In the Standard Model (and most of its extensions), the electroweak gauge symmetry is broken by the vacuum condensate of an isospin-doublet scalar field: the famous Higgs field. But scalars in larger isospin representations can also contribute to electroweak symmetry breaking and to the masses of the W and Z bosons. In this talk I'll explore the possibilities for such "exotic" contributions to the vacuum condensate and discuss their phenomenological consequences, which can be used in a generic way to experimentally constrain these scenarios.