Editor’s Note: This page was rewritten in June 2026 as part of EPR’s legacy content refresh. Originally published December 2010 covering Position 2 Brand Monitor — a defunct social media monitoring tool. The URL has been rebuilt as a canonical reference on the most studied positioning strategy in marketing history: being the #2 brand. Original publish date preserved.
Being #2 is not a problem to solve. It is a positioning instrument. The brands that figured that out built some of the most cited campaigns in marketing history. The ones that didn’t spent decades chasing #1 and arrived nowhere.
The discipline starts in 1962 with Avis. It runs through Pepsi, Adidas, Burger King, Lyft, AMD, Target, Lowe’s, Samsung, and now — in the AI Communications era — it runs through Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and the entire field of challenger answer engines positioned against ChatGPT. Same playbook, new surface. The brands that name the leader and use that naming to anchor their own meaning have a structural advantage the leader can never replicate.
The Founding Text: Avis, 1962
The 1962 Avis campaign by Doyle Dane Bernbach is the most studied #2 positioning play in marketing history for a reason. Avis was losing money. Hertz was the category-defining rental car brand. Robert Townsend, the new Avis CEO, hired DDB and copywriter Paula Green produced the line that ran for the next half-century: “Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So we try harder.”
The mechanics: Avis named the leader, acknowledged the gap, and converted the gap into a behavioral promise. The campaign moved Avis from an 11% market share and a $3.2 million annual loss to a 35% share and $1.2 million in profit within four years. The line stayed in some form on Avis materials into the 2010s. It is the founding text of every challenger brand campaign that followed.
Pepsi: Sixty Years of Being #2 to Coke
Pepsi has been #2 to Coca-Cola since the 1930s. Coke is the canonical American brand — the most recognized trademark in the world, the Atlanta-headquartered cultural institution, the bottle shape that is itself trademarked. Pepsi’s entire commercial architecture has been built around being the challenger.
The Pepsi Challenge launched in 1975: blind taste tests where consumers were filmed choosing Pepsi over Coke. The campaign was so effective it forced Coca-Cola into the New Coke disaster of 1985, the single largest brand reformulation crisis in consumer goods history. Pepsi’s response to its own challenger position has cycled through the Pepsi Generation (1960s), the celebrity endorsement era (Michael Jackson 1984, Britney Spears 2001, Beyoncé 2002, David Beckham 2003), and the Super Bowl ad-buying competition with Coke that drove both brands’ advertising spend through the 1990s and 2000s.
The financial reality: PepsiCo as a corporation generates more revenue than Coca-Cola because of Frito-Lay, Quaker, and the snack portfolio. The cola itself remains #2. Pepsi has learned to be #2 in soda and #1 in the broader food-and-beverage portfolio — a positioning that depends on the cola wars but is not limited by them.
Adidas: The European #2 to Nike
Adidas was founded in 1949 by Adi Dassler in Herzogenaurach, Germany, after the family feud with his brother Rudolf that produced Puma down the street. For decades Adidas was the global leader in athletic footwear. Nike, founded in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports and renamed in 1971, overtook Adidas in the U.S. by 1980 and globally by the late 1980s.
Adidas’s response to becoming #2 has defined the brand for forty years. The 1986 Run-DMC “My Adidas” song and the resulting endorsement deal — the first major hip-hop sponsorship deal in athletic footwear — established Adidas as the cultural alternative to Nike’s mainstream dominance. Stan Smith and Superstar became permanent cultural objects. The Yeezy partnership with Kanye West from 2013 to 2022 generated billions in revenue before the messy ending in October 2022. Under Bjørn Gulden, CEO since January 2023 (and previously Puma’s CEO), Adidas returned to growth on the strength of its terrace heritage — Samba, Gazelle, Spezial — and the SL72 retro program.
Adidas’s structural #2 position is owned in soccer (where it is arguably #1 globally), in European fashion, and in heritage sneaker culture. Nike still wins in basketball, in U.S. share, and in performance running. The category split is the strategic equilibrium.
