Two friends started a craft brewery in a garage in Pietermaritzburg, with a second-hand kettle, a stack of library books and a lot of failed batches. Six years later, their beer is stocked in bars across KwaZulu-Natal. When they finally commission a professional website, the agency suggests a polished, corporate look: stock photos of gleaming steel tanks, a mission statement about “crafting premium experiences” and no mention of the garage at all.
The founders hesitate. The garage story is the one their regulars love. It’s the one they tell at tastings, and the one people repeat to their friends. But it feels small, and they want to look like a serious business.
Many small businesses face the same temptation: to hide their size, their humble beginnings and their struggles in order to look bigger and more established. Research suggests that, in the right circumstances, the opposite approach can be more powerful.
One Like insight: For many customers, your humble start is the very reason to root for you.
The underdog effect
In 2011, Neeru Paharia and Anat Keinan of Harvard, Jill Avery of Simmons School of Management and Juliet Schor of Boston College published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research on what they called “underdog brand biographies”: the stories businesses tell about their humble origins, limited resources and determined struggle against bigger rivals.
Across four studies, they found that such stories, in the authors’ words, can increase purchase intentions, real choice, and brand loyalty. In one, participants offered a chocolate bar as a thank-you for taking part chose the brand with the underdog story 71% of the time.
The researchers identified two essential ingredients. The first is external disadvantage: being smaller, newer or less well-resourced than competitors. The second is passion and determination: visible commitment to overcoming the odds. The combination was what made the story powerful. Disadvantage on its own can simply look weak; determination on its own can look like ordinary ambition.
The reason, they argued, is identity. Most people have felt like an underdog at some point, and they respond warmly when they see that experience reflected in a brand. The effect was stronger among people who saw themselves as underdogs, stronger when buying for themselves rather than for others, and stronger in cultures where underdog stories are part of national identity. The studies were run in the US and Singapore, and the effect was present in both.
These were controlled experiments, often with modest stakes like chocolate bars, and real buying decisions involve many other factors. But they suggest that a small business’s origins can be an asset when told honestly.
Telling your story without overplaying it
The research points to a few principles for small businesses that want to use their story well.
Keep it true. The power of an underdog story comes from authenticity. Exaggerating hardship or inventing a garage that never existed is both dishonest and risky, because customers increasingly check. Your real story, told plainly, is enough.
Show both halves. Mention the disadvantage, such as the small kitchen, the borrowed equipment or the first customers you won one by one, and the determination: the late nights, the experiments, the stubborn commitment to doing it properly. The combination is what resonates.
Connect it to the customer. The research suggests people respond because they see themselves in the story. Talking about who you serve and why you started, perhaps because you were frustrated by how big companies treated people like you, makes that connection explicit.
Let it grow with you. You can stay true to your origins even as you succeed. Many well-known brands still tell their garage stories decades later. Growth doesn’t erase the underdog story; it becomes the evidence that the determination paid off.
[Infographic placement] The two ingredients of an underdog story. A simple Venn diagram. Left circle: External disadvantage (small, new, under-resourced, up against bigger rivals). Right circle: Passion and determination (commitment, persistence, care). Overlap labelled Underdog story that resonates. Caption: Paharia, Keinan, Avery and Schor (2011): participants chose the underdog brand 71% of the time in a real-choice test.
Finding your story
Write down, in a few sentences, how your business really began: where, with what, and against which odds. Then note what kept you going. Ask a few loyal customers what they know about your story and whether it matters to them. You may find they already tell it for you.
Then look at where that story appears. Is it on your website’s About page, in your social media, on your packaging or in the way staff talk to customers? Or has it been polished away in an effort to look bigger? As we explored in Why Brands Are Adding Mess on Purpose, visible evidence of real people and real effort is becoming more valuable, not less.
A few questions can help:
- What is the honest story of how our business started?
- Which disadvantages did we face, and what determination did it take to overcome them?
- Where, if anywhere, do customers currently encounter that story?
- Are we trying to look bigger in ways that hide what makes customers root for us?
Which brings us back to the brewery and its forgotten garage. The founders don’t need gleaming stock photos. A website that opens with a photo of that first second-hand kettle and a few honest lines about the failed batches would tell customers exactly why this beer is worth choosing over the big brands: because two determined people refused to give up on making it properly.
Sources
- Neeru Paharia, Anat Keinan, Jill Avery and Juliet B. Schor, “The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination through Brand Biography”, Journal of Consumer Research 37(5), 2011. The 71% figure is reported in the University of Chicago Press release.
