The Underdog Advantage™

Uncovering the secrets for marketing success

Our Book

The Underdog Advantage™

We believe in The Underdog Advantage™ so much we wrote a book about it. It’s our planning approach that identifies your underdog traits and puts them into strategies that help you win and tactics that make you stand out.

Because you don’t beat the competition by doing what they do.

You beat them by changing the odds.

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Packed with fascinating stories, eye-opening case-studies, and lateral advice, this book will give you an advantage that sheer scale and money can’t buy.

Andy Nairn, Founder of Lucky Generals, Author of Go Luck Yourself
I can’t recommend this book enough to anyone looking to back themselves. Read it, learn from it, share it – used wisely, the lessons in this book will become your unfair advantage.

Becky McKinlay, Managing Director, Oystercatchers
A carefully curated collection of ideas packed with stories of human courage, boldness, and smart opportunism. Highly useful, hugely entertaining, full of wisdom.

Orlando Wood, Chief Creative Office, System One. Author, Lemon and Look Out.
This fabulously entertaining and healthily subversive book will give you a black belt in corporate jiu-jitsu. Although technically it’s a red belt in jiu-jitsu.

Rory Sutherland, TED Global speaker, Author of Alchemy, and Vice Chairman, Ogilvy UK
Entertainingly and powerfully restates the case for human ingenuity and the relationship between risk and reward.

Tom Knox, Chairman, History of Advertising Trust, Former IPA President

Interrogate

We question the problem before trying to solve it.

The result is a tightly defined challenge and a clearer view of the change required.

Traits

Your organisation has advantage hiding somewhere. We find it.

We examine your business, brand, audience, market, assets, capabilities and culture. We also look honestly at your appetite for risk. This means we find where you can win.

Strategies

Strategy means making choices. Sometimes they are hard ones.

We decide where to compete, how to combine the strongest traits and which battle offers the best chance of changing the odds.

The result is a focused strategic choice that directs effort where it can make the greatest difference.

Tactics

We turn hard choices into decisive action.

Every channel, idea and investment is given a clear role, with resources concentrated on the audiences, occasions and moments most likely to change the outcome.

The aim is not simply to do more. It is to make every move count.

Evidence

Measuring what changed, not just what happened.

We distinguish between outputs; what we delivered; outtakes; what people noticed, understood or felt; and outcomes; what changed for the organisation.

That evidence becomes the beginning of the next planning cycle: measure what moved, learn from it and go again.

Join our workshops

Workshop

The Underdog Advantage™ Audit

Find the advantage hiding in plain sight. A fast, provocative session for senior teams using the principles of The Underdog Advantage™. You leave with a clear problem and promising places to look for advantage.

Duration: 1 Hour

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Risk illustration with an exclamation mark

Workshop

The Deep Dive

Know what you’ve got. Know what you’re prepared to risk. Before choosing a strategy, we take stock of the organisation itself and explore the level of risk the challenge demands. You leave with clear guardrails for the brief that follows.

Duration: ½ Day

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Workshop

The Playbook

Turn advantage into action. Using the Strategies and Tactics from The Underdog Advantage™, we identify where to focus and translate the strongest direction into practical choices, ideas and a sharper brief. You get a clear way forward.

Duration: ½ Day

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Enquire about a workshop

Talk to one of our Underdog Advantage™ experts about booking in a workshop.