---
title: "How Small Brands Can Break Through the Blockade and Defeat First-Tier Brands?"
description: "In an incremental market, small brands can survive by imitating big brands and targeting niche markets. However, in today's saturated and stagnant market, small brands face the challenge of being crushed by big brands' aggressive competition. To thrive, small brands must abandon conservatism, adopt challenger strategies, find breakthrough points, leverage new traffic and channels, and follow the eight laws of challenger innovation to establish a strong brand identity and win consumer loyalty."
author: "赵波"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-11-06"
categories: "Brand Marketing, Management & Methods"
language: "en"
canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/how-small-brands-can-break-through-the-blockade-and-defeat-first-tier-br-71942774/"
markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/how-small-brands-can-break-through-the-blockade-and-defeat-first-tier-br-71942774.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Xa5y2Qr6QYLEysJN2EEguw"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E5%B0%8F%E5%93%81%E7%89%8C%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E7%AA%81%E7%A0%B4%E5%B0%81%E9%94%81-%E6%88%98%E8%83%9C%E4%B8%80%E7%BA%BF%E5%93%81%E7%89%8C-71942774.md"
attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/how-small-brands-can-break-through-the-blockade-and-defeat-first-tier-br-71942774/"
citation: "赵波. “How Small Brands Can Break Through the Blockade and Defeat First-Tier Brands?.” New Distribution, 2019-11-06. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/how-small-brands-can-break-through-the-blockade-and-defeat-first-tier-br-71942774/"
usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt"
---

# How Small Brands Can Break Through the Blockade and Defeat First-Tier Brands?

> In an incremental market, small brands can survive by imitating big brands and targeting niche markets. However, in today's saturated and stagnant market, small brands face the challenge of being crushed by big brands' aggressive competition. To thrive, small brands must abandon conservatism, adopt challenger strategies, find breakthrough points, leverage new traffic and channels, and follow the eight laws of challenger innovation to establish a strong brand identity and win consumer loyalty.

