they intentionally reinvent key aspects of themselves in order to force rapid reappraisal from the consumer. Sometimes this will take the form of product reinvention or it can be simply something that breaks the tradition of the "product category".

The vitality of inexperience

Many challenger brands are new and they are successful in its category. One question we might ask is that: how many of these successful challenger brands have role models to follow? Surprisingly, very few of these brands have one.

Role models. Every one knows that different product categories have their own set of ways to do business.

However, consumers do not view it this way, they view all of these are the same; in other words, what consumer experienced in one category, they expect that the same or better experience can be found in another category.

Advantage of Inexperience

The gap between what experienced marketers feel and what the consumer feels is what we want to confine here. This gap in fact creates an advantage for inexperience marketers who are new to the category: it stimulates the inexperience people to try new possibilities that the experience people afraid and cannot think of to try.

Thus, our first credo for challenger brands, is to "say goodbye to our past", even we are not new to the category [note: our aim is to be inexperienced].

Fire yourself

Not surprisingly, saying goodbye to our past is easier...