Playing it safe is the most dangerous move a challenger brand can make. This article explores why bold, distinctive ideas drive faster growth and lasting impact. From Bendon’s Bra Better platform to four practical principles for building brave campaigns, discover why being bold isn’t optional for challengers but it’s essential.

When you’re the challenger, you can’t always outspend, but you can outthink.

One of the biggest risks for any brand is playing it safe. Dull, wallpaper advertising drains budgets, delivers little in return, and does nothing to make you memorable in the eyes of customers. For challenger brands, safe is dangerous, because you don’t have the luxury of an unlimited budget and being able to waste money. To grow, you need bold, distinctive ideas that capture attention, spark emotion, and make people care.

And it’s not just challengers. To truly grow and succeed, every business needs to adopt a challenger mindset, even the category leaders (perhaps especially them). Just as people are drawn to interesting people, customers are drawn to interesting brands. So it’s astounding that so many businesses avoid the bold option. The reason? Fear. Risk-aversion. Internal conservatism. Sticking your neck out is scary.

A challenger mindset means having the conviction to hold a point of view that matters to people. It’s not just about having distinctive assets - it’s about acting distinctively.

The Cost of Dull

Research backs this up. The Cost of Dull, a study by Adam Morgan, Peter Field and Jon Evans, found that dull brands consistently failed to generate meaningful growth. By contrast, brands with strong, memorable advertising grew 400 - 600% faster, gaining 10 - 20% market share. Yet the researchers also found around half of all advertising is dull. That’s an extraordinary waste of time and money.

As a challenger, you can’t outspend or outscale the big players. So let them be the dull ones. Let them cling to their assets. Your advantage lies in acting distinctively - taking fresh perspectives, finding new angles, and refusing to fade into the background.
The lesson? Have a challenger mindset and settle for nothing less than distinctiveness. Then, once you’ve found it, keep challenging yourself to hold onto it.

The High Cost of Playing Safe

The gap between bold and dull advertising is stark. Campaigns that lean into emotion, creativity and surprise build memory and preference. Neutral, rational work simply fades.

Positive emotions, joy, pride, delight - are proven to embed long-term memory structures. Ads that make people feel are more likely to drive growth. Ads that cause no reaction at all are the most dangerous of all, an expensive way to stand still.

Why Bold Matters More for Challengers

Market leaders enjoy built-in advantages: scale, awareness, efficiency. Challengers don’t. To compete, you need to punch above your weight and earn attention in ways bigger players avoid. Boldness is your natural edge:

  • It creates cut-through. If you can’t outspend, you must out-create.
  • It builds memory. Distinctive, emotional ideas live longer in people’s minds.
  • It signals confidence. Bold brands show they belong and that they’re here to stay.

Your goal isn’t to be liked by everyone. It’s to be loved by the right people. That means being willing to polarise, provoke, and stand for something.

Boldness in Action: Bendon’s Bra Better

When Bendon needed to rebuild relevance, it couldn’t rely on discounting and functional marketing. The insight was simple but powerful: most women wear bras every day, but few feel good in them.

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The Bra Better platform repositioned bras as part of real women’s lives – the post-divorce bra, the strap them in bra, the I feel girly bra. It was bold, rooted in truth, and impossible to ignore. Focused around their strong products, the brand reframed the category through powerful storytelling.

That’s challenger creativity: uncover a human truth, then turn it into a campaign with energy, cut-through and cultural relevance.

How to Build Bold Campaigns

Being bold isn’t about being reckless, it’s about being deliberate and brave enough to stand out. Four principles to guide challenger campaigns:

  1. Anchor in Insight. Boldness without truth is noise. Boldness without action is puffery. Build from customer insight and back it up with behaviour – clever ideas alone won’t sustain growth.
  2. Evoke Emotion. Joy, pride, surprise – strong emotional responses embed memory structures and make work distinctive. In a world of thousands of daily messages, emotional cut-through ensures you’re remembered.
  3. Embrace Distinctiveness. Go beyond logos and colours. Own music, shapes, packaging, characters – think Mastercard’s sonic branding, Nike’s swoosh, Coke’s bottle. Assets only matter if they’re used distinctively.
  4. Commit Fully. Half-bold is half-forgotten. Roll ideas out across every channel: mass media, digital, email, social, physical environments. Bold ideas should even touch and drive internal cultural values, driving pride and guiding behaviour. Boldness must be embedded, not bolted on.

The Challenger’s Advantage

Bold campaigns aren’t optional for challengers - they’re essential. You don’t have the time or money to be invisible. If you want to grow, you must stand for something, make statements, and leave an impression.

Boldness may feel uncomfortable. That’s the point. Comfort is the enemy of cut-through. The real danger lies in playing it safe. For challengers, the greater risk isn’t trying something bold – it’s settling for comfort and being forgotten.

So ask yourself: is your next campaign just turning up? Or is it turning heads? As a challenger you need to be ambitious, be disruptive, be bold, but above all else, don’t be dull.

This is the eighth article in our Challenger Marketing series you can find article seven here: Customer Journey - balancing what you say with what you do.

Source: Duncan Shand, 17 September 2025