I sat down recently with Tom Rainsford, one of the people who helped build giffgaff from the inside. Not as a consultant who parachuted in with a deck, but as someone who was there from the beginning, shaping the brand, living inside the mess, and working out what actually mattered.

What came out of that conversation was less a neat brand case study and more a set of principles that most companies never figure out. giffgaff is over 15 years old now. It’s owned by Virgin. The market has moved. But the thinking behind it is, if anything, more relevant today than it was in 2009.

Here are six things Tom said that I can’t stop thinking about.

1. Three words. That's it.

In 2008, Gav Thompson came back from a conference in San Francisco, opened his notebook, and wrote three words. Mutual. Fair. Simple.

That was it. No 40-page strategy document. No brand architecture pyramid. No “purpose ecosystem.” Just three words that described a different way of doing mobile that didn’t yet exist.

Tom described it like this:

Most brands never get to three words. They get to three pages, which are then compressed into a tagline that nobody inside the company believes and nobody outside the company understands. giffgaff started with a principle, not a proposition. The clarity came first, and everything else was built around it.

There’s a lesson in that. Not “write a shorter brief” but something harder: do you actually know what you stand for at the level of a sentence? Not what you say you stand for. What every product decision, pricing decision, and marketing decision actually demonstrates you stand for. giffgaff’s three words were load-bearing. Everything else rested on them.

(A photocopy of the orginal three words on paper!)

2. Pick an enemy, not a fight

giffgaff launched into a market where every major mobile network had terrible net promoter scores. People hated their phone contracts. They hated the asterisks. They hated being trapped in expensive deals with brands that felt like they were taking your money and offering as little as possible in return.

So giffGaff had an enemy. A clear one. The fat cats of mobile.

Their first instinct was to call it out directly. A campaign called “The Man,” all about fat cats and sticking it to them. It didn’t work.

Someone in a research group put it plainly, and Tom has clearly never forgotten it:

“If a brand or a business is going to take a minute of my time, I want to know what you do and what you do well, not what you don’t like or what you think someone else doesn’t do well.”

So they changed. The ethos shifted from disruptive to positively disruptive. Tom described the difference using an analogy:

This is one of the most underrated ideas in brand strategy. You do not need to name your enemy to beat them. You just need to build something so obviously better that the implication is clear. giffgaff never needed to say “Big teleco is ripping you off.” They just needed to be cheaper, simpler, and fairer, and let the contrast do the work.

3. Community as infrastructure, not hype

Right now, every brand deck I read has the word “community” in it. Community-led growth. Building community. Owned community. It gets said so often it has stopped meaning anything.

giffgaff made community the actual operating model of the business.

From day one, there were no call centres. No retail footprint. Members served each other, answered each other’s questions, solved each other’s problems. Tom described the scale of it: “On average, six responses in something like 90 seconds with like a 97% accuracy rate, 24/7, 365, of anything.”

That is not a community strategy. That is a business model. And the difference matters enormously, because it means the community wasn’t decorative. It was functional. It had a job to do that actually needed doing, and it did that job better than a conventional call centre ever could.

Most brands that talk about community mean: we want our customers to feel part of something, and we’d like them to create content for us. giffgaff meant: our customers are the infrastructure. Their participation is what makes the economics work.

The result was a brand behaviour, not a marketing campaign. You cannot fake that. You can write “community-led” in a strategy document but if the community is not actually doing anything structural, if they’re not baked into the product, the pricing, the operations, it’s just a word.

Come see me live!

Building a brand has never been tougher. Change isn’t gradual anymore. It’s exponential. More has shifted in the last decade than the previous century.

At the same time… 67% of ads are skipped. & attention is harder to earn than ever.

That’s why every brand now has to think and act like a challenger.
Not because it’s trendy. Because it’s survival.

I’m running a workshop on this at Brands&Culture in London
📍 May 7th, 2PM

Would love to see you there and all readers off this newsletter get an exclusive 15% discount. Simply use code SPEAKER15 at the link below 👇

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4. Mean it, don’t say it

Here’s where it gets interesting. giffgaff had community as infrastructure. But they also made it the face of the brand.

Tom described going to people’s houses in Cardiff to film them in their bedrooms, then putting that footage on the outdoor boards on their road. Members were in the TV ads. Their tweets ran live inside E4 sponsorship idents, pulled in real time from conversations about the shows giffgaff was sponsoring.

This is what I mean when I say community as brand behaviour. GiffGaff didn’t just use community in their marketing. They made the community the proof of the proposition. Mutual. Fair. Simple. You want evidence? Here are the actual people. Here are their actual faces, on their actual street.

It’s hard to fake that level of commitment to a positioning. Which is exactly why it worked.

5. Create flywheels, not campaigns

Once you see the logic, it’s almost elegantly simple. But it took genuine conviction to build, because every element of it depends on every other element.