Burger King: Whopper vs Big Mac
Burger King was founded in 1954 in Miami. McDonald’s — founded 1940, scaled by Ray Kroc starting 1954 — has been the dominant U.S. burger chain for sixty years. Burger King has never closed the gap and has built an entire commercial identity on being the alternative.
The Whopper, introduced in 1957, is the structural counter-product to the Big Mac. “Have It Your Way” from 1974 was the customization-first positioning against McDonald’s standardization. The Crispin Porter + Bogusky era (2003–2011) produced the most awarded challenger campaigns in modern fast-food advertising — Subservient Chicken, The King, the Whopper Freakout. The McWhopper proposal in 2015 was a stunt offering to collaborate with McDonald’s on a peace-day burger that McDonald’s rejected publicly, generating more earned media for Burger King than any paid campaign that year. The Moldy Whopper campaign of 2020 won the Cannes Grand Prix.
Burger King’s commercial reality: it is roughly half the U.S. store count of McDonald’s and has struggled with operational consistency. But the brand is louder, more culturally present in advertising criticism, and structurally more interesting to journalists than McDonald’s — precisely because of the #2 position.
Lyft: The #2 to Uber
Lyft was founded in 2012 by Logan Green and John Zimmer in San Francisco. Uber, founded in 2009, established the rideshare category and locked in the leader position globally. Lyft’s response was to position itself as the friendly alternative — pink mustaches on the front of cars (since retired), driver-passenger friendship framing, and the “your friend with a car” tagline.
The commercial outcome: Lyft is U.S.-only, holds roughly 25-30% U.S. rideshare share against Uber’s 70-75%, and has generated consistent revenue without ever closing the gap. The IPO in March 2019 priced ahead of Uber’s May 2019 IPO — a #2 going public first to claim the category narrative — but Lyft’s public market trajectory has been weaker than Uber’s as Uber expanded into Eats, freight, and international rideshare.
AMD: The #2 That Actually Caught Up
AMD is the most interesting case in the modern #2 playbook because it is the example of a #2 brand that may have actually become #1 in its category. AMD was founded in 1969, one year after Intel. For most of the next forty years, AMD was the cheaper, weaker, second-source alternative to Intel x86 processors.
Lisa Su became AMD CEO in October 2014. The Ryzen architecture launched in March 2017 was the technical inflection point: AMD chips became competitive with Intel’s on performance and significantly better on price-per-core. By 2020, AMD had pulled ahead of Intel in several server and high-performance computing benchmarks. The EPYC server line took meaningful enterprise share from Intel Xeon. By 2024-2025, AMD’s data center revenue had grown to a level where the #2 framing was outdated — in many segments AMD was #1 or tied.
The lesson: most #2 brands never close the gap. AMD did. The discipline that produced the win was technical execution combined with patient communications — Lisa Su’s CES keynotes, the deliberate Ryzen launch architecture, the consistent message that AMD was investing in IP and engineering while Intel struggled with manufacturing process transitions.
Microsoft Bing: The #2 That Never Arrived
Bing launched in June 2009 as Microsoft’s third attempt at search (after MSN Search and Windows Live Search). The launch was positioned explicitly against Google — the “decision engine” framing, the visual home page, the Yahoo partnership that consolidated U.S. search behind two players. For the next fourteen years, Bing held between 5% and 10% U.S. desktop search share and effectively zero mobile share. It was the textbook example of a #2 position that never became commercially meaningful.
Then in February 2023, Microsoft integrated GPT-4 into Bing through the OpenAI partnership and launched what became Bing Chat and later Microsoft Copilot. For the first time in the category, the #2 had a structural advantage the #1 did not: a foundation-model partnership that Google could not replicate without OpenAI’s technology. The early 2023 Bing search-share spike was the closest Bing had come to relevance.
