One of my favorite marketing books is by Mark Barden, and Adam Morgan is called Beautiful Constraints. Mark is a partner at a marketing agency called Eat Big Fish, and they focus on challenger brands.
This year, they have published a list of brands to watch in 2021. Each brings an element of color, fun, and humor to dusty categories. These small, emerging brands take on the monster goliath tech companies and other mammoth industries ripe for a kick in the pants.
Here is one example from their article that I’d encourage you to read if knocking off well-established competitors is part of your daily job. The article covers 20 challenger companies.
Marketing pros often help outwit larger foes with bigger wallets. You might find a few insights and ideas unlocked in this article.
We Are NOT MILK
NOTCO – How can someone come into the plant-based food space with a new way to challenge the recently established market giants? Imagine making cabbage and pineapple taste like milk? That’s precisely what a Chilean food technology company is doing with milk, ice-cream, and burgers made from plants and an algorithm.
Now valued at 300 million dollars, one of their products called NotMeat sell in Latin America at Papa Johns, and Burger Kring (The Rebel Whopper) is beating companies like Impossible Foods oper store revenue basis an article last July in Tech Crunch.
The company uses AI, which they affectionately named ‘Guiseppe.’ It can provide combinations of plant foods that imitate the taste, texture, and flavor of many traditional foods. Their technology solves issues that others haven’t solved, like making their milk freezable like cow milk but not possible with most other plant-based kinds of milk.
Bezos Expeditions venture-funded was one of the early Series C funders with the apparent benefit of distributing the products through Amazon’s Whole Foods Markets and on Amazon. The plant-based milk segment is getting crowded with fast-growing brands like Oatly and a new product launch from Impossible Foods coming soon.
A Brand of Opposition
Every product from NotCo is in opposition using the crossing out of cows, for example, on its package. Unlike other brands who see themselves as the ‘next technology or generation of products,”, NotCo like Not Milk, positions itself as the challenger.
The brand is more revolutionary versus others as evolution. This approach has been successful in Latin America, but what happens when it emerges on the U.S. store shelves?
As Notco enters the U.S. someone, may be crying over spilt milk.
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Photos courtesy of Notco