Community handles customer service. No call centres, no retail footprint. That keeps costs down. Lower costs mean the pricing stays fair. Fair pricing attracts members who believe in what you’re doing. Members who believe in it tell other people. Member get member drove 50% of acquisition at giffgaff’s peak.

Tom put it well: “The idea was to create an ecosystem.” A dartboard, as he described it, where the most committed members at the bullseye generated so much heat and energy that it radiated outwards, pulling more people in, feeding the whole machine.

Each revolution made the next one stronger. More members meant more community capacity for service. Better service meant lower churn. Lower churn meant better economics. Better economics meant better pricing. Better pricing meant more members.

This is what challenger brands rarely manage to build. They get the contrarian positioning right, they find the enemy, they launch with some noise. But the flywheel requires structural thinking, not just creative thinking. giffgaff worked because the brand, the business model, and the community were not three separate things. They were the same thing, expressed in different ways.

6. Culture is everything

Tom left this for near the end of our conversation, almost as an afterthought. But I think it might be the most important part.

giffgaff operated out of a separate office from O2. It had its own induction, its own internal “ministries” (ministry of good times, ministry of wellbeing, ministry of learning), its own ways of working. And crucially, O2 understood this. They gave GiffGaff the room to be different.

“You had the oxygen to let it work,” Tom said.

Most challenger brands, when they succeed, become interesting to large companies. And large companies, when they buy interesting things, immediately try to make them less interesting. It’s not malicious. It’s just the gravitational pull of the way they operate.

giffgaff worked because the 160th person to join got the same brand induction as the 20th. Because the internal values were as load-bearing as the external ones. Because the people who ran it, Mike Fairman and Ash Schofield among them, protected the culture as fiercely as they protected the P&L.

You can have a great proposition, a clever flywheel, and a sharp enemy. But if the organisation doesn’t live the values internally, the whole thing eventually curdles. People can tell. They always can.

Conclusion

GiffGaff didn’t grow because of a single campaign or clever positioning. It grew because everything worked together.

It started with radical clarity, three words that actually guided decisions. It found an enemy, but won by building something better rather than picking a fight. It turned community into infrastructure, not a marketing idea, making customers part of the business model itself. It then proved the brand through behaviour, not claims, using real members as living evidence. From there, it built a self-reinforcing flywheel, where product, pricing, and advocacy fed each other. And underpinning it all was a culture strong enough to protect the model, even inside a larger organisation.

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Here’s a number that should haunt every CMO who’s ever stood in a boardroom and declared a “bold new vision.”

$88 billion.

That’s what Meta spent across seven years on the Metaverse. More than the inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo programme. More than the GDP of several small countries. All of it poured into a product that, at its lowest point, had an estimated 900 daily active users.

Nine hundred people.

Yet the Metaverse didn’t fail because the technology wasn’t ready. It failed because almost every fundamental principle of brand strategy, consumer behaviour, and market creation was violated simultaneously. And the people doing the violating were too deep in their own narrative to notice. This is the story of how that happens. And more usefully, how you stop it happening to you.

You Can’t Buy a Category Into Existence

The first and most important thing to understand about the Metaverse is that it failed a test most brands never even run. Positioning theory is pretty simple in principle: you need to occupy a specific, ownable place in the mind of a consumer. That position needs to be clear, relevant, and differentiated against alternatives they already understand.

“The Metaverse” was none of these.

When a term means everything, it means nothing. Anything from a VR chat app to a lightly gamified website was calling itself a metaverse. Meta’s own employees reportedly couldn’t agree on what Horizon Worlds was supposed to be. YouTube? A casual World of Warcraft? A platform? A game? A social space? All of the above and therefore none of the above.

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have a useful concept here: Category Entry Points. The idea is that brands grow when they’re mentally available at the moments consumers actually need them. Before a purchase, before a decision, before a craving…the brand that comes to mind first wins. The Metaverse failed this test catastrophically. There was no established consumer need-state that “enter a virtual world via a head-mounted device” addressed. No moment of life that it mapped onto. No “I need this right now” that it answered.

Compare that with how Apple positioned the iPhone in 2007. Apple didn’t invent a new category. It entered an existing one, mobile phones, and redefined it from a software experience perspective. Consumers already had a mental hook to hang it on. Netflix didn’t create the category of entertainment; it entered home video and expanded slowly into streaming. The Metaverse tried to create a category, sell the category, and be the only product in it, simultaneously.

And then there’s the naming. Renaming a three-billion-user company after a concept from a 1992 Neal Stephenson science fiction novel, one in which the protagonist delivers pizza for the mafia, is not category creation. It is category confusion. The word “meta” comes from Greek meaning “beyond.” Beyond what, exactly? Beyond social media? Beyond reality? Beyond coherent product strategy?

The Gap Between Promise and Product

In October 2021, Zuckerberg held a 75-minute presentation selling a vision of the future: photorealistic holograms, teleportation to concerts, a seamless virtual economy.