**Innovation and growth within large enterprises, in an incremental market, only require making good products and steadily following market growth; growth is linear, and enterprises generally choose a sustaining innovation strategy.**
In an incremental market, small brands only need to follow behind big brands, imitate and keep up, and in niche markets not covered by big brands, such as fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-tier markets, they can survive well through imitation. We see many Kangshuai Fu, Seven Walnuts, and Wahaha Eight-Treasure Porridge appearing in rural markets in earlier years, essentially for this reason.
**But today, the entire Chinese market has entered a stock market stage, with excessive saturation and product overcapacity, where there are more monks than porridge.** For big brands to continue growing, they must engage in squeeze competition, meaning all growth comes from squeezing competitors' market share. We see many big brands using price wars, channel sinking, and other frontal attacks to eliminate competitors.
At this time, the first to be eliminated are those small brands that were built by imitating and following big brands.
**The problem small brands face today is: How to survive and achieve a second takeoff under the attack and squeeze of big brands?**
**-01-
The terrifying aspect of industry leaders is not only their **massive scale and profits**, but also the **unique premium pricing power they gain through market dominance**, and even **an ultra-high return on investment that is disproportionate to their size**. 
Look at Apple's profit margins: in 2016, Apple captured 91% of the profits in the smartphone industry, 83% in 2017, and 87% in 2018! That's the most terrifying part—not just having a brand, but also having money and profits!
This means that small brands must swim harder than big brands just to stay in place and maintain the status quo.
If one day we find that even maintaining the status quo is no longer enough to cope with market competition; to maintain profits among peers and survive; to achieve rapid development in a stagnant market environment—what should small brands do?
Undoubtedly, relying on blindly imitating and following the brand strategies of leaders only helps strengthen their market advantage.
What small brands need to do is **abandon conservatism and gradualism** and **think like a challenger in a boxing ring.** **Design your own territory in completely different ways and paths.** Stand on the opposite side of big brands, muster the courage to challenge them, rather than following behind them and eating the "food scraps" they leave in the market.
**First, you must know that cycles are important; whether products or technology, they all have cycles. Even if there are no cycles, you know consumers will get tired of the old and crave the new.**
Second, big brands all face the innovator's dilemma. The one who defeats your opponent is not necessarily a stronger opponent, but rather exploiting their ignorance and arrogance to bring them down. You should become an idol brand in places where big brands cannot reach.
Moreover, big brands are not as scary as we think. Professor Zeng Ming pointed out the weaknesses of big brands: **they can't see, they look down on, and they can't learn.**
If the quality and experience of your product are merely rated as "same as big brands," that is clearly not enough. What we need to do is establish a stronger connection with consumers, and through brief contact on the shelf, fully stimulate consumers' curiosity, desire, and reevaluation of their purchase choices, so that consumers actively choose and consume.
To win back consumers, you must center on innovation, reset everything to zero, and think from the origin: I want to create a product that fully sparks consumer curiosity. If I have no resources, how do I do it?
To challenge big brands, first clarify that you are a brand that consumers can remember at a glance, or are about to become a well-known brand, not just a product. High-quality products themselves are not scarce; what is scarce is the ability to make consumers distinguish you from other products and remember you. Consumers change their preferences too quickly, so our products must not only be good-looking but also full of charm.
To achieve this, you must first be different. The emergence of new technologies, new infrastructure, new channels, and new scenarios are all opportunities for small brands to be born.
Liang Ning mentioned in her course "Growth Thinking 30 Lectures" on Get that the growth framework is one horizontal and one vertical: **
> **Vertical: Breakthrough point, leverage, and fractal; Horizontal: Design patterns, optimize organization, leverage momentum, and cross cycles;**
Back to the FMCG industry, the three steps for small brands to challenge big brands are: **find a breakthrough point, leverage it, and quickly capture the market through efficient fractal expansion.**
**-02-**
For small brands, challenging big brands with innovative products alone is not enough; big brands will imitate your products and use their channel and resource advantages to quickly scale up.
Therefore, for small brands, it is essential to use a high-leverage approach to quickly capture consumer awareness. However, with limited resources and finances, small brands must adopt marketing methods that are completely different from the past to gain the advantage of "high leverage."
The essence of this leverage is traffic dividends—being able to use the power of platform traffic at the lowest possible cost on traffic sources that big brands have not yet discovered or that are just emerging, to achieve rapid takeoff.
**Opportunity point: New product * New traffic * New channel.**
> **Innovation:** New product/new model/new supply chain/new technology. **New traffic:** Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, influencers, live streaming. **New channels:** Community group buying, B2B, CVS, social e-commerce.
We see a batch of internet-famous products in today's market: Genki Forest, Zhong Xue Gao, Single Grain, Egg Full, Laxin Shuo, Hi Eat Home, etc., all of which have traces of the above models.
**Core: Innovative product * Traffic dividend * Leveraged transaction.**
**-03-
**Eight Laws of Challenger Innovation**
**1\. Break completely with the past**
> • Fire yourself (restructure business, transform) • Swim against the current (challenge the leader) • Subvert tradition (break consumers' perception of the product) • Completely reinvent yourself (reshape your brand image)
**2\. Establish a lighthouse-like identifying characteristic**
> • Superior product/service performance; • Strong personality culture: history, core users, exploit competitors' weaknesses, advertising or marketing creativity;
