Which brands win — how to win as a good one.
A convicted former Prime Minister just got a second pardon. This time, he’ll serve the rest of his sentence at home. His party opened a public fundraiser to help him pay the RM50 million fine attached. [1]
It raised RM1 million in a day. [2]
I’m not here to argue whether that’s fair. [3] I’m here to tell you what it means for every founder who’s been told the better brand wins.
Because it doesn’t. Not always. Not even most of the time.
Boeing killed 346 people with a plane they knew was defective. Two crashes. Software they hid from pilots. [4] The criminal charge got dismissed last November. Settled. No conviction. [5] Airlines never stopped ordering the plane. [6]
Nestlé Malaysia stocks Milo, Maggi, KitKat, and Nescafé in every kampung and every mamak shop. The parent group has spent decades getting called out for aggressive baby-formula marketing in developing countries [7], palm oil deforestation [8], and child labour in its cocoa supply. [9] Not to mention its perceived support for Israel through its Israeli subsidiary Osem. [10] Yet, very few if any are emptying their pantry. In fact, Nestlé products are even available on the Sumbangan Asas Rahmah programme. [11]
Meta has been caught mishandling user data [12], amplifying misinformation, and running experiments on its own users [13] for over a decade. Facebook is still where every small business advertises. Instagram is where your teenager lives. WhatsApp is where your family group is. You are stuck with Zuck!
None of this is forgiveness. Nobody woke up and decided Boeing deserved a second chance. Nobody in Malaysia is throwing out their Milo tin over another Nestlé exposé. Nobody in Kuala Lumpur is deleting WhatsApp because they read another headline about Meta.
It’s something colder than forgiveness. It’s stickiness.
Switching a fleet from Boeing to Airbus costs airlines billions. Leaving WhatsApp means telling three hundred contacts you’ve moved to Signal. Moving your bank means rewiring every autopay, every standing instruction, every connected app you’ve ever set up.
The compromised brand doesn’t win because it’s better. It wins because leaving is expensive. That’s why nobody leaves WhatsApp. That’s why airlines still order Boeing. And that’s why a convicted ex-Prime Minister gets a public fundraiser instead of a jail cell.
This is the part of the challenger brand story nobody wants to hear.
Your better positioning, your cleaner conviction, your sharper enemy definition — those things are real. They matter. I’ve spent twenty years and turbocharged over 400 brands on exactly that logic. It works.
But it doesn’t work on its own.
Signal was built to give people what encrypted messaging should have been from the start. End-to-end by default. No data harvesting. No ads. No parent company monetising your conversations. [14] Every tech-literate person on earth knows Signal exists — and still hasn’t left WhatsApp. Because it’s not about the message. It’s about the three hundred contacts you’d have to convince to come with you.
Signal has the story. WhatsApp has you.
So how does the good brand become the sticky one? Three moves. All three are how somebody real did it. Recently.
Canva didn’t convert Adobe users. It went after everyone Adobe structurally excluded — small business owners, teachers, marketing coordinators, nurses, students — anyone who needed to make a decent graphic without paying RM220 a month [15] or spending three years in design school. Nothing to switch from. Nobody to convince. Ten years in, Canva has more users worldwide than Adobe has ever had subscribers. [16]
Every founder should ask one question: who is my category structurally excluding right now? Those are your customers. They cost nothing to acquire because they were never being served.
TikTok didn’t build a better Instagram. It changed the question — from “who do you follow” to “what should you watch next.” Meta rebuilt Reels from scratch on TikTok’s terms. [17] Facebook became sucky in the process — voluntarily abandoning the very thing that made it sticky in the first place: its social network. [18] That’s how powerful an axis move is. The incumbent will walk away from their own strength to chase yours.
At Brand Geeks Inc we call these positioning plays. Four ways to move the axis: Access (open the category), Simplicity (strip out the complexity the incumbent hides behind), Niche (win a small tribe hard before anyone takes them seriously), Belief (make the category about ideology, not features). Pick the one your incumbent can’t follow you into without becoming something they aren’t.
Commit hard enough that they have to choose — defend the old axis, or chase yours. Either way, you moved the fight.
Stickiness doesn’t lift itself. Something forces it. A price hike. An outage. A regulation change. A technology transition. A generational handover. A boycott. Sometimes a pandemic. Once or twice in a lifetime — a genocide. Every one of them creates the same window — a moment when switching costs collapse for everyone in the category at once, because everyone is being forced to re-choose.