What he actually delivered was Horizon Worlds. Described by most who saw it as a low-quality video game from the early 2000s. Empty worlds. Basic graphics. And avatars. Without. Legs.

This is where expectancy violation theory comes in. When brands create expectations and fail to meet them, consumers don’t just feel disappointed. They feel betrayed. That betrayal drives vindictive behaviour. Negative reviews. Public mockery. The kind of earned media you desperately don’t want.

A year into the platform’s life, Zuckerberg held a dedicated event to announce that avatars would now have legs. The internet reacted with appropriate incredulity. It later emerged the demonstration had been generated using a motion capture suit, not actual VR technology. A company that had spent approximately $10 billion at that point couldn’t render legs, and had faked a video claiming otherwise.

That’s not just a technical failure, its one of trust failing.

The Wrong Engagement for the Wrong Audience

Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: the Metaverse required the opposite of what digital consumers actually do.

The dominant paradigm of digital consumption is passive and mobile-first. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube — all of them thrive on passive consumption. You pick up your phone. You scroll. You absorb. The friction is near-zero.

The Metaverse required you to strap a large plastic device to your face, create and customise an avatar, navigate a disorienting environment, and then, upon arrival , find somewhere empty to stand. Over half of Quest headsets reportedly went unused after six months. A retention rate worse than gym subcriptions.

The Metaverse also assumed people wanted a virtual identity separate from their real one. That consumers craved a persistent digital self expressed through avatars and virtual clothing. The actual evidence pointed the other way. The platforms that built digital identity successfully, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, did so by amplifying real identity. Rather than replacing it.

Forced Demand vs. Earned Demand

The most instructive contrast in modern technology history is between the Metaverse and Fortnite.

Fortnite launched in 2017 as a free-to-play game on hardware people already owned. It grew because it solved a problem its users actually had: something exciting to do with their friends that was free, accessible, and worked whether you were casual or competitive. Travis Scott’s in-game concert drew 12 million concurrent players , a digital event that arrived organically from within a product users already loved.

The Metaverse was top-down corporate narrative. No cultural movement was asking for it. No community of users was clamouring to conduct their social lives through floating torsos on a space station.

The word “metaverse” appeared 449 times in third-quarter 2021 earnings calls. Not because 449 companies had discovered an organic consumer need, but because a powerful company had announced a thesis and an entire class of analysts, consultants, and executives needed to be seen standing on the right side of it.

This is the difference between forced demand and earned demand. Social media, gaming ecosystems, the creator economy…all earned demand. They attracted users by solving problems people actually had, then grew through network effects once real human behaviour had already occurred. The Metaverse tried to shortcut this with executive declaration and $88 billion in capital. Seventy percent of startups fail due to premature scaling before product-market fit. Meta pulled that off at a scale no startup could dream of.

The Poisoned Well

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say plainly: the Metaverse wasn’t launched by a neutral party.

It was launched by a company that had just endured one of its worst press cycles in history. A whistleblower testifying before the US Senate about profits over safety. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic circling. A brand whose primary cultural association was surveillance and designed addiction.

And Meta’s response was to ask users to invite biometric sensors into their homes, strap cameras to their faces, and trust the company with their most intimate physical environments.

Brand trust research distinguishes between performance-based failures (product problems) and value-based transgressions (ethical breaches). The value-based ones take significantly longer to recover from and their effects spread through social networks like a multiplier. Meta had committed both simultaneously.

Run a simple thought experiment: if the same product, same technology, had been launched by Nintendo, a brand with deep goodwill among gaming communities, strong IP, and zero data scandal history, would adoption have looked different? Almost certainly yes. The poisoned well problem can’t be solved with marketing. It has to be solved with product design and brand rehabilitation. Meta had done neither.

Four Lessons That Actually Travel

The Metaverse is an extreme case. But the failure pattern is common. And the lessons are useful to anyone building a brand, launching a product, or trying to create market demand.

1. Map the need before naming the category. Before you name a category, find the consumer job-to-be-done it addresses. Ask: what specific problem does this solve, and when do people feel it? If the answer is vague or speculative, you’re not creating a category, you’re constructing a fiction.

2. Retention is your honesty metric. Monthly churn among first-time Horizon Worlds users was evident within months of launch. Meta scaled the narrative anyway. Retention speaks before revenue, before press, before analyst forecasts. Marketing built on top of broken retention is an accelerant, not a solution.

3. Never futurise your positioning. When a brand’s primary positioning lives in “this is what we will become,” it creates expectations the current product will inevitably fail to meet and gives consumers no reason to engage now. Effective positioning anchors in a present benefit that’s already real.

4. Ask who’s actually asking for this. The movements that produced durable platforms all arrived bottom-up. The desire to connect, to play, to create and be seen, all present in human behaviour before the platforms existed to monetise it. Platform builders channelled demand. They didn’t manufacture it. When investment banks, consulting firms, and CMOs all endorse a thesis simultaneously, it’s worth asking: who, outside this room, is actually asking for this?

