What If Your Competitor’s Biggest Strength Is Your Opportunity?

When you start a business in a category where one brand is almost synonymous with the product itself, you quickly realise that you are not simply competing with another company. You are competing with an idea that already exists in the customer’s mind.

That was one of the realities I encountered while building BrixBuilders. We operate in the building-block category, where LEGO has been part of popular culture for generations. For many people, building blocks immediately bring LEGO to mind. The brand has built an enormous amount of recognition over the years, and that recognition naturally influences how people think about the category.

For a smaller business, the obvious reaction is to ask, “How do we compete with them?” The more I have thought about it, the less useful I find that question. A challenger rarely has the resources to simply replicate everything an established brand does and do it better. The more interesting question is: what if we stop trying to win the same comparison? That shift in thinking changes the strategy completely.

The category leader doesn’t own every customer need

When one company becomes synonymous with a category, it is easy to assume that it also owns the entire category. But a category can be much broader than the brand that dominates it.

Someone buying a building set might care about the subject of the build, the number of pieces, the complexity, the finished model, the amount they want to spend, the experience of assembling it, or simply finding something they have never seen before. Different customers can enter the same category with very different priorities. That is where I think challenger brands have an opportunity.

Instead of asking customers to compare two brands on every possible dimension, a challenger can identify the particular things that matter most to the people it wants to serve and build its proposition around those things.

For BrixBuilders, that has meant looking beyond the assumption that there is only one way to participate in the building-block hobby. We have focused on bringing together alternative building-block brands and making a broader range of sets available to enthusiasts in India. Our proposition is built around choice and the idea of getting more from the hobby without treating the category leader as the only reference point.

The important distinction is that we are not trying to convince someone that the category leader has no value. We are trying to show that there are other ways to define value within the same category.

A challenger doesn’t need to be better at everything

There is a tendency to think that a challenger brand needs to prove that it is superior across the board. That is an incredibly difficult position for a smaller business to take. An established company may have greater awareness, larger distribution, stronger recall, and decades of experience behind its products. Trying to beat it simultaneously on every dimension is likely to leave the challenger constantly playing catch-up.

A more realistic approach is to ask where you can be particularly relevant. That could mean serving a specific audience, offering a wider selection within a niche, solving a particular problem, creating a different product experience, or simply approaching the economics of the category differently.

The objective is not to become a slightly smaller version of the incumbent. It is to give customers a reason to consider a different option.

This is something I have found particularly interesting about building BrixBuilders. The business exists in a category that already has a very strong reference brand, but that doesn’t mean every enthusiast has exactly the same priorities. Once you start looking at the category through the customer’s requirements rather than the incumbent’s position, there is considerably more room to operate.

Price can open the door, but positioning keeps the conversation interesting

Cost is an obvious point of comparison for any challenger, particularly when there is a significant difference between what customers are accustomed to paying and what alternatives can offer. But a lower price alone does not create a distinctive brand.

If that becomes the entire proposition, the conversation eventually becomes very simple: who can sell the same thing for less? That is not a particularly attractive place for a young business to compete.

The more useful question is what the customer can do with the difference.

If a customer has a particular budget, does a different price point allow them to explore a larger build? Does it allow them to try a theme they otherwise would not consider? Does it allow someone who is new to the hobby to participate without making a large initial commitment?

The answer will be different for different customers, but the underlying principle remains the same: price becomes more meaningful when it changes what the customer can access. That is a much stronger conversation than simply saying something is cheaper.

Don’t build your strategy around the incumbent’s weaknesses

Another trap for challenger brands is spending too much time studying what the market leader does badly. Of course, competitive analysis matters. You need to understand the market and the alternatives available to customers. But if your entire strategy is built around finding weaknesses in another company’s proposition, your own identity can become reactive.

You start defining yourself through somebody else.

I think a stronger approach is to look at what customers want and then ask where there is room to build something distinctive around those needs.

That distinction matters because a challenger should eventually be able to explain its existence without mentioning the incumbent. If your entire pitch begins with “we are an alternative to X”, you are still giving X the most important position in the customer’s mind.

