Over the last decade, big brands have seen disruptive young challengers eat away their market share. Look at banking, a centuries-old industry that was blindsided by the likes of Monzo, Coinbase, Wise and Robinhood, or the way Liquid Death toppled the bottled water market. Even big pharma, a sector known for its stranglehold, has come up against the likes of companies such as Cabinet Health, Seed and Hims.
Davids have been long slaying Goliaths in every sector, and consumers have shown they’re keen to spend money on brands that actively reject the status quo, culture and attitude of traditional Big Corps.
This power-balance tremor has prompted the acceleration of a quietly bubbling mindset shift, with CMOs and CEOs realising that, in order to survive, they need to think and behave like the challengers they’re now looking to for inspiration.
And it’s a shift that’s directly impacting the way they’re thinking about agency partners. Many of the world’s biggest corporations are foregoing their agency equivalents – large, multi-city, multi-layered, hundreds-strong creative teams owned by the big networks – in favour of smaller alternatives. And that means small in size not in influence; teams that occupy a single floor not the entire building.
Luckily for the rest of the big brands, there’s more of these kinds of creative shops than ever before. People that learned the ropes at agencies with hundreds of employees, and some of the biggest clients around, are now offering exponentially more value, running their own smaller outfits. They have huge ambition around who they partner with and attract a much higher level of talent – drawn there by better working culture, more senior, close-knit teams and the chance to push boundaries with creative work that actually drives value.
And they offer brands a much closer and more straightforward partnership. Teams have less layers and are, in many cases, still led by the original founders, giving clients easy, end-to-end access to senior creatives and strategists. They’re more agile, more often than not working on a project-by-project basis meaning they engage with briefs quickly and handle comparatively shorter term engagements. And in many cases there’s also the benefit of a more bespoke team, with many smaller agencies bringing in hyper-specific talent as it’s needed, rather than relying on the same always-on-staff creatives.
Smaller size also means teams take on less work, and care deeply about individual projects – pushing briefs, taking risks and elevating the work to a higher outcome. The relationship is one of close collaboration, rather than another entry on the spreadsheet of an agency that has a reputation, and bottom line, to maintain. And when it comes to fees businesses can expect to get far more bang for their buck, largely because small agencies don’t have to worry about funnelling money back to their holding company.
It couldn’t be a better time for big brands to be working with these agencies. Early-stage businesses have been navigating a highly-challenging fundraising environment, finding it harder than ever to raise money, and many unicorns or would-be unicorns that were once a very real threat are having to put the brakes on their spending and focus on profitability above anything else.
So as the wave of disruptor brands crests and recedes, at least for now, there’s a huge opportunity for long-established brands to step in, utilise the challenger playbook and grab back some of their usurped market share.
Now is the time for CEOs and CMOs to chase after the agencies that shaped those upstart competitors, built their customer acquisition strategies, honed their messaging and designed their brand worlds. To reclaim a diminished customer base, they need to think like the challengers that stole it in the first place.