The deeper question the Metaverse leaves behind isn’t technological. It’s human.

What do people actually want from the digital spaces they inhabit? The answer, consistently, is connection…but on their own terms, at their own friction level, in the identity they already have.

Any future that respects that answer has a chance. Any future that ignores it will spend $88 billion discovering the same truth.

Jack Daniel’s is one of those rare brands that hardly needs an introduction. It is iconic, instantly recognisable, and deeply embedded in culture. But that kind of fame creates its own challenge. How do you modernise a brand like that without stripping away the very things that made people love it in the first place?

That was the challenge Sophia Angelis…

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For decades, the sportswear category has looked almost impossible to break into. Nike dominates through scale, storytelling and cultural mythology. Adidas blends sport with street culture and fashion. Between them, they control the majority of global market share, retail space and consumer attention. For any new entrant, the odds are brutally stacked ag…

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For decades, KFC was fried chicken in America. It wasn’t just a fast food chain. It was the reference point. The gold standard. The bucket on the family table. The taste people associated with comfort, nostalgia and Americana.

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For most of its history, New Balance had a very clear reputation. It was the brand of practicality. Reliable running shoes, solid craftsmanship and comfort above all else. But culturally, it was known for something else entirely: the “dad shoe.” The sort of trainer you’d see worn by middle-aged men mowing the lawn or grilling in suburban backyards. Functional, dependable and unfussy. While Nike dominated through superstar athletes and Adidas rode waves of street culture and music, New Balance stayed firmly in its lane as a performance running brand. That positioning earned the company credibility and trust, but it rarely translated into cultural heat or broader commercial growth.

And yet over the last decade something remarkable has happened. Without the bombastic marketing budgets of its competitors, New Balance has quietly transformed itself into one of the fastest-growing sportswear brands in the world. In 2024 the company reported $7.8 billion in global revenue, up from $6.5 billion the year before. Those figures still pale compared to Nike’s $51 billion or Adidas’ $26 billion, but the trajectory tells a very different story. Rather than competing purely on scale, New Balance has behaved like a challenger brand, redefining how people see the business and unlocking powerful marketing growth along the way.

What makes the New Balance story particularly instructive is that the company didn’t radically reinvent its product. Instead, it gradually reinterpreted what the brand meant. Several lessons from that transformation stand out…

Duality Can Be a Strength

One of the most revealing lines ever written about New Balance appeared during the launch of the 990v5 sneaker. The ad read: “Worn by supermodels in London and dads in Ohio.” In a single sentence, the brand captured something incredibly powerful. It reframed a stereotype and turned it into a strategic asset.

Instead of running away from the “dad shoe” label, New Balance leaned into it and reinterpreted what it meant. Comfort became credibility. Practicality became authenticity. Rather than chasing the positioning of competitors like Nike or Adidas, the company embraced its unique identity. That mindset is a hallmark of a strong challenger brand: instead of imitating category leaders, it reframes what makes it different and turns that difference into advantage.

Today, New Balance comfortably exists in two worlds at once. It is both fashion and function, culture and performance, streetwear and everyday footwear. The same sneaker might appear on a Paris runway one week and on a suburban dad the next. For most brands that contrast would feel confusing, but for New Balance it became a defining strategic strength. By embracing cultural duality, the brand unlocked both cultural relevance and sustained commercial growth.

Cultural Investment Beats Transactional Marketing

Behind the scenes, another major shift was happening in how New Balance approached brand building and marketing growth. For years the company invested heavily in transactional tactics such as paid social media and search advertising. These channels are powerful tools for driving short-term sales, but they rarely build lasting brand meaning.

Eventually New Balance recognised a limitation of this approach. Performance marketing can sell shoes, but it cannot build culture.

So the company shifted its strategy. Rather than prioritising short-term conversion tactics, New Balance began investing far more heavily in storytelling, athlete partnerships and long-term brand building. This pivot towards brand investment accelerated both cultural relevance and long-term commercial growth.

The results are visible in the athletes the company now partners with. New Balance’s roster includes tennis champion Coco Gauff, baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani, NBA champions like Kawhi Leonard and Jamal Murray, and emerging basketball prodigy Cooper Flagg.

Each ambassador represents a different sporting world, but collectively they elevate the credibility of the brand. As one New Balance executive described it, “a rising tide lifts all ships.” When one athlete succeeds on the world stage, the entire brand benefits. These partnerships do more than promote individual products—they reinforce the cultural legitimacy that fuels sustained marketing growth for a challenger brand competing against global giants.

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Hype Drives Attention. Core Products Drive Revenue

Athletes are only part of the equation. New Balance has also become one of the most strategic collaborators in the sneaker industry.

In recent years the brand has partnered with influential designers and fashion labels such as Joe Freshgoods and Aimé Leon Dore. These collaborations consistently generate excitement and often rank among the most sought-after sneaker releases of the year.

