Stop Blending In and Start Winning Like a Challenger Bank
By Jessica Kendall, , Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Eric Fulwiler, co-founder and CEO of Rival and former CMO of 11:FS, has spent more than 10,000 hours researching what separates high-growth challenger brands from the pack. In partnership with Imperial College London, his team developed a data-driven benchmark — the Rival 50 — to identify brands generating outsized momentum through differentiation, relevance, and talkability.
Fulwiler argues that banking’s challenge isn’t a lack of technology but accumulated “marketing debt” and a reluctance to make clear strategic choices. Challenger brands grow because they challenge category conventions, embed themselves in microcultures, and think like media companies obsessed with attention.
For retail banking leaders, the mandate is clear: sharpen differentiation, reframe marketing as a business driver, build structured innovation into the operating model, and redesign the CMO role around measurable commercial impact.
Need to Know:
- Add a third lens to brand strategy: which category convention are you intentionally challenging?
- Activate microcultures, not broad segments. Growth comes from relevance inside interest-based communities that over-index for your ideal customer.
- Think like a media company. Design campaigns for “talkability” — how 1,000 people tell 10 others — not just reach.
- AI is becoming the unlock for community institutions, enabling seamless experiences while freeing staff for higher-value relationship moments. Efficiency fuels connection.
- Primacy in 2026 belongs to institutions that win everyday financial behaviors and build trust for life’s biggest decisions. The goal is dominance in moments, not ownership forever.
Fulwiler’s premise is simple: challengers win not because they outspend incumbents, but because they make sharper choices.
At Rival, that belief turned into a four-month research initiative culminating in the Rival 50 index. Rather than producing another subjective “top brands” list, Fulwiler’s team partnered with Imperial College London to quantify brand momentum. They measured:
- Revenue growth, where available
- Share of search, a leading indicator strongly correlated with commercial performance
- Brand performance across three drivers: differentiation, relevance and talkability
The result is an annual benchmark highlighting brands that generate disproportionate impact from limited resources.
For banking leaders, it shows that growth signals can be measured earlier than revenue. Share of search, earned attention, and cultural traction offer leading indicators of brand strength.
If your institution only tracks lagging financial metrics, you are reading the scoreboard long after the play has been called.
Differentiation Requires Clear Choices
Fulwiler sees a recurring flaw in financial services marketing: brand strategy built on audience needs plus product value, but lacking a clear challenge to category norms.
Challenger brands ask a third question: What convention are we deliberately breaking?
In many regional banking campaigns, the ad could belong to any competitor if you removed the logo. That’s not a creative problem. It’s a strategic one.
Two practical prompts Fulwiler uses with clients:
- If your logo disappeared, would your marketing still be identifiable?
- Is there a defined group of customers who would say, “That brand isn’t for me”?
That second question is uncomfortable for banks accustomed to broad targeting. Yet challenger brands treat exclusion as strategic focus. They are explicit about who they serve and who they don’t.
For retail banks, this means defining sharper positioning in areas like small-business specialization, creator-economy banking, or hyperlocal community niches. Then, you align product, messaging and experience around that stance.
Without differentiation, price and distribution become the only levers left.
Find Relevance in Microcultures
Fulwiler’s research shows culturally relevant brands grow roughly six times faster than category averages. Challenger brands look for microcultures (i.e., interest-based communities formed around shared passions rather than demographics) that over-index within their target audiences and create tailored activations that typically earn disproportionate attention because competitors aren’t showing up there
For banks, this reframes segmentation. Instead of “Millennials” or “affluent households,” banks should consider more specific microcultures such as:
- Independent fitness entrepreneurs
- E-sports participants
- Sustainable-living advocates
- Local real estate investors
The strategy works because relevance compounds. When a brand shows up authentically within a community, belonging follows. And, belonging drives advocacy.
Fulwiler stresses that marketing should be a two-way bridge: not only bringing products to market, but bringing customer culture into product development. When microculture insights inform features, partnerships, and messaging, differentiation strengthens organically.
From Marketing Function to Media Engine
Challenger brands are forced to think like media companies. With limited budgets, they cannot rely on brute-force paid reach. Instead, they optimize for talkability.
Rather than asking, “How do we reach 10,000 people?” they ask, “If 1,000 people see this, how do we inspire each of them to tell 10 others?”
Why this matters. Financial institutions often communicate updates sporadically and transactionally. Instead, they should continuously narrate product evolution, reinforcing momentum in the way that consumer brands do.
Thinking like a media company means:
- Designing content streams, not campaigns
- Building recurring audience touchpoints
- Measuring earned amplification, not just impressions
- Treating attention as a scarce asset to collect and retain
As generative AI lowers barriers to content production, average, generic content will multiply. Human attention will not. Fulwiler predicts that meaningful in-person experiences and experiential marketing will gain value as digital noise increases.
Banks that master sustained storytelling and community engagement will outperform those that treat marketing as episodic announcements.
How Marketing Can Lead Enterprise Alignment
One of Fulwiler’s strongest points is organizational, not tactical. Marketing cannot succeed if product and operations teams move in different directions.
Customers experience one brand. They do not separate marketing from onboarding, underwriting, or service.
Through more than 200 CMO interviews, Fulwiler identified a consistent pattern: high-performing CMOs intentionally spend time with customers and force their teams to do the same. They act as translators between market needs and internal decision-making.
He outlines three requirements for the modern CMO:
- Think like a board member first. Tie marketing directly to enterprise growth.
- Own measurable business outcomes. Marketing exists to drive results, not vanity metrics.
- Turn data and technology into advantage. Make marketing technology and analytics into strategic assets.
For leaders concerned about incrementalism, Fulwiler recommends structured innovation frameworks — such as 70/20/10 allocation models or internal “1% vs. 10x” investment splits — to prevent the organization from defaulting to minor optimizations.
Innovation rarely emerges accidentally. It requires intentional space.
The Goal: Put Your Model Out of Business
Perhaps Fulwiler’s most provocative advice draws from transformation stories at institutions like DBS Bank: leadership must actively attempt to disrupt its own model before competitors do.
For banks, key questions to consider include:
- If a fintech launched today with no legacy systems, what would it do differently?
- What marketing debt has accumulated over the past decade?
- Which internal assumptions go unchallenged?
Incumbents possess trust — an asset challengers struggle to earn. But trust alone does not guarantee future growth.
The banks that thrive will combine that trust with sharper positioning, microculture relevance, media fluency and structured innovation. Those capabilities do not require abandoning compliance or stability. They require clearer choices and disciplined execution.
In a category where many brands look and sound alike, that alone can create meaningful advantage.
