Stories of our clients: Take on Goliath

Being a small business owner in the current environment can be very challenging. Big corporations have big marketing budgets, brand recognition, and general power in the industry. How small businesses can compete with big brands is by standing out. This is something that Take on Goliath, a commercial strategy consulting agency, is proving by helping their clients be seen and heard in a saturated market.

Take on Goliath came as an answer to an issue Dave Christie, the founder of Take on Goliath, perceived many entrepreneurs around him have been dealing with when it came to establishing a business. As he describes it: "I've worked within sales for a very long time, 10-20 years. And over those times, I've seen more and more small businesses develop. Many of my friends and colleagues have started these businesses up and, unfortunately, have not been given the best advice and so struggled to penetrate the market against some of the larger brands that were out there. So, there are obviously a lot of big brands with big budgets that do all the shouting and screaming and get all the attention, and some of the smaller brands find it difficult to penetrate that." With this problem in mind, Dave decided to help new businesses get their name out there. "It's all about helping smaller brands take on the bigger brands and giving them a bigger share of voice, a bigger share of social media, more opportunities within the smaller scope of time."

"Sometimes they're small startups, from concept to taking an idea to putting it on paper, to finding the product of the packaging, the design, and then finding a home for it on shelves. And sometimes, it's just mentoring business owners and new founders not to make a lot of the mistakes that new businesses make by trying to help them avoid some of the pitfalls, save some of their money and utilize their budgets more constructively. To make their budgets stretch further is a little bit different because we don't have one set way of doing things. We will react to the customer, react to the channel and react to the end user."

Given enough effort and planning, any business can achieve recognition, and the clients of Take on Goliath know this first-hand. "We have a company, Marcel's Green Soap, that up until about twelve months ago had no presence within the UK, very little footprint. We've managed to work with them to get them probably one of the better distributions in that independent health food sector in some of the key online and eCommerce platforms and help really raise their profile to the point that we now have larger major retailers knocking at the door for interest in their business. So we've managed to raise the profile of the brands because of the levels of support that we put in."

The issue of brand protection gradually became more important as Dave started thinking about the implications of not securing his intellectual property. "I was one of those people that didn't think I needed to trademark my business. Then one of my clients brought up the issue of brand protection. They said you've got a very unique name, something powerful and clever, and you should protect it, because it's your idea and the identity of your business. And if somebody takes that away, you'd lose the momentum. All of the feedback, the reviews and the support that you've built across the industry, and you'd have to start again. It was like a light bulb moment for me." 

“The process of trademark registration can be a bit confusing: I don’t know where to go, what to do, how to do it. And it was actually one of my clients that recommended Trama to me. They assured me that it was pretty simple, but I was still hesitant. I didn’t understand how it could be so easy and straightforward. But once I made the inquiry, I got an Email back very quickly and they explained the situation. The communication was quick, clear and people came back straight away. In my work the issue of trademarks does come up, so now it's now part of my conversation because of the work that we've done with Trama.”