Every marketing leader has sat in that meeting. A senior executive points at a fast-growing challenger brand and asks why the company can’t just do that — go viral, get influencers talking, launch with a bold claim and win the internet by Friday.
A new Adweek opinion piece argues that this instinct is built on a misreading. Insurgent brands do not win primarily because of clever marketing tactics that anyone can copy. They win because of structural conditions that established businesses simply do not share.
A different business model, not a different tone of voice
The author, a former CMO, makes the point bluntly: an insurgent is not just a large company at an earlier stage of life. It is a different kind of business — one built on patient capital and small, flexible manufacturing, which allows it to absorb losses, tolerate long payback periods and operate at low volumes.
Mature brands cannot wish away their own complexity. They have portfolios, P&L targets, retail relationships and investment trade-offs across many brands at once.
The piece recounts market visits with the Sipsmith Gin team after the brand was acquired by a large company. The Sipsmith marketers travelled with the founders and lived the brand in every conversation. That intensity was genuine — and possible precisely because there was only one brand to carry. A portfolio marketer, by definition, cannot identify with every brand at that pitch.
Depth versus breadth
The marketing logic diverges too. Insurgents typically start with a polarising proposition aimed at a narrow, culturally coherent group. They optimise for intense relevance in a niche — depth over breadth.
Mainstream brands need distinctiveness as well, but they also have to stay relevant to a broad population and drive repeat purchase. Owning a niche may barely register on their P&L.
Insurgents also have the freedom to keep searching. The article cites Poppi, which shifted its proposition, name and packaging until it landed on an identity that worked. Useful lessons — but not a repeatable playbook. If a mature brand changed positioning that often, its millions of existing consumers would be left dizzy.
Where copying goes wrong
The most common mistake, according to the piece, is replicating the visible surface of insurgency rather than the underlying principle. Large organisations tend to lift three things:
- Founder-led purpose — which reads as manufactured when consumers sense it was reverse-engineered in a workshop, and can actively backfire.
- Organic digital communities — an agency-built community rarely behaves like one that formed naturally.
- Tight cultural affinity — a niche cultural angle can feel forced on a mass brand and fragment the broad relevance it depends on.
The prescription: translate insurgent thinking rather than replicate it.
The hybrid launch model
The most practical idea in the piece is a split of responsibilities across the launch journey. Any new product needs three things: desirability, mental and physical availability, and trial.
Insurgents are excellent at the first. Large companies, with reach media budgets and distribution muscle, are far stronger on the second and third.
So the recommendation for established brands is to borrow insurgent techniques at the front end of a launch — staggered rollouts, pre-launch demand creation, culturally credible partners and fast feedback loops that build desire among a high-affinity audience. Then switch on scale: distribution, retail influence and advertising weight to convert that cultural heat into volume.
Why it matters for Indian marketers
The tension is familiar in India, where legacy FMCG, BFSI and auto brands are watching D2C challengers win share of conversation on a fraction of the budget. The temptation is to imitate the tone. The more durable move is to identify which insurgent behaviours are actually portable — speed, sharper cultural partnerships, staged launches — and which are a function of a business model you do not have.
The closing argument is a useful corrective for anyone in a large marketing organisation: fall back in love with your scale. Broad distribution, retail leverage, R&D, manufacturing capacity, first-party data and existing brand equity are assets most insurgents can only envy.
Source: Adweek