But these limited collaborations are not the core business model. They serve a strategic role: generating cultural heat and attention.

Limited releases create scarcity, spark conversation and position the brand within fashion culture. Yet the real commercial engine sits elsewhere—in the general-release products available at scale. These are the shoes worn every day by millions of customers and the products that ultimately drive long-term commercial growth.

New Balance has also embraced the mechanics of modern drop culture. Timed releases and culturally reactive merchandise allow the brand to participate in real-time moments. When Shohei Ohtani achieved his historic 50/50 baseball milestone, New Balance immediately released a commemorative shirt celebrating the achievement. The product sold out within hours.

The item itself was relatively simple. But the speed of response allowed fans to feel part of the moment.

In other words, hype creates attention. Core products sustain the business. For a challenger brand, this balance between cultural heat and scalable product is essential to unlocking long-term marketing growth.

Long-Term Thinking Protects Authenticity

Perhaps the most underrated advantage behind New Balance’s rise is structural rather than strategic.

Unlike publicly traded competitors, New Balance remains privately owned and controlled by chairman Jim Davis. That independence allows the company to think very differently about growth.

Public companies often operate under intense quarterly pressure to deliver immediate results. New Balance instead plans on much longer timelines. Strategic initiatives are often designed to play out over six to ten years.

When entering a new category, the company is comfortable simply breaking even after six years. That level of patience is rare in modern corporate environments, but it provides a powerful competitive advantage.

By thinking long term, New Balance avoids chasing short-term trends that might dilute its identity. Instead it can steadily invest in brand equity, cultural partnerships and product credibility. Over time that approach compounds into something powerful: a challenger brand achieving sustained marketing growth while protecting the authenticity that drives lasting commercial growth.

The Bigger Lesson

New Balance didn’t win by reinventing sneakers. It won by reinterpreting the brand.

By embracing its heritage rather than rejecting it, investing in culture instead of pure performance marketing, using hype to support scalable products, and thinking in decades rather than quarters, the company quietly transformed itself into one of the most culturally relevant sportswear brands in the world.

And in today’s attention economy, changing what a brand means is often far more powerful than changing what it makes.

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Will Poskett

Founder, Defiant

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How? Well they build what i call a cult brand. One with a strong sene of gravity, that sucks consumers in. A brand that doesn’t just invite you in, but makes you feel complicit in the brand story unfolding. And at a time at a time when collective viewing is dissolving and attention is evaporating, the show’s communications strategy stands as a masterclass in modern marketing..

Curious?
Let’s dive into the upside down.

Mystery beats message

Every great cult begins by building intrigue, a quiet rupture in the ordinary, and Stranger Things understood exactly how to do this. Before a full trailer ever surfaced, Netflix led with intentional absence: a campaign built from static, half-seconds, and signals that felt slightly misaligned. A kind of narrative austerity. teasing just enough to create a disturbance but never enough to give away the full answer.

@3rddufferno bc why does will look so exhausted in season 5 i’m scared. #strangerthings #strangerthings5 #willbyers #noahschnapp #vecna #jamiecampbellbower #netflix #fyp #viral

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Conspiracy theories where awash across socials for months leading up to the Season 5 trailer

By staying quiet for so long, deliberately quiet, the brand created the perfect kind of oxygen. It gave fans space to gather, speculate, and let their curiosity grow unchecked. So when the official trailers finally arrived, they didn’t land on empty ground. They hit an audience already primed to react, and the response was immediate: a full-blown frenzy.

What followed wasn’t a typical promo cycle either. It was a trail of clues scattered across the internet. On TikTok, tiny clips turned into group investigations. One frame, one gesture, one visual glitch and suddenly the comments section behaved like a war room. Everyone believed they’d spotted something others had missed. Over on Reddit, the speculation went even deeper. Fans brightened screenshots, isolated shadows, treated reflections like meaningful symbols. Theories didn’t just appear; they multiplied, collided, and evolved into even stranger interpretations.

The brilliance of this approach was simple: the accuracy didn’t matter. The act of hunting for meaning did. Netflix didn’t just release trailers they sparked a collective investigation. And fans weren’t watching; they were decoding.

What made it work wasn’t secrecy but engineered ambiguity. Netflix nudged the crowd without ever confirming or denying anything. Poster drops came with no captions. Character teasers lingered on background objects instead of the characters themselves. Even Google joined in, flipping search results into the Upside Down. Everywhere you looked, it felt like there was another hint, another code, another doorway into the story. Fandom shifted from entertainment to practice.

And the best part? All of that activity (commenting, sharing, theorizing )pushed Stranger Things to the top of every algorithm. The result? the internet didn’t just talk about the show; it was consumed by it….creating a boat load of fame (the biggest driver of brand growth).

Attack cities, not channels

If the online campaign was about conspiratorial intimacy, the real-world campaign was about scale. Loud, physical, and impossible to ignore. Stranger Things didn’t simply appear in cities such as London, Madrid, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo…it took them over.