For the fragmented public, **what resolves differences is never communication, but navigation.** Think of Apple's Steve Jobs: would he ask consumers, "Do you need a phone?" Consumers would only ever answer, "I need a phone with a more comfortable keyboard."
**3\. Assume the role of the industry's brand leader in your thinking**
There are two types of market leaders: one is the market leader, and the other is the thought leader. They may not be the largest, but they are certainly the most eye-catching, with strong momentum, leading popular culture. If you cannot be the market leader, at least become the brand everyone talks about, the one that appears vibrant in people's eyes.
**The tragedy of big brands is that the stronger the brand, the weaker its public opinion, which is your opportunity for success.**
**4\. Overcome consumer indifference as much as possible**
**In a world of information saturation and chaos, the biggest danger brands face is not consumer rejection, but indifference.**
Half of a rocket's fuel is used to complete its first mile. During that mile, the rocket must gain critical momentum to reach the speed it needs.
The startup phase of a new brand is like a rocket. The real difficulty lies in gaining that critical initial momentum. Half of a brand's available fuel should be used to overcome Earth's gravity, and its Earth's gravity is consumer indifference.
**5\. Make necessary sacrifices**
Necessary sacrifice is fundamentally different from focus. Focus allows for second and third goals.
Cut everything unrelated to the core (goals, scope, information, product lines, distribution, etc.).
> • Trade quantity for loyalty: serve only a small group of people; • Trade quantity for distinctiveness: buy the most expensive ad slots to occupy the best mindshare; • Trade quantity for scarcity: better to be unavailable than unwanted; • Trade depth for clarity: deep stories move consumers more than shallow ads; • Sacrifice secondary tasks: focus, focus, focus;
As a challenger, resources are limited. You need to win a small group of loyal fans through genuine differentiation, not a group of indifferent consumers who know your brand.
**6\. Super promise**
Deliver experiences and products that exceed user expectations, do not deceive users, and match words with actions.
**7\. Treat new media publicity as a high-leverage asset**
Here, new media refers to all media platforms that are different from traditional media, have traffic dividends, and can interact and communicate with users.
The relationship between mainstream brands and consumers is comfortable and stable, to the point where even if the dialogue is bland, it doesn't matter. Between mainstream brands and consumers, advertising is merely used to evoke memory of the brand.
For mainstream brands, exposure + repetition is the most effective way to convey information. In the words of Teacher Hua Shan, **the power of repetition is strong.**
Mainstream brands have solidified brand assets and will protect their brand image in consumers' minds as much as possible, leading to a relatively comfortable cultural atmosphere.
But small brands cannot just chat with consumers; they must ensure every communication is efficient, successfully capturing consumer attention, and not just one consumer but the collective imagination of a group of consumers.
Consumers are no longer the same, and communication is no longer the same.
Consumer attention is becoming a scarce resource, and consumers are increasingly selective about their attention.
Classic cases of leveraging new media as high leverage:
> • Leverage public relations—Kangshifu water source incident; • Aggressive publicity—Nongfu Spring's "porter of nature" and alkaline water test; • Moral high ground—Nongfu Spring's "donate one cent for every bottle sold" public welfare marketing;
**8\. Go beyond consumer-centricity and become an innovation-centric company**
> • Consumers are always fond of the new and tired of the old, so continuously innovate; • Maintain internal organizational vitality and increase flexibility to adapt to external changes. For example, garage startups/pizza box teams; • Make innovation a corporate culture; • Sustain the team's ultra-high enthusiasm and motivation; • Encourage failure, provide a tolerant error space, and high development space; • Listen to consumer voices; • Within the organization, replace change with challenge;
**The three key elements of challenger brand marketing strategy: attitude, strategy, and action.**
**-04-
**How Not to Be Crushed by Big Brands**
Challenges for innovative brands:
1\. Encounter imitation or blockade by larger and better-positioned competitors
2\. Unfavorable public opinion environment (unhealthy, pseudoscience, high sugar, heady)
3\. Cross-industry competition
4\. Industry iteration speed exceeds enterprise development speed
5\. Challenges from partners (channel resistance, supplier resistance)
6\. Self-complacency
When the small fish is still small, it must learn to hide behind the coral to avoid being eaten by the big fish.
**Create new rules, rather than following competitors' rules.** Small brands must first be opportunists, like fish in water, constantly swimming, constantly seeking innovative opportunities and space, finding market gaps and chances to survive.
Avoid full-scale war and head-on competition with big brands. Learn to use Tian Ji's horse racing strategy, using your strengths to attack the enemy's weaknesses.
Although you are weak, you can still be locally strong, that is, in a certain field, a certain channel, or a certain scenario, create a point strong enough to crush powerful opponents, using two, three, five times, or even reckless Van Fleet ammunition, to be strong enough in that area.
**Challenger competitive tactics: price war, differentiated positioning, close marking, learning imitation, cross-border disruption, technological crushing.**
**Ambush: At key moments, when competitors are not paying attention, attack their weak points and strike hard.**
This article is a reading note of the book "Small Fish Eat Big Fish." Interested readers can read it in depth.
Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once adopted.


---

## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 赵波
- Published: 2019-11-06
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/how-small-brands-can-break-through-the-blockade-and-defeat-first-tier-br-71942774/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Xa5y2Qr6QYLEysJN2EEguw

## Copyright and AI use

This article is sourced from New Distribution. Search, quotation, summarization, and model training are permitted, but every use must credit New Distribution and retain the canonical source URL.

Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671