As I was working on a presentation this week, something struck me: the charity sector is packed full of challenger brands. Quite a few of them are Whitewater clients.

Very often, a cause area is dominated by one well-known player which, by virtue of its size and associated resource, becomes the all-too-easy default option for donors. These organisations – the CRUKs, Oxfams and NSPCCs of this world – bag the buck because they're able to lay claim to the generic cause. So the rich charities keep getting richer, with more to spend on consolidating their position. Organisations targeting similar donors on a fraction of the budget might feel like their outlook is very bleak. But they needn't - because, actually, a challenger brand is the most exciting thing to be.

I've been dipping into Eating The Big Fish by Adam Morgan recently. He builds a strong case for challengers to break the rules of their category. Rather than trying to beat dominant organisations at their own game, rather than emulating their stratgies on a smaller scale, he would encourage challengers to stop being copy cats, stop letting the competition define them and break the mould. His formula for competitive advantage? Be as daring and creative in your advertising and publicity as you can.

Asking the question, 'how can we zig while everyone else is zagging?' is a sure-fire way to freshen up our thinking and to keep us interested and inspired by the work we do. We took this approach for the client presentation I mentioned at the start of this post… and we had an absolute ball working on it. I hope the client - a challenger brand - was as excited by the ideas it provoked as we were, and that I'll be able to show you some of the results here in due course!

It can be incredibly liberating to take a brand into new waters. But it inevitably means taking a risk. In our sector, perhaps more than any other, this a scary and uncomfortable concept because charities have to be so frugal with and accountable for their marketing spend. Learning what has worked for the competition is a sensible approach, which minimises the risk - and I'm not suggesting for a moment that we should be irresponsible. We'd be mad not to learn from tried and tested techniques that we've seen perform well. But the safest route is unlikely to be the one that allows a charity to fundamentally cut through and really get noticed by the donors they desperately need to attract.

Perhaps I'm just feeling feisty. But I'm going to keep Adam Morgan on my desk and encourage our clients to be brave little fish.

Michelle Taylor