London was the first major breach. Overnight, billboards began glitching in real time. Screens flickered as if a signal were breaking, then shifted into eerie red portals that looked straight out of the Upside Down. Posters were hung upside down. Cracks appeared in walls as though something underneath was trying to break through. Red light washed over familiar stations and streets. For commuters, it didn’t feel like advertising. It felt like an intrusion, Hawkins leaking into the city and blurring the line between fiction and reality.

Then came WSQK: The Squawk, the boldest moment of all. Netflix launched a fully functioning 1980s-style radio station that broadcast across London. It played era-specific music, aired fake Hawkins commercials, and featured DJs who sounded like they lived in 1985. Every detail, from the station van to the branding, felt true to the Stranger Things universe. Fans began wondering if the radio station itself was a clue about the season’s plot, and that speculation naturally became part of the campaign.

This pattern repeated around the world, each city getting its own interpretation. Madrid turned into a multi-week Hawkins takeover, with streets and storefronts transformed into scenes from the show. Los Angeles held the emotional “One Last Ride” bike rally, a nostalgic sendoff echoing the signature way the kids of Hawkins traveled. New York delivered a national moment: a full Stranger Things float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, complete with Foreigner performing atop a glowing, ominous Hawkins Lab. These cities didn’t feel like settings for ads. They felt temporarily possessed. Even places that rarely get large-scale pop culture activations, like the Riyadh desert or the neon heart of Tokyo, became gathering spots for screenings, fan events, and immersive experiences.

The above approach reminded me a lot of what we used to do at Wieden & Kennedy London when working on Nike. We called it a city attack, a way to make a budget feel much bigger by concentrating spend in a few core areas and going big. It effectively deepens immersion and makes the brand feel much larger than it actually is.

Expand via fandoms

In a previous episode of Behind the Brands, we explored how PerfectTed used ‘Little Bigness’ to scale fast…winning one tight geographic group (women aged 18–35 in London) before expanding outward. Stranger Things took the same principle but applied it differently. Instead of geographic dominance, it pursued fandom dominance. It infiltrated, scaled, and ultimately owned one micro-community at a time, interest by interest, subculture by subculture, until the sum of those little wins created something that felt culturally enormous.

Primark’s streetwear line made Hawkins High apparel part of everyday wardrobes. Nike and Converse released footwear that blurred the line between costume and fashion statement, transforming sneaker drops into lore-encoded artifacts. CoverGirl launched a Stranger Things makeup collection that didn’t feel like fan-service merch; it felt like an editorial interpretation of the Upside Down’s palette. D&D released game sets tying directly into the Hellfire Club mythology, giving tabletop players a reason to deepen their narrative connection. Even food brands…Eggo, Doritos, Gatorade….didn’t just plaster logos on packaging; they resurrected discontinued flavors, created fictional crossover products, and leaned fully into the universe’s 1980s heart.

Target went the furthest. More than 150 products, complete with in-store activations that transformed aisles into mini-Hawkins experiences. Plush toys, décor, snacks, apparel, electronics—everything softened into nostalgia or sharpened into thematic mimicry. A trip to Target during launch season felt less like shopping and more like stepping through a curated portal into an alternate timeline.

Brands often talk about “meeting people where they are.” Stranger Things met people where they identify. That’s the difference. And because each subculture is inherently social, the campaign didn’t need to shout. It simply needed to show up wearing insider clothing. Fans did the amplification.

You see in a cult led strategy, the goal is omnipresence. To feel like you are everywhere all at once. One that infiltrates fandom by fandom…growing masss reach in the process.

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Owning a moment

Cult brands don’t just release a show.
Cult brands own a cultural moment

The release schedule was the masterstroke: four episodes at Thanksgiving, three at Christmas, and the finale on New Year’s Eve. It positioned Stranger Things not as content to binge, but as the show to watch this holiday season. By spacing the episodes across holidays, Netflix created a cadence of anticipation. Family gatherings turning into viewing parties, holiday downtime merging with narrative immersion, and the countdown to the finale aligning with the countdown to the new year.

And it didn’t stop there. Global fan screenings turned premieres into communal rituals, from Leicester Square to Stockholm to Tokyo. Fans showed up in costume, participated in themed activities, and watched alongside cast members. The experience felt less like a screening and more like a pilgrimage. Meanwhile, the six-continent experiential rollout ensured that no corner of the world was excluded. Every city had its own ritual, its own memory, its own way of saying goodbye.

The brilliance in all this was the emotional pacing. Stranger Things didn’t ask fans to marathon episodes alone on their couches at midnight. It invited them to savor, to gather, to experience the ending together. And in a world where collective viewership has been in decline this felt not only magical but memorable.

Four principles to learn from…

To wrap up, here are the big takeaways from Netflix’s cult-led launch playbook:

1. Mystery beats message
Stranger Things didn’t flood the internet with information. It held back. That deliberate quiet created space for curiosity to grow and for fan conspiracies to flourish. By the time the trailers dropped, they didn’t just inform…they detonated. The lesson: mystery can be more powerful than messaging.

