How Challenger Brands Stand Out with Less Marketing Effort

Last year, Emerald Nuts launched its first advertising campaign in years, including a 30-second national TV commercial shot at a Texas baseball stadium. Two singers dressed in Western attire performed "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh-inning stretch. One, eating Emerald nuts, sang the correct lyrics, while the other, eating ordinary nuts, sang nonsensical lyrics to a confused crowd.

The ad contrasts the "nonsense" in life with the "nonsense" in the salty snack nut category, conveying the message that "Emerald will rise above it all," said Dan Eisenberg, chief marketing officer at Blue Chip, an independent Chicago-based brand commerce agency.

Emerald is one of several packaged food challenger brands Blue Chip has worked with over the years. These brands are often mid-sized or smaller, with limited marketing budgets, yet they must compete against large corporations or established brands with deep pockets.

For challenger brands, it is especially critical to use precious marketing funds to build brand awareness while precisely targeting strategically fitting markets and retailers through research and data. Every marketing dollar needs to do "double duty"—building the brand and driving sales simultaneously, Eisenberg said.

Eisenberg explained that challenger brands are essentially newer to the market, so building awareness is crucial. But they must ensure that awareness building and storytelling are connected to conversion, retail media, trade marketing, and shopper marketing.

"Challenger brands especially cannot afford to have brand and performance strategies separated. The stakes are too high," he said.

A 'nonsense' sales story

Emerald, which competes with Planters and Diamond, was acquired by Campbell Soup in 2018—part of its $4.9 billion deal to buy salty snack maker Snyder's-Lance—and was then sold in 2023 to Flagstone Foods, a private-label CPG manufacturer.

The brand was "somewhat dormant" during its time under Campbell, but was essentially relaunched after being sold to Flagstone, Eisenberg said. That's when Blue Chip was hired to handle Emerald's brand, media, retail, and marketing work.

Blue Chip assessed the salty snack nut category and found that competitors were selling low-quality products with lots of fillers or "junk," Eisenberg said. Emerald sought to tap into this white space by investing in new production capabilities and committing to high-quality nuts and flavors.

That message became the core of the "Nonsense" campaign, the brand's first consumer campaign in years, designed to poke fun at competitors in the category.

"It's not just humor for humor's sake, but humor with a real strategic reason and a clear point of differentiation in the category," Eisenberg said.

The media strategy included paid social media (such as TikTok) and retail media targeting major retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Publix, according to information the company shared via email. The campaign ultimately attracted a younger audience—boosting engagement among millennial shoppers by 11% and new brand purchases by 30%, the company said.

It also gave Emerald's sales team a new sales story to use when approaching retailers, helping rebuild retailer relationships that had declined during the Campbell era, Eisenberg said.

Increasing household penetration

Bob's Red Mill, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, launched a new brand identity this year and has grown into a national health food brand whose products compete with large, established brands, including Pepsi subsidiary Quaker Oats in oatmeal, and other challenger brands like King Arthur Baking in flour.

Blue Chip took over Bob's integrated media and shopper marketing work five years ago and works with the company's marketing, sales, and leadership teams, Eisenberg said.

This led to an advertising campaign that included its "Start with the Best Oats" tagline and appeared across digital and social media, influencers, and shopper marketing.

Blue Chip consolidated Bob's media and shopper marketing investments into a unified strategy and launched a full-funnel campaign, Eisenberg said.

Eisenberg said Bob's had previously focused more on the bottom of the funnel. But with its products now sold in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast, it needed to reach new households.

Blue Chip's proprietary tool, Market Match, enables the company to algorithmically score markets and designated market areas where Bob's has distribution, and further prioritize where to invest limited marketing dollars, Eisenberg said. The company uses data to analyze growth and secondary markets—identifying where consumer lookalike audiences are densest, where distribution is strongest, and whether competitive activity is seen, he said.

The campaign was also based on real research and data showing the brand delivers a superior experience, Eisenberg said.

Eisenberg said the campaign helped Bob's achieve significant growth in household penetration and dollar sales over the past five years. This included a record performance in the fourth quarter of 2025, when the brand achieved its first million-dollar week at Walmart, according to information the company shared via email.

"The business has been very strong, and a big part of that is household penetration growth," Eisenberg said.

'Fewer, bigger, better'

Challenger brands like Bob's Red Mill "don't have the luxury of being everything to everyone," Eisenberg said. But that limitation can also be a major advantage for challenger brands, because that mindset can lead to strategic focus.

Blue Chip advises its clients to follow a "fewer, bigger, better" approach. The agency's clients make disciplined and precise choices regarding consumer audiences, markets, and designated market areas to guide media spending, he said. They also decide which media channel types to engage with and which retailers to support, he said.

"We really focus on high-impact opportunities," Eisenberg said.