Challenger Messaging: How Food Brands Can Level Up Their Marketing and PR
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Who’s your brand’s biggest enemy? That’s a question we love to ask in our marketing messaging discoveries at Grasslands.
When you think of some of the most iconic brands of all time, you might also immediately think of the competitor they position themselves against. Coke and Pepsi, for example. Apple and Microsoft. Nike and Reebok. Part of what makes these brands so recognizable and enduring is those core rivalries that give their most loyal customers something with which to identify, and also something to oppose.
Your brand’s biggest rival might not be another brand, however. In some industries like cannabis and psychedelics, the major oppositional forces brands are squaring up against are federal prohibition and decades of stigma from the War on Drugs.
In the food industry, there is an age-old positional binary between name brand and generic product offerings. And in the natural foods sector, brands have spent decades positioning themselves against product offerings from Big Food, utilizing differentiation messaging rooted in a “back to the land” ethos.
Whatever the answer to the adversarial “enemy question,” the results can reveal intriguing new directions for your marketing and PR messaging.
The Power of Challenger Messaging for Natural Foods Brands
Challenger messaging is the most direct example of how the enemy question can shape brand messaging. Challenger messaging is exactly what it sounds like: marketing and PR tactics that position a brand against a direct competitor, a more-established rival or a concept that’s more abstract.
For example, before John Mackey founded Whole Foods in 1980, he first launched a health food store called Safer Way—a direct riff on Safeway, a national grocery chain that was founded in 1915 and expanded throughout the Great Depression.
A more recent example from the natural foods sector is what soft drink brand Poppi did with its 2024 Super Bowl ad, which positioned prebiotic soda as the future of the category. Poppi didn’t specifically mention established brands like Coke, Sprite or Dr. Pepper in its spot, and it didn’t have to.
Instead, the ad copy focused on soda’s reputation as unhealthy junk food. The brand declared, “This will be the last moment you ever think of soda as being a dirty word, as being bad for you, filled with unclean ingredients and unnecessary sugar.” That’s powerful stuff.
But brands can also use the enemy question to position themselves against a particular pain point that’s been left unaddressed by larger, more traditional brands. By tackling a conceptual problem, emerging and independent food brands not only claim key messaging white space but also make a big impression on values-based consumers who are eager to spend with purpose-driven brands.
Food subscription services like Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market, for example, have both challenged the problem of food waste and the inconvenience of brick-and-mortar grocery stores in their marketing and PR messaging. Tony’s Chocolonely offers consumers an alternative to substandard labor practices common in the chocolate industry. And meat alternatives Beyond and Impossible both challenged the notion that veggie burgers were too bland and boring to bother with.
Speaking of meat alternatives, the plant-based foods sector is a particularly good example of how challenger messaging can function in a nuanced way. Many of the first meat alternative products in the United States were first inspired by religious dietary guidelines from denominations like the Seventh Day Adventists that rapidly gained popularity in the early 20th century.
Around the same time, the nascent animal rights movement gained momentum and authors like Upton Sinclair called attention to health and safety violations in the meat packing industries. Soon, brands were touting meat and dairy alternatives not with religious messaging but as the more humane choice, kinder to animals and humans alike.
Even traditional meat, egg and dairy brands have segmented into those that practice factory farming techniques and those that advertise on terms like “grass-fed,” “free range” and “pasture-raised.” Those terms are intended to connote not only better conditions for the animals, but also paint a pastoral picture of the small family farms of yore for consumers.
When the environmental movement took off in the 1960s and 1970s, meat and dairy alternatives again found a new enemy to position themselves against. That challenger messaging has recently evolved once again in the era of climate change awareness. Not only are meat alternatives touting themselves as the lower-carbon choice, the beef industry is spending big dollars on sustainability PR messaging.
How to Deploy Challenger Marketing and PR Tactics for Natural Food Brands
So, with these many examples of challenger messaging in natural foods top of mind, how do brands actually put this concept into practice?
On the marketing side, the enemy question can carry forward from foundational brand development and brand naming to audience segmentation through brand messaging. Challenger messaging can inform a brand’s mission, vision and values and shape the brand voice used in copywriting across all digital and print marketing channels. Just look at the defiant tone brands like Oatly have taken, knowing that a product as seemingly anodyne as oat milk can be an unexpected lightning rod in the so-called culture wars.
In PR, challenger messaging can be a useful starting point for proactive pitching to journalists writing for natural products trade publications as well as mainstream media. A provocative X vs. Y narrative can be a pithy way to help reporters quickly grasp what a new product is and where it fits into the established context.
Challenger messaging is also a potent tool for newsjacking—that’s a tactic publicists use to inject a brand into media discourse on other topics as the news cycle unfurls.
Five Tips for Challenger Brand Messaging
However you deploy challenger messaging or however fully it’s integrated into your overall brand ecosystem, there are a few ways to ensure that your challenge has as much bite as bark:
- Understand the target audience’s pain points. Brands need to really understand their customers' pain points and why they have been left hanging—particularly if the enemy you’re challenging is another well-established, well-funded brand.
- Take a solutions-oriented approach. Customers want to be empowered. It makes them feel good and builds trust. It’s not enough to highlight their pain points. The challenge brand has to position itself as the solution, or at least a major component of it.
- Feelings really matter. In an era of data-based decision making, it can be easy to forget that logic is only one part of how you win an argument. To really make an impact, challenger brands have to speak to the core human emotions that drive decision-making, identity and change.
- Drive the conversation forward. Challenger brands must be in constant conversation with their customers as well as their target audience. It’s not enough to convert consumers and evangelize the brand’s values. Customer feedback is key to understanding how your brand is resonating and succeeding at creating change. It’s also crucial to intuiting where to go next. After all, a challenger brand’s work is never done.
- Think like a community organizer. A challenger brand is ultimately positioning itself as an advocate—a change maker that is committed to shifting the status quo. There’s a proven blueprint for success that brands can follow to really walk the walk. Challenge brands can look to successful models used by community organizers and activists to generate grassroots effort toward various causes, and turn collective action into a genuine sense of connection and support.