Don't challenge the market, change it.

We are a marketing consultancy that builds challenger brands, strategies, and capabilities to change categories.

We work with challengers to help them scale, and incumbents to help them innovate.

We build brands that break through in a crowded market.

Our BrandOS framework creates the foundation for challenger growth by developing a brand that's relevant, authentic, and differentiated in the market.

Brand Development

We develop the strategies and systems to drive effective and efficient growth.

Our Go-to-Market planning process combines strong marketing fundamentals with challenger principles and practices to build a powerful growth machine.

Go-to-Market Strategy

Designing strategies and roadmaps for leading data management and martech adoption.

The risks and opportunities with first-party data are as big as they have ever been. There’s a huge opportunity to develop a competitive advantage in data and martech, but you need the right strategy, tech stack, and skill set within your team. The fastest growing area of our consulting practice helps businesses understand where the gaps are in their current data and martech capabilities and develop a roadmap to become best-in-class.

Data & Martech Management

We design modern marketing functions and develop best-in-class in-house talent.

The best strategy in the world doesn't matter if you don't have the right people set up in the right way to execute it. We have years of experience developing structures, capabilities, and partners for high-growth marketing teams.

Capability Building

Recent work

We work with challengers and incumbents around the world.

Building a cultural flywheel for customer acquisition

We worked with the marketing leadership team for Call of Duty to make the world’s biggest video game even more culturally relevant. We identified key cultural trends and built a cultural flywheel to reach and attract new players.

Go-To-Market Strategy

Developing a playbook for new product adoption

We worked with the product and marketing leadership teams at Q2, a leading core banking tech provider in North America, to develop a GTM playbook that would drive adoption with financial service providers. We ran two in-market testing flights with dozens of copy variations to identify the best positioning, and packaged up our learnings in an easy-to-use playbook that we then distributed to the partner FSIs.

Go-To-Market Strategy

Evolving the brand purpose for a heritage business with challenger ambitions

We worked with Reebok’s CEO and leadership team to evolve their brand purpose after their transition to a new owner and with a new CEO. We brought together the invaluable equity of Reebok’s history with their ambitions to challenge the industry again. Our work was presented to all employees and key retail partners.

Brand Development

Finding the whitespace in a crowded market to drive product and market expansion

We worked with the CEO of Bud to develop a brand positioning that would help the business stand out and grow internationally after their Series B. In a category as crowded as open banking, we focused on clarifying and simplifying the core of what makes the Bud product and proposition different.

Brand Development

Developing a marketing dept strategy and org structure to support 10x growth

We worked with the marketing leadership team at Omnipresent to design their org structure, ways of working, hiring roadmap, and budgets to support the 10x growth ambitions and $1B valuation of the business.

Capability Building

Designing a digital communications plan for a new accelerator program

We worked with the innovation and marketing teams at Avery Dennison to develop the channel and messaging strategy for a new, global program focused on attracting start-ups in the B2B packaging and adhesives space. We developed the channel mix, messaging hierarchy, paid media plans, budgets, and ROI forecasts for three major markets.

Go-To-Market Strategy

Developing a greenfield challenger brand for a leading incumbent

We worked with leading insurance company in Africa, Old Mutual, to develop a greenfield product by developing the brand positioning, architecture and name based on audience research and value proposition.

Brand Development

Building a simple, clear brand position for a complex product

We worked with the CEO, COO, and Head of Marketing at RTGS.Global to develop a brand positioning and architecture that would clearly communicate the functional and emotional benefit of the proposition. As a challenger in the wholesale, cross-border settlement space, we needed to build trust as well as excitement.

Brand Development

Building a company and community around a B2B brand

We worked with the CMO of Autobooks to support annual planning for owned, paid, and earned channels leading up to Series C funding. We also trained the team on paid media planning and execution that led to a significant increase in conversion rates.

Go-To-Market Strategy

What do our partners think of us?

“Rival has a superpower. No matter how complex the business…no matter how esoteric the field, the Rival team has an unmatched ability to boil a brand down to its bare essentials – and then make it sing.”

Gordon Cooper

Chief Operating Officer, RTGS.Global

"In an industry where brand is king, Rival helped us clearly define our brand strategy to challenge the sportswear industry. Rival was able to cut through the complexity of our business to help us transform our brand and culture for sustainable future growth."

Connor Altier

Global Brand Strategy Lead, Reebok

"Rival is the Rolls Royce of brand and marketing consultancies. The rigor and depth of their methodology and work is second to none, even the big firms."

Sahba Hadipour

Founder & CEO, SISAA

"Rival are forward thinking, thought provoking, creative and energetic in their approach to winning in the constantly evolving digital marketing landscape."

Sorcha Madigan

Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Boyne Valley Group

"As a team, we were looking to unlock value by creating a structure that better aligned with our future marketing goals. Working with team Rival gave us the perspective and strategies needed to help up us optimise our resources and focus on key areas where we could quickly deliver value to our customers and outperform the competition at scale."

Suzie Thompson

VP Commercial, Red Carnation Hotels

"As part of a growth stage company, the expectation of the marketing team is to ensure our company becomes a category leader. We partnered with Rival to accelerate our team’s learnings, and our company’s growth - faster than if we had done it on our own."

Derik Sutton

CMO, Autobooks

"Rival is impressive top to bottom. The full team was invested and engaged in the success of the project. Their acumen of the industry and expertise they provide is unmatched. Not only are they on the cutting edge of media world and brand strategy, but they are also a joy to work with and make the long hours together so much fun. I learned an immeasurable amount from the whole team and am a better marketer because of them."

Mikel Weigel

Senior End-User Adoption Specialist, Q2