The first PUNCHING landed on the same night as Glastonbury tickets and Celebrity Traitors, and the room was still packed. Marketing leaders, founders and hungry talent came to talk about one thing: how to win when your ambition outstrips your resources.
Kerry Collinge, the brain behind challengers such as Uncensored CMO and System1 and now co-founder of The Illuminari, joined our Creative Strategist Olivia Phillips to unpack it. What followed was a Q&A full of healthy debate and a challenger brand raffle to finish the night.
Here’s what we took away.
Key takeaways
- Make people care about what you care about
- Constraints are fuel, not excuses
- Premium is earned, not priced
- Let AI do the dishes – and use the time well
- 80% consistent, 20% brilliant: know where to be bold
Make people care about what you care about
If one idea ran through the whole night, it was this. Whether you’re building a brand or a career, your job is to make other people feel what you feel.
“The biggest challenge in your professional life is to make somebody care about the things that you care about. To believe that they’re worth having.”
— Kerry Collinge, Co-Founder at The Illuminari
For challengers, that’s the whole game. When you can’t outspend the big players, you have to out-feel them. No more bland ads trying to say five things at once; the winners are culturally resonant and make people feel something.
Constraints are fuel, not excuses
Kerry’s starting point was simple: a constraint is never a reason not to win. Challengers treat a tight budget, a small team or a late start as fuel for sharper thinking. Too many categories now look and sound the same, because marketers have stopped trusting their instincts.
“What’s happened over the 25 years of my career, it’s blanded out, it’s vanillaed out. It has become very, very dull. That is because we’ve stopped relying on humans because we’re all so terrified of the data. We all hide behind the data.”
— Kerry Collinge, Co-Founder at The Illuminari
The fix is to challenge the stale codes of your category on purpose. But Kerry was clear that this should be surgical: challenger thinking works best aimed at specific moments and problems, not as a permanent posture of picking fights.
And it starts with the people doing the work.
“Humanity is the heart of brands that grow. And so, if we’re not having fun and being humans, how can we reflect that into our brands?”
— Kerry Collinge, Co-Founder at The Illuminari
Premium is earned, not priced
A higher price has to be justified through experiences and cultural moments that signal value, not just a bigger number on the shelf. Kerry drew on her time selling beer, where products are often functionally indistinguishable and emotion does the heavy lifting.
“When you’re trying to sell beer at a price premium, every single brand bump on the brand, we try to add value. There was a lot of onus on the marketeer to use their gut feel as the conduit between what the audience wanted and what the category stood for.”
— Kerry Collinge, Co-Founder at The Illuminari
For new challengers, her advice was to build purpose in from day one, because retrofitting it later costs more and confuses everyone. And as you grow, hold to a clear North Star and protect your core consumers, because their trust is what got you here.
That doesn’t mean playing it safe. It means knowing where to be bold.
“I believe that it should be eighty percent consistent, twenty percent brilliance.”
— Kerry Collinge, Co-Founder at The Illuminari
Let AI do the dishes
Of course the topic of AI reared its head, and for good reason. The overarching message was to outsource optimisation to the machines, and double down on the human imagination and emotional impact they can’t replicate.
“It’s the classic saying wanting AI to wash your clothes and do the dishes, so you have more time for creativity. You still have to wash your clothes and do the dishes. But we know that it doesn’t have to be that.”
— Olivia Phillips, Creative Strategist, StrategiQ
That freed-up time should go into the work that makes people care. Getting there takes psychologically safe friction: teams that feel secure enough to disagree, because that’s where breakthrough ideas surface.
And there’s a practical way to fund it, the 70/20/10 model. Spend 70% optimising what works, 20% testing, and 10% on genuine innovation, so the steady stuff earns you budget for the bold bets.
Join the community
PUNCHING was the first Campaign Life event, a quarterly series for marketing leaders, hungry talent and ambitious builders who want to trade war stories, share what they’ve learned and keep this conversation going.
Next up:
- Paid Life – 5 November
- Brand Life – 3 December
Whether you’re steering a scale-up, managing a lean marketing budget or building your career from the ground up, there’s a place for you in the room.