Every brand brief seems to contain the same gravitational pull: be number one, be the best, be the most important, command the most attention. Which is exactly why deliberately giving up first place can be so powerful.
Embrace Second Place turns a concession into the source of brand strength. Instead of pretending to be first, best, biggest or most important, the brand willingly gives something up - rank, product dominance, celebrity status, importance or cultural attention - and makes that sacrifice carry the argument.
Here are five ways campaigns have made coming second work harder than claiming first.
- Concede Your Importance
- Confess the Rank
- Lose on Purpose
- Demote the Icon
- Concede the Moment
1. Concede Your Importance
Make the brand deliberately secondary to the thing it exists to enable.
Your Second Most Important Network - Tesco Mobile · BBH London · 2026
Telecommunications advertising habitually makes the network the hero: coverage, speed, technology, connectivity. Tesco Mobile changed the hierarchy.
Its proposition, "Your Second Most Important Network", places people's actual network of family, friends and communities first. Tesco Mobile is valuable precisely because it connects people to something more valuable than Tesco Mobile. The concession therefore sharpens the product's purpose rather than diminishing it. The technology becomes the enabler, not the destination.
Get Busy Living - Monzo · BBH London · 2026 makes a closely related concession. Banks normally fight for customers' attention. Monzo deliberately gives some of that attention away. Across ten single-shot films, life occupies the foreground while the bank's features operate quietly around the edges. Good banking, the campaign suggests, should free you to think about banking less.
2. Confess the Rank
Name your own inferior position out loud and let the honesty do the persuading.
We Try Harder - Avis · DDB · 1962
Avis was trailing Hertz when it made its number-two status the premise of its advertising: if you are not the market leader, you have to try harder.
Rather than disguise the weakness, the campaign converted it into behavioural proof. Avis could not afford dirty cars, bad service or making customers wait. The concession also quietly reframed Hertz: if Avis had to try harder, perhaps the leader could afford not to.
The results made it one of advertising's definitive challenger platforms. Within a year Avis was profitable for the first time in a decade, and between 1963 and 1966 the Hertz-Avis market-share gap narrowed from 61-29 to 49-36.
The Other Hardware Store - Mitre 10 · Dig · 2022 uses the same move more gently. As Australia's second-largest hardware network but rarely the automatic first thought, Mitre 10 simply admitted it was "the other hardware store". Being overlooked became the reason to reconsider it.