2. Attack cities, not channels
Instead of thinly spreading budget across markets, Netflix concentrated spend in major cultural hotspots—London, Madrid, New York, LA—turning them into living extensions of the Upside Down. This “city attack” approach makes a brand feel far bigger than its actual footprint. Challenger brands can borrow this: go deep in fewer places, and the world will assume you’re everywhere.

3. Expand via fandoms
Rather than chasing broad audiences, Netflix embedded Stranger Things into existing subcultures—streetwear, beauty, gaming, nostalgia food, collectibles. Each partnership unlocked a new tribe. The strategy wasn’t reach; it was relevance. Cult brands grow fastest when they move through communities that already care about something.

4. Own a moment
The staggered holiday release, global fan screenings, and six-continent activations turned the final season into a ritual, not a content dump. Netflix didn’t give fans episodes; it gave them shared occasions. Challenger brands can learn from this pacing: engineer moments people gather around, not just assets they scroll past.

A brand isn’t your logo, product, or guidelines. It’s a feeling, the instinct people get when they hear your name. It’s your reputation, your story, and the reason someone picks you over the rest.

Seen through that lens, creators are brands. They spark emotion, build trust, tell stories, and stay top of mind long before anyone’s ready to buy.

Which is exa…

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Sound good?
Well grab a matcha, settle in, and let’s break it down.

Join our free community chat by hitting the button below and singing up to the Substack app. I’ll be around to answer any Qs you have or take suggestions for further content…

Product led strategy

Before Kelly arrived, PerfectTed was already on a tear. It had grown from £10,000 a month in revenue in early 2023 to an annualised run rate of £50 million just a couple of years later. The driver behind this early success? Amazing founders and product market fit. The three founders are, in Kelly’s words, “incredibly intelligent, very ambitious and driven, but in very different ways.” Marissa is a creative genius and brand visionary; Teddie is, as Kelly put it, “the best salesperson I’ve ever met”; and Levi is the operational and financial anchor who keeps the whole machine running. They play in their lanes, trust one another’s strengths, and together create a leadership team far more powerful than the sum of its parts. Best of all? Each of them understands the power of brand.

Kelly is clear, beyond the brilliant founders, PerfectTed’s success wasn’t luck. It was textbook product market fit that leveraged the power of brand. You see Matcha already existed in the market, but it wasn’t accessible. It was niche, expensive, and branded for health die-hards rather than the younger, anxious, caffeine-sensitive generation who actually needed it most. PerfectTed inverted that model, making matcha more accessible (and desirable) for everyone.

That accessibility, and the price difference, was driven by a brilliant supply-chain strategy. The founders built a model that allowed them to offer high-quality matcha at a much lower price point, and then wrapped it in a bright, disruptive & distinctive brand. A brand that pops on shelf and truly stands out.

What’s most interesting, however, is how this product–market fit ultimately shaped their purpose. A purpose that now guides everything the business does moving forward.

All in on brand

I have long said to many of our clients, from Beavertown Brewery to Clipper Teas , that the best brand strategies are born from a simple product truth. Of course you want to tap into big cultural and consumer tensions, but before all of that you need to ground the brand in a unique truth about the business.

PerfectTed’s purpose is born from a simple product truth, but also allows them to play a much bigger cultural and fame-worthy role. Their purpose? To spread positive energy and make matcha accessible.

On one hand, the idea of spreading positive energy comes directly from the product truth and naturally expands into culture. Matcha delivers a smoother, steadier, calmer kind of caffeine. No crashes, no jitters, no anxiety spikes. At the same time, it ladders up into a much bigger cultural conversation: rising anxiety levels in the UK (and globally), and the growing awareness of how coffee and energy drinks can exacerbate it. It’s a widespread human truth that many of us recognise including one of PerfectTed’s founders, Marissa.

On one hand, “spreading positive energy” comes straight from the product truth. Matcha gives you a smoother, calmer lift — no crashes, no jitters, no anxiety spikes. And that taps directly into a much bigger cultural moment: rising anxiety levels and growing awareness of how coffee and energy drinks can make it worse. It’s a very real, very relatable tension — one that PerfectTed’s founder Marissa experienced first-hand.

On the other hand, “making matcha accessible” reflects their mission to open up a category that used to feel niche and intimidating. PerfectTed lowers the barriers, simpler rituals, lower price points, easier formats, so matcha becomes something anyone can pick up, use and actually enjoy.

They bring this brand to life across every touchpoint of the business. They’ve made matcha more accessible through the formats they’ve created, the merchandising, and the product design. Cans for convenience. RTDs. Instant pistachio latte powders designed so you don’t need a whisk, a bowl, or a ritual. And soon, single-serve sachets clipped onto supermarket shelves so the barrier to trial drops to zero.

