Nothing Electronics, Who Gives a Crap and Snag Rank Highly as UK’s Top Challenger Brands

Temu, Brewdog, and Ryanair have been crowned the UK’s leading ‘trouble-making’ brands, according to the inaugural Trouble Making 100 (TM100) report from creative and media agency Trouble Maker. The new study challenges conventional wisdom, revealing a significant disconnect between the brands marketers celebrate and the ones consumers genuinely choose.

While industry heavyweights dominate the top spots, the high ranking of upstarts Nothing Electronics, Who Gives a Crap and Snag highlights the success of new brands with unique perspectives on their category.

This first-of-its-kind ranking uses real consumer perspectives, not industry chatter, to provide a new playbook for marketers aiming to win hearts, minds and wallets in a challenging economic climate.

Topping the inaugural rankings, Temu, Brewdog, and Ryanair demonstrate a diverse mix of audience appeal and challenger characteristics, from brand personality to behaviour, underscoring that there’s no single way to be a challenger brand in any market.

The report also shows that the characteristics of successful challenger brands evolve across life stages, revealing a delicate balance between the impact of personality and meaningful industry disruption, and how different generations react and respond to these factors in different ways.

Finally, the results highlight a notable “Challenger Gap”, with much-lauded industry darlings such as Surreal, Oatly, KFC, Greggs and Specsavers, typically associated with “disruptive” behaviour, ranking lower than other brands with less coverage in the marketing press.

This finding reinforces several key themes from the report:

• The Challenger Gap: The brands that our industry frequently spotlights aren’t necessarily the ones real consumers think are the best challengers. For example, Oatly (TM100 #51) has 24 headline mentions across Marketing Week, The Drum, Campaign and Little Black Book in the last 18 months, compared to just 5 for Who Gives A Crap (TM100 #8) across the same period
• The Challenger Media Touchpoints: Clever billboards may impress us in our industry echo chambers, but just 3.8% of consumers associate their favourite challenger brand with out-of-home. Social media is the true challenger battleground, with 30% spotting challenger brands there (rising to 54% among 18-24s)
• Digital Disruption and Challenger Ratings: Digital disruption doesn’t equal challenger perception. In fact, companies that have changed entire industries (such as Duolingo and Monzo) came out lower than other digital brands in the study, such as SHEIN and Temu
• Safe is Risky: It appears it is riskier not to challenge category conventions and take risks in communications, as two-thirds of UK consumers believe brands “play it too safe,” a figure that climbs to 75% among 18-35s
• The Price of Rebellion: 51% of UK consumers identify as ‘rebel-minded,’ and 67% of this group are more likely to buy from challengers. That’s 17 million Britons, representing a £4bn+ weekly spending opportunity for savvy challenger brands

“As an industry, we love discussing, analysing and anointing challenger brands, but it struck us that no one had ever asked real people what they think makes a great challenger brand,” said Pete Jackson, head of planning at Trouble Maker. “The ambition for the TM100 is to capture what resonates with people and turn those insights into a practical playbook for making trouble in your market.”

“This first study is just the start of what we hope will be a multi-year journey, exploring trouble-making through the eyes of UK consumers and creating a bellwether for challenger brands in the UK.”

Jonathan Fraser, chief creative officer at Trouble Maker, added, “Creativity without courage doesn’t cut it anymore. The TM100 shows that trouble-making isn’t just a nice-to-have attitude, but reinforces what we already know - that it’s a real driver of business value.

“Few brands win solely through media scale and even fewer are market leaders. The rest can only win hearts (and wallets) by being brave enough to break category rules, take risks and stand for something. That’s both the challenge and the opportunity for marketers today.”

The TM100 ranks brands of all sizes, from household names to smaller start-ups, across diverse sectors including media and entertainment, apparel, tech, food and drink, and FMCG. The methodology combines prompted awareness scores with ad spend data over the last 18 months, ensuring small and large brands compete on an even playing field. Based on responses from the UK public, more than 400 brands were identified and narrowed to a Top 100, and then ranked using the new TM Index™.

Visit here or email TM100@troublemaker.co.uk to access the full TM100 report, discuss the findings, or see where your brand ranks.