Challenger vs Heritage Brands | Wildish & Co

We've worked with brands that are trying to burn the category down. We've also worked with brands that built the category in the first place. And here's what those two briefs have taught us: the creative strategy looks completely different, but the underlying truth is exactly the same.

The brands that win, whether they're the new kid or the institution, are the ones that know precisely who they are.

That sounds simple, but it isn't. Most brands have a vague sense of their values and a logo they're not sure about. The ones we love working with have something more specific: a clear point of view on the world, and the confidence to build everything around it.

Here's what working across both sides of the brief as a branding agency has actually taught us.

The Challenger Brief: Earn Your Place in the Room

Challenger brands don't have the luxury of legacy. They can't point to 150 years of history or a loyal customer base built over decades. What they have is a reason to exist that the incumbent doesn't, and their entire brand job is to make that reason impossible to ignore.

The brief for a challenger is essentially: be undeniable.

And it's worth being clear on what challenger actually means. It isn't a size or a market share number. A challenger brand is defined by "ambitions bigger than resources and a willingness to break category codes to close that gap." That's a mindset, not a metric.

Bumble: Disrupting Dating by Rewriting the Rules

When we started working with Bumble, the brief wasn't really about dating apps. It was about power. Bumble had built a product with a genuinely different premise, women make the first move, and the question was how to translate that into a brand that felt as radical as the idea itself.

Challenger brands in crowded categories face a specific trap: they try to look credible by looking like everyone else. Bumble did the opposite. The creative leaned into the distinctiveness of the premise rather than softening it for mass appeal.

A challenger's biggest asset is its point of difference. The moment you sand it down to avoid alienating people, you've given up the only thing that made you interesting. Design for the people who get it, not the people who don't yet.

Cult Mia: Making Independent Fashion Feel Like a Movement

Cult Mia is a platform for independent designers, and the challenger angle was clear: the fashion industry has a gatekeeping problem, and Cult Mia exists to dismantle it.

The brand work here was about making that mission feel tangible rather than just stated. Independent fashion can easily tip into niche or inaccessible. The creative challenge was building something that felt genuinely cool and culturally credible, not just ethically correct.

• The visual identity had to feel editorial, not marketplace
• The tone needed to speak to fashion-literate customers without alienating newer ones
• Every touchpoint had to communicate curation and discovery, not just inventory

Cult Mia is a good example of a challenger brand where the product IS the point of view. The brand's job was to make that visible.

Notorious Nooch: Building a Category From Scratch

Notorious Nooch is nutritional yeast. Which, if you don't know what that is, is exactly the problem we were solving.

This is the purest version of the challenger brief: you're not disrupting an existing category, you're trying to create one. The brand couldn't rely on people already wanting the product. It had to make them want it.

The creative answer was personality. Notorious Nooch leans hard into irreverence and humour, because that's the fastest route from "what is this?" to "I need this." When the product is unfamiliar, the brand has to do the heavy lifting of making people feel something before they understand anything.

When you're building from scratch, brand isn't just marketing support. It's the product's entire first impression.

The Heritage Brief: Earn Your Place in the Future

Heritage brands have the opposite problem. They've already earned their place. The challenge is staying relevant without betraying the thing that made them worth caring about in the first place.

The brief here is harder than it looks, because the wrong answer is always available: modernise everything and lose your soul, or protect everything and become a museum piece.

The best heritage work finds the third option. And it starts with an honest diagnosis. Not all heritage is the same. A brand that's a cultural anchor (woven into how people define themselves) needs a different strategy to a brand that's a category benchmark (trusted, reliable, but not beloved). Getting that wrong is how heritage becomes a liability rather than an asset.

Penhaligon's: When History Is a Superpower, Not a Constraint

Penhaligon's has been making perfume since 1870. That's not a footnote, it's the whole story. And yet a brand that only talks about its past is a brand talking to itself.

Our campaign work for Penhaligon's had to hold two things at once: deep respect for the craft and heritage, and a creative energy that felt genuinely contemporary. The fragrance profiling work we developed was built around the idea that Penhaligon's doesn't just sell perfume, it sells character. Eccentric, specific, unapologetically British character.

Heritage isn't a story about the past. It's proof that you've always had a point of view. The creative job is to make that point of view feel alive right now, not archived.

The brands that get heritage wrong treat it as a constraint. The ones that get it right treat it as permission, to be more specific, more confident, and more distinctive than any newcomer could afford to be.

Divine Chocolate: The Heritage Challenger

Divine Chocolate is one of the most interesting briefs we've worked on because it sits across both categories. It has a founding story and a set of values that are genuinely radical: a Fairtrade chocolate brand part-owned by the cocoa farmers who supply it. That's a heritage worth protecting. But the brand also needed to behave like a challenger in a category dominated by much bigger players.

The creative tension here was productive. Divine couldn't just lean on its ethical credentials, because "we're the good ones" is a weak brand position in a crowded market. It needed to be desirable first, and purposeful second.

• Lead with the product and the pleasure, not the mission statement
• Let the ownership model be a proof point, not the entire pitch
• Build a visual identity that could compete on shelf with brands spending ten times the marketing budget

Purpose is not a substitute for desirability. The most powerful purpose-led brands are also genuinely, unapologetically good products.

The Thing Both Briefs Have in Common

After working across all of these brands, the pattern is hard to miss.

Bumble knew it was rewriting the rules of dating. Penhaligon's knew it was the eccentric, brilliant outsider of British perfumery. Notorious Nooch knew it was making something unfamiliar feel irresistible. Divine knew its ownership model was unlike anything else in the category.

None of them were vague about who they were.

The research backs this up too. Challenger brands that grow fastest aren't just the ones with the best product, they're the ones that challenge a category norm, not just a competitor. And heritage brands that stay relevant aren't the ones that modernise for the sake of it, they're the ones that diagnose what kind of heritage they actually have, and act accordingly.

That's the real brief, whether you're a challenger or a heritage brand. Not "make us look modern" or "make us feel fresh." The real brief is: help us understand ourselves clearly enough to show up with conviction.

Once a brand knows exactly what it stands for and who it's for, the design, the tone, the creative campaigns, all of it becomes much easier to get right. And much harder to get wrong.

What This Means for Your Brand

If you're a founder or marketing lead sitting with a rebrand brief right now, here's the question worth asking before you brief any agency:

• Do you know what your brand would never do? (That's often more revealing than what it would.)
• Can you describe your audience in a sentence that isn't just a demographic?
• If your brand disappeared tomorrow, would anyone actually miss it, and why?

The answers to those questions are the brief. Everything else is execution.

We're the creative agency who works with brands on both sides of this, the ones building from scratch and the ones protecting something that's already worth protecting. If you're figuring out which side you're on, or how to move forward from there, take a look at our case studies or get in touch. We'd love to hear what you're working on.