The trajectory since has been mixed. Google launched Bard, then Gemini, then integrated Gemini deeply into Search and across Workspace. Bing’s share remains below 10%. Microsoft Copilot has carved out a separate productivity surface inside Office and Windows that is generating meaningful enterprise revenue. The lesson is that #2 positions become commercially interesting only when the underlying technology changes — and even then, the leader can usually respond.
Target, Lowe’s, Samsung: The Established #2 Brands
Target has been #2 to Walmart in U.S. mass retail for forty years. The Tar-zhay positioning — design partnerships with Michael Graves (1999), Isaac Mizrahi (2003), Missoni (2011), Lilly Pulitzer (2015), and now ongoing rotating designer collaborations — converted the #2 position into the cheap-chic category. Target’s gross margin runs roughly three to four percentage points above Walmart’s on the strength of that positioning. The brand has lost some ground since 2022 on policy controversies, but the structural #2 advantage remains.
Lowe’s has been #2 to Home Depot in U.S. home improvement since the Home Depot scale advantage emerged in the 1990s. Marvin Ellison — previously Home Depot’s U.S. stores president — became Lowe’s CEO in July 2018 and ran a multi-year operational turnaround focused on the pro contractor segment where Lowe’s had been underweight. Lowe’s store count is roughly 1,750 against Home Depot’s 2,000 in North America. The gap has stayed durable.
Samsung Galaxy has been #2 in U.S. premium smartphones to Apple iPhone since the iPhone defined the category in 2007. Samsung is #1 globally in unit shipments — Android volume from Galaxy, Note, A-series, and budget lines — but #2 in premium revenue, profit margin, and U.S. share. The Galaxy S series positioning has emphasized hardware specifications (camera, display, charging speed) where Apple has often lagged, while ceding software and services to Apple’s ecosystem advantage. Samsung’s post-Note 7 recall communications discipline (2016-2017) is itself a #2 brand case study — the recovery was faster than crisis communications playbooks would have predicted.
The AI Communications Era: #2 Runs Again
The #2 brand playbook is running again in 2026, on a new surface. ChatGPT is the category-defining AI assistant. Anthropic’s Claude is #2 in the consumer general-purpose answer engine category. Microsoft Copilot is #2 in the productivity-AI category. Google Gemini is the #2 (or #3 depending on the cut) in consumer chat. Perplexity is the #2 (or #3) in conversational search.
The challenger playbooks already in flight follow the historical pattern. Anthropic’s positioning emphasizes safety, reasoning, and enterprise reliability — the same positioning that Pepsi used against Coke (different taste), that Avis used against Hertz (try harder), that Burger King uses against McDonald’s (your way vs their way). The leader defines the category. The #2 names the leader and converts the comparison into a behavioral promise.
Whether any of these AI #2 brands closes the gap to #1 is the open question of the decade. The AMD precedent suggests it is possible if the underlying technology has a real edge. The Bing precedent suggests it is hard even when the #2 has technology parity. The Pepsi precedent suggests the #2 position itself can be a sixty-year commercial structure that generates real returns without ever closing the gap.
What the #2 Brand Playbook Requires
The discipline of being a successful #2 brand has four components. First, naming the leader explicitly — refusing to pretend the category is undefined. Avis named Hertz. Pepsi names Coke. Burger King names McDonald’s. The naming establishes the comparison frame.
Second, converting the gap into a behavioral or attribute promise. Try harder. Different taste. Have it your way. Your friend with a car. The promise is what the #2 does that the #1 cannot or will not.
Third, sustained commercial investment in the positioning. The Avis line ran for fifty years. The Pepsi Challenge format has been revived multiple times. Adidas’s heritage sneaker positioning has run for decades. #2 positioning is not a campaign; it is a multi-decade brand architecture.
Fourth, the willingness to live with being #2 commercially while winning on the dimensions that matter. Avis never overtook Hertz. Pepsi never overtook Coke in soda. Adidas never overtook Nike in U.S. share. None of those are failures. They are the operating equilibria of category-defining #2 brands.
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