A brief landed on Tuesday from a company holding four percent of a category where the leader holds thirty eight. Page one, first line, set in the flat confident font of a deck nobody has argued with yet: our ambition is to be the category leader.
I have read some version of that sentence in nearly every challenger brief of my career. I have written it myself, from inside brand strategy rooms, because it is the sentence that gets a strategy approved.
It is also, most of the time, a strategy for a company that does not exist.
The plan underneath it is never actually a plan to become the leader. It is a plan to look like one. Same shelf language, same category truths, same reassuring photography, the entire grammar of dominance applied to a brand with four percent. Which is exactly the problem. You cannot out leader the leader with the leader's own vocabulary. You can only look like a smaller copy of the thing people already buy.
Second choice is not a consolation prize. It is a real position with its own vocabulary, its own economics, and its own kind of loyalty, and almost nobody writes one on purpose.
Three things change when you write it honestly.
One, you get to name the leader. Avis built sixty years of equity on We Try Harder, a line that only works because Hertz existed and everybody knew it. Naming the giant is free positioning. Pretending the giant is not standing there costs you the only real tension you have.
Two, you get a different promise. The leader has to promise everyone something. You get to promise a specific group of people the exact thing the leader cannot afford to do. Salt & Straw is not going to out scale Tillamook and would be foolish to try. It sells you a flavor that could not survive a national supply chain, which is precisely the point of it.
Three, your economics get honest. Second choice brands do not need seventy percent awareness. They need the right eleven percent of a market to be certain, and certainty is cheaper to buy than ubiquity.
You cannot out leader the leader with the leader's own vocabulary.
The hard part is not the craft. The hard part is the room. Nobody wants to walk a board through a strategy that opens by conceding the top of the category, even when conceding it is the single most useful thing on the page.
I sing at a karaoke bar in Southeast Portland twice a month and I am reliably the fourth best singer in the building. I know this. I still get the room, because I am not competing with the woman who does Whitney. I am doing something she would never attempt, badly, at full volume, and the host calls me baby either way.