The longer-term goal should be for customers to understand what you stand for on your own terms.

The advantage of being small is that you can choose your battlefield

Large brands have to operate at scale. That scale is a huge advantage, but it also means that they have to think about a very broad market. A smaller company doesn’t necessarily have that constraint.

It can decide that a particular audience matters more. It can focus on a particular category within the category. It can experiment with products that would be too niche for a mass-market strategy. It can build its assortment around a specific kind of enthusiast rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

That ability to choose the battlefield is one of the advantages I think smaller businesses should take more seriously.

The question is not necessarily, “How do we get a piece of the entire market?” It can instead be, “Which part of this market can we understand exceptionally well?”

Once you start thinking that way, the size of the incumbent becomes less intimidating. You are no longer trying to fight a much larger company across its entire territory. You are choosing a smaller territory where your proposition can make more sense.

Your competitor can define the category without defining your brand

There is an important distinction between learning from an established player and allowing that player to dictate your strategy. A dominant brand can tell you a lot about how a category works. It can reveal what customers recognise, what products have become popular, and which assumptions have become embedded in the market.

But those observations don’t have to determine what your own brand becomes. In fact, they can help you identify where the category has become predictable.

Every mature category develops conventions. Customers become accustomed to certain products, certain price structures, and certain ways of buying. Those conventions can be useful, but they can also create opportunities for companies willing to question them.

For a challenger, that questioning can be the beginning of differentiation.

You don’t necessarily need to invent an entirely new category. Sometimes you just need to offer a different answer to a question customers have been asking in the same way for years.

Also read: Growing a Brand Without Chasing Every Trend

The most valuable customer may be the one the category overlooks

One of the biggest lessons I have taken from building BrixBuilders is that market size can sometimes be misleading. A large market is attractive on paper, but it doesn’t tell you whether your particular proposition has a meaningful reason to exist within it.

A smaller group of customers with a strong interest and a clear unmet need can be far more valuable to an emerging business than a huge audience that sees little reason to switch. That is particularly relevant for niche businesses.

You don’t necessarily need to persuade an entire category to change its behaviour. You need to find enough people for whom your proposition makes sense, understand why it makes sense to them, and build from there.

As that audience grows, the brand can expand its relevance without losing the reason it was chosen in the first place.

Sometimes the best competitive strategy is not to compete directly

This is probably the biggest change in how I think about challenger brands today. When you look at a dominant incumbent, the natural instinct is to think about how to beat it. But that assumes that both companies have to compete on the same terms.

They don’t.

A challenger can change the terms of the conversation by identifying a different customer need, serving a narrower audience, creating a different value equation, or opening up parts of the category that the dominant brand does not define as strongly.

That doesn’t make the incumbent irrelevant. It simply means that the incumbent is no longer the only reference point.

For BrixBuilders, building in this space has made me realise that the existence of a very strong category leader can actually force a young business to become clearer about its own reason for being. You cannot rely on familiarity, so you have to think carefully about the space you want to occupy and the customers for whom that space matters.

Your biggest competitor may be showing you where the opportunity is

I don’t think the answer for every challenger brand is to position itself against the market leader. Sometimes the right strategy really is to compete directly. Sometimes price is the advantage. Sometimes product superiority is the advantage.

But there is another option that is easy to overlook.

Instead of asking what the incumbent is doing that you need to beat, ask what the incumbent’s position tells you about the market itself.

What assumptions have customers accepted?

What needs are being treated as secondary?

Which audiences are being served only as part of a much larger market?

What would customers choose if they were given a different set of trade-offs?

Those questions can reveal opportunities that a conventional competitor analysis may miss.

Building BrixBuilders has made me less interested in the idea of “beating” a bigger brand and more interested in the idea of finding a space where a smaller brand can genuinely matter.

Because perhaps the point of being a challenger isn’t to become a smaller version of the leader. Perhaps it is to give customers a choice they didn’t realise they were missing.

– Written by Atharva Sawant, Co-Founder of BrixBuilders and its Tech & Marketing Lead. His experience spans AI, pharmaceutical science, product management, and engineering, with previous roles at Monash University, Plaksha, and Indegene.