How to compete with giants on a fraction of their budget

If the biggest player in your category spends $50 million a year on marketing and you spend $2 million, you’re making 4% of their noise (at best).

That’s the reality for most challenger brands. At MATE, we grew the customer base by more than 300% on budgets that wouldn’t cover the big telcos’ sponsorship line. We didn’t do that by being louder. We couldn’t have been.

The lesson I keep coming back to is simple. You don’t beat a giant by playing their game at a smaller size. You beat them by picking a fight they can’t afford to join or haven’t taken advantage of.

Why trying to out-shout them doesn’t work

Most challenger brands start by copying the leader’s playbook. Same channels, same kinds of offers, same “we’re great value” messages. Just less of it.

The problem is that you’re in the same auctions as them. They can outbid you on every keyword that matters. They can buy the same media placements you want, more often. When they run a promo, they can run it for longer than you can afford to.

If your plan looks like theirs at 4% of the volume, you’re not a challenger. You’re background noise.

Find the fight they can’t win

Every big incumbent has things they structurally can’t do, however much money they have. Some common ones:

• They can’t be small. They serve everyone, so they can’t speak to one group of customers as if they were the only group that mattered.
• They can’t simplify easily. They’ve got dozens of legacy products, systems, and pricing structures that someone depends on.
• They can’t cut prices on everything. Every price drop hits millions of existing customers, not just new ones.
• They can’t move fast. A change that takes you a week can take them two quarters and five committees.
• They struggle to feel personal. Scale makes service feel like process.

Your job is to find the one where their weakness overlaps with something your customers genuinely care about.

The test I use: if they copied our position tomorrow, what would it cost them? If the answer is “nothing much”, it’s not a defendable position. It’s more like a campaign. If the answer is “they’d have to rebuild their pricing, retrain 5,000 staff, and upset their existing customers”, now you’ve got something.

During 2020, when COVID fist hit, MATE was able to take advantage of our Aussie based call centre and deploy staff to work form home quickly, while legacy brands with outsourced, offshore call centres suffered badly as other countries shut down. Whilst this wasn’t a long-term defendable position, we doubled down on our Aussie based support and ultimately won out on new customers.

Fund one fight properly

This is the part lean teams find hardest, because it means saying no to a lot.

Once you’ve picked your fight, it should dominate your message and your budget. As a rough guide, I’d want most of the spend and almost all of the messaging pointing at it. Everything else is maintenance.

Here’s why the concentration matters. Say you’ve got $2 million and five things you’d like people to know about you. Spread evenly, that’s $400k behind each message. That’s nothing against a $50 million competitor. Put $1.5 million behind one message and you’ve at least got a chance of owning something in your customers’ heads.

It feels risky. Spreading the money around feels safer because nothing fails badly. But nothing wins either.

Where challengers go wrong

I’ve seen (and made) a few of these.

Using price as the only weapon. It works until the incumbent decides to match you for a quarter. They can afford to lose money on new customers for a while. You probably can’t. Price can be part of your fight, but it shouldn’t be the whole thing.

Trying to look like a big brand. Small brands sometimes spend a lot to look established, with polished corporate ads and big-brand tone. You end up looking like a smaller version of the thing people were already unsure about. The scrappiness is often part of the appeal. Use it.

Changing the fight every quarter. Positioning takes time to stick. If you switch message every time a campaign underperforms, customers never get the chance to connect you with anything. When you look back, you’ll find the brands that won picked something and stayed with it for years.

The product has to prove it

This is the uncomfortable bit for marketers. You can pick the perfect fight, and it’ll still fall over if the business doesn’t back it.

If your fight is “better service than the giants” and your hold times are the same as theirs, the ads just speed up the moment customers work out you’re not different. Reviews will say so. And those reviews are exactly what AI search tools and comparison sites pick up when they decide which brands to recommend.

So, the fight has to show up everywhere: the website, onboarding, support, billing, cancellations. Marketing can make the claim, but the rest of the business needs to make it true. If the rest of the company isn’t willing to commit to the fight, pick a different one.

A one-page challenger check

Before your next planning cycle, answer these honestly. One page, no slides.

1. What’s the one thing we do that the biggest player in our category structurally can’t?
2. Do our customers actually care about it? Evidence, not assumption. Reviews, churn reasons, sales calls.
3. If the leader copied it tomorrow, what would it cost them?
4. What share of our budget and messaging is behind it right now? Be honest.
5. Does the product prove it at every touchpoint? Where doesn’t it?
6. What are we doing that has nothing to do with our fight? That’s the list of things to stop.

If you can’t answer question one, that’s your first job. Everything else in the marketing plan is secondary until you can.

You’ll never have their budget. You don’t need it. You need a fight they can’t join and the discipline to keep fighting it long after it stops feeling new.