Nvidia spent twenty years making chips for gaming graphics. Nobody outside gamers really cared. Then AI models turned out to need exactly the kind of parallel computing GPUs were built for. Every AI company on earth suddenly needed Nvidia. They went from a niche chipmaker to one of the most valuable companies on the planet in three years. [19]
AI is doing the same to every knowledge-based industry right now. Legal, consulting, accounting, marketing, education, software — every incumbent’s twenty-year moat is being asked to justify itself against something that costs a hundredth. The founders who inherit the next decade in these categories are already building the answer. The ones waiting to see how it shakes out will inherit nothing.
Meanwhile, brands that stayed on the wrong side of Gaza are testing exactly how much stickiness can carry them. Some are hemorrhaging customers who won’t come back. [20] Some are betting the news cycle moves on before their numbers do. [21] Either way, they’ve learnt what founders should note: customers reserve the right to force their own event. Silence is a position. Neutrality is a stance. Your loyal buyer does the accounting even when you don’t.
Founders don’t manufacture forcing events. What they can do is name the one coming for their category — and be the ready answer when the window opens. Every founder should be able to finish this sentence: When [X] happens in my category, I’ll be the obvious choice because I’ve already built [Y].
Can’t finish it? You’re not positioned. You’re waiting.
The Challenger Brand Canvas doesn’t promise you’ll win. It’s not a horoscope.
What it does is force three honest questions. Are you opening a door the incumbent won’t, or fighting them for their stickiest customers? Are you competing on the incumbent’s axis, or moving it? Are you positioned for the forcing event, waiting for one that won’t come, or about to be blindsided by one that already has?
If the answer to all three is no, your conviction won’t save you. Doesn’t matter how sharp your story is.
If the answer to any of them is yes, you have a real shot. Not because you deserve one. Because you’re building one.
The best brand doesn’t win. The stickiest one does.
Your job as a challenger isn’t to be the best brand.
It’s to become the stickiest one — before the incumbent notices.
Regarding Brand Geeks Inc
Since 2011, Brand Geeks Inc has helped brands evolve into tech-empowered market leaders. We’ve guided 300+ brands, including MyTeksi (before it became Grab), to turbo growth. We don’t just nurture legendary brands that change the world, we nurture the people who build them. Explore our portfolio and services at brandgeeksinc.com
If you’d like our help: Get our consulting services for your branding needs;
email [email protected].
References
- Najib granted conditional pardon on 18 Sept 2026: house arrest until 23 Aug 2028 if the RM50M fine is paid; follows the 2024 sentence reduction. Malay Mail
- UMNO solidarity fund reached RM1M in less than a day. Malay Mail
- Malaysian Bar challenges the house-arrest pardon. Malaysiakini
- US House committee report on Boeing and FAA failures, including MCAS concealed from pilots. Global News
- Judge approves DOJ dismissal of Boeing criminal case, 6 Nov 2025; 346 deaths; no conviction. GV Wire / AP, Bloomberg Law
- Boeing out-orders Airbus in 2025 for the first time since 2018. Sherwood News
- Nestlé accused of adding sugar to baby foods sold in lower-income countries (2024). FoodNavigator
- Greenpeace KitKat campaign over palm oil and deforestation. Marketing Week
- Nestlé USA v. Doe: cocoa child-labour case at the US Supreme Court (2021). Food Manufacturing
- Osem fully owned by Nestlé since 2016. Wikipedia
- Milo, Nescafé and Maggi on the MyKasih SARA eligible-items list. AJobThing, MyKasih Foundation
- FTC fines Facebook US$5B over Cambridge Analytica privacy violations (2019). The Drum
- Facebook emotional contagion experiment on 689,000 users. PNAS paper
- Signal’s non-profit, ad-free, encrypted-by-default model. Think Insights
- Adobe Creative Cloud Pro regular price in Malaysia: RM220.32 a month. RinggitPlus
- Canva at 265M+ monthly users and 31M+ paid subscribers (2025). Adobe subscriber count not disclosed; see Editor’s note 1. TechCrunch
- Instagram launches Reels as TikTok rival, Aug 2020. Axios
- Meta’s FTC trial filing: 17% of Facebook time and 7% of Instagram time spent on friends’ content. Zuckerberg admits friend sharing is declining. Fast Company ME, CNN via ABC17
- Nvidia becomes the first US$5 trillion company, Oct 2025. Dawn
- Over 100 KFC Malaysia outlets temporarily closed amid boycott (2024). NST
- Berjaya Food (Starbucks Malaysia) still loss-making in Feb 2026 as boycott lingers; 20 more outlets closed. Focus Malaysia
