Fridge Raiders: How small brands can overthrow bigger brands

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INTRODUCTION

What do you do if you are a smaller scaleup or a challenger brand, trying to compete with far bigger players? What do you do if you are massively outspent, outshouted and outshelved? Well, this week we are going to cover exactly that. I am going to show you how to outsmart, when you cannot outspend, by breaking down an award-winning campaign I developed many years ago. Sounds interesting? Let’s dive in.

PICK A DIFFERENT FIGHT

Mattessons Fridge Raiders is a tiny meat snack brand in the UK. Despite showing early promise, it was increasingly struggling. Sales were declining and it was failing to grow household penetration (ie the number of households that bought it).  Why was it struggling so much? Well simply in the UK, we tend to not snack on meat & the all-mighty crisps rule supreme. In fact whilst only 2/10 of Brits snack on meat at lunchtime 9/10 regularly snack on crisps. 

Understanding this we realized we could not fight crisps head-on. We realized we needed to pick a different fight if we wanted to win. So we looked beyond the saturated lunchtime occasion and tried to find a new opportunity to unlock growth. Months of in-depth research revealed the answer. What was it? Well, we discovered that 2.9M teens in the UK snack and games, every day after school. Best of all? At the time no snack brand was playing in this space.

What can we learn from this? If the bigger players in your category are fighting over the same moments or occasions. Find new ones to own.

MEANINGFUL ACTION

Ads are great. No, really they are. I have been making them for over seventeen years and we have made a ton of them at Defiant. However, sometimes ads are not the best course of action. Why? Well, they can be expensive to make and require a ton of media money to be effective, against bigger brands. 

In the case of Fridge Raiders, we realized ads alone would not cut it. We realized if we wanted to win we needed to take action, rather than make ads. We needed to make a net positive contribution to the game occasion we identified, rather than spam them messages or performance marketing (ugh). What exactly did we do? Let me break it down below. 

We realized Fridge Raiders, being protein-based, could help gamers play for longer. Leaning into this we defined our strategic focus as “powering up gamers” and delivered on this year after year. In year one, we created the world’s first meat-snacking helmet, helping players game and snack without getting greasy fingers. In year two we created FRHANK, a robot that gamers could play along with whilst munching on Fridge Raiders. And in year three we took things to the next level. We decided to use gaming as a means to skill up teenagers and teach coding, whilst they played their favourite games and snacked. If you liked a proper overview of the campaign check out the case video below.

CHECK OUT THE CASE STUDY HERE

What can we learn from this? If you are a scaleup or challenger brand and cannot win on media spend…think of the meaningful action you can take, rather than the ads you make

CONCLUSION

The big question is, did it work? Yep, a hell of a lot. Fridge Raiders went from double-digit sales decline to double-digit growth. It also achieved an ROI over double category norms two. 

Do you work for a startup, scaleup or challenger brand and like more strategies on how to win? Well, you are in luck. I will be running a free workshop next Wednesday at 1PM GMT if you would like to find out more. Spaces are limited, sign up below. Sign up below for free:

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Expect big thinking & small typ0s because i'm #MadeByDyslexia 

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Will Poskett

Co-Founder Defiant