And then there’s how they bring positive energy to life. Through their tone, their activations, their events, and their culture. PerfectTed doesn’t do slow-breathing, soft-lighting, “wellness” energy. Their energy is high-tempo, vibrant, punchy, joyful. “The feeling we want people to experience is more like an ice plunge than a meditation session,” Kelly said. You see it in the music-led events, the dynamic content, the humour, the bold packaging, the way employees stand rather than sit at Taste of London. It’s not wellness… it’s positive energy.

And everything they do is wrapped in their bold, green & distinctive brand colours. From packaging and supermarket promotions to the merch employees wear.

Little bigness: owning a small world first

Perhaps one of the smartest things PerfectTed has done is what Kelly calls ‘Little bigness’. Simply rather than trying to be everything, everywhere, all at once, they went narrow and deep.

When it came to Little Bigness, they had a clear focus. For around eight months, that focus was almost obsessive. “We focused on 18–35-year-old women in London,” she said. “Now our brand awareness in London among that audience is around 85% …on par with brands like Trip and Dash, actually about 10% higher.”

Personally, I love this approach. It’s super smart. As a challenger brand, you simply cannot spend enough to get mass reach and compete with mainstream brands. That’s why this model works so well. You still prioritise reach…but you do it in a far more focused, efficient way. You win one core group, then the next, then the next. It’s effectively a step ladder, where you incrementally build mass reach over time.

And the ambition doesn’t stop here. The big challenge now, however, is to ratch up even further and help PerfectTed go even more mainstream. They have brilliant disruption and physical availability… the challenge now is how do they get their mental availability to catch up.

New models of fame

Long-time readers of this newsletter will know I tend to bang on about one thing: fame is the single biggest driver of brand growth. What I love about PerfectTed is that they aren’t following the old playbook of fame ( big budgets, top-down TV spots, and media plans only a holding company could afford). They’re inventing a completely new model. A new kind of fame engine.

They’re building something far more modern and far more scalable for a challenger brand: a human-powered fame machine. As Kelly told me, “We talk about H2H… human to human. Ultimately, people build emotional connections with other people, not with brands.” And that philosophy defines every part of how PerfectTed shows up in culture. Instead of polishing corporate stories, they put real humans, founders, staff, even the office dog, at the centre. Their employee-generated content engine on LinkedIn is one of the strongest in the UK food-and-drink space, with up to 30 employees posting every day.

It’s also a system designed for joy, not obligation. The team runs a weekly “LinkedIn of the Week” ceremony, complete with confetti cannons, giant novelty cheques, and a founders’ handshake for the winner. It turns content creation into a cultural ritual. Keeping energy high, morale up, and the brand constantly in the feed. They’ve even built comedy alter-egos to cut through LinkedIn’s self-serious tone: the company dog now has her own profile as Head of Morale, for example.

But PerfectTed’s fame engine isn’t just employee-led, it’s being institutionalised. Kelly is building an in-house content studio that operates more like a meme newsroom than a traditional marketing department. Graphic designers, videographers, editors, storytellers, PR operators and virality specialists are all part of the mix. The ambition is simple but bold: create 10x the content output of most brands without relying on paid influencers or big ATL campaigns. As Kelly put it, “I don’t need a big budget, I need a big team…one that is focused on earned-first attention and is creatively driven.”

I love this approach because it mirrors exactly what we’ve have recently built at Defiant. A model where we match big-agency with BAFTA-winning comedy writers, influencers, meme-makers and creators to give brands outsized fame and market share.

Enjoying this post? Then join over 9,000 people who read this newsletter. Each week we breakdown the strategies behind the world’s most successful challenger & creator led brands.

Four principles challenger brands can learn from PerfectTed

To wrap up, here are the big takeaways I’d pull out of Kelly’s playbook:

1. Out-create, don’t outspend
PerfectTed knows it will never outspend Red Bull or the big FMCGs. So it’s built a culture around out-creating them instead. From “London Matcha Festival” stunts to LinkedIn dogs and novelty cheques, the internal mantra is clear: do something creative enough that it earns attention.

2. Invest in content before you think you need it
Most brands leave content until later. PerfectTed treated it as foundational. That’s why Kelly’s first hires weren’t just managers – they were creators. “The brands that are really winning today are telling a story about how they’re building the business,” she said. “If you don’t have content from the beginning, you lose a lot of the most interesting parts of that story.”

3. Practice “little bigness”
Rather than chasing everyone, everywhere, they went deep with a very specific audience: 18–35-year-old women in London. Becoming ubiquitous inside a small, high-value community gave them the momentum – and the confidence – to scale wider.

4. Build on brand, not performance
Perhaps the boldest move of all: they’ve never relied on performance marketing to grow. Everything is anchored in brand – from product (formats, price points, flavours) to distinctive assets, to founder-led storytelling and employee content. In a world where many early-stage brands become addicted to ROAS dashboards, PerfectTed is a reminder that conviction in brand can still build serious commercial muscle.

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