How to Create a Brand Enemy That Makes Your Positioning Stronger
A brand enemy is the problem, belief, behaviour or convention your brand exists to challenge. Defining one gives your purpose tension, makes your positioning clearer and helps customers understand not only what you offer, but what you stand for.
And importantly, your enemy doesn’t have to be another company.
In fact, the strongest brand enemies often aren’t competitors at all. They’re the outdated assumption, frustrating problem or accepted way of doing things that your customers already want to escape.
That’s what makes the idea so powerful.
What is a brand enemy?
A brand enemy is a clearly defined force that stands in opposition to the change your brand wants to create.
Think about any compelling story. There is usually tension between the world as it is and the world the protagonist believes it could become.
Brands work in much the same way.
Without that tension, you can have a perfectly sensible purpose, proposition and set of values — but very little for people to emotionally connect with.
A useful way to frame it is:
Your purpose describes the future you want to create. Your brand enemy identifies what’s standing in the way.
That’s why defining an enemy can sharpen your entire brand strategy.
Why does your brand need something to fight against?
Because “we provide great service” isn’t a cause.
Neither is “we’re innovative”, “we put customers first” or most of the other statements filling About pages across the internet.
Growing businesses need a more distinctive point of view.
When you identify what you’re fighting against, three things become easier:
- Positioning: customers can see why you’re meaningfully different.
- Messaging: you have a stronger story than simply describing your products or services.
- Alignment: your people have a clearer principle against which to make decisions.
Your enemy effectively creates a line in the sand.
It says: this is the problem we refuse to accept.
That can be far more powerful than another list of brand values.
How do you create a brand enemy?
There are four useful places to look: your purpose, your category, your customer’s problem and your values.
1. What does your purpose tell you you’re fighting?
Start with why the business needs to exist beyond making money.
Ask:
If we succeeded completely, what would be different for our customers or our industry?
Then reverse the answer.
If your purpose is to make expert financial advice accessible, perhaps your enemy is unnecessary financial complexity.
If your purpose is to make sustainable choices easier, your enemy might be disposable consumption.
If you’re trying to help businesses make faster decisions, your enemy could be organisational bureaucracy.
This is more useful than inventing a villain for a campaign. The enemy emerges naturally from the change you’re trying to create.
2. Is there an industry convention you disagree with?
Sometimes your enemy sits inside your own category.
Perhaps your competitors are overly corporate. Perhaps the industry makes something unnecessarily complicated. Perhaps everyone sells in exactly the same way.
That’s an opportunity.
Rather than saying you’re “different”, define what you’re different from.
This doesn’t require attacking competitors by name. It means identifying an accepted category convention and explaining why you believe customers deserve something better.
The distinction matters.
Picking fights simply to attract attention can quickly become a gimmick. Challenging an industry convention because it conflicts with your beliefs creates meaningful differentiation.
Should your brand enemy be a competitor?
Usually, no.
Competitor-led positioning can work. Dunkin’, for example, has historically used its rivalry with Starbucks to reinforce a more accessible, everyday identity.
But building your entire strategy around another company creates a weakness: they remain at the centre of your story.
A more durable approach is to identify the underlying problem.
Google’s early mission to organise the world’s information provides a useful example. The bigger enemy wasn’t another search engine. It was the difficulty of navigating an enormous and disorganised amount of information.
That gives a brand a much larger battle to fight.
So ask yourself:
What problem would still matter if our biggest competitor disappeared tomorrow?
The answer is often a much stronger brand enemy.
How can customer pain become your brand enemy?
Listen to what customers complain about before they find you.
What wastes their time?
What makes them frustrated?
What have they reluctantly accepted as “just how this industry works”?
These problems can become powerful strategic territory because the customer already understands the enemy.
You don’t need to convince them that the problem exists.
You need to demonstrate that you understand it — and have built your business differently because of it.
Try completing this sentence:
Our customers shouldn’t have to put up with __________.
The answers can expose much stronger positioning opportunities than asking, “What makes us unique?”
Can a brand enemy help you attract the right audience?
Yes — because strong positioning isn’t designed to appeal equally to everyone.
Apple’s famous Think Different era wasn’t simply about computers. Its positioning celebrated creators, thinkers and people prepared to challenge convention.
That creates identity.
People aren’t just choosing a product. They’re recognising something of themselves in the brand.
This is where a brand enemy becomes magnetic. By making your beliefs clearer, you make it easier for the right audience to say:
“That’s how I see the world too.”
There is a trade-off, of course. Clear positioning may make you less attractive to some people.
That’s often the point.
What makes a good brand enemy?
Before committing to one, test it against four questions:
- Is it relevant? Does your audience genuinely experience or care about this problem?
- Is it credible? Does your business actually behave differently?
- Is it enduring? Will this issue still matter several years from now?
- Is it useful? Can it guide decisions, messaging and customer experience?
If the enemy only produces a provocative advertising line, it isn’t strategic enough.
A strong enemy should influence what you do as well as what you say.
What is Elements Brand Management fighting against?
For us, the enemy is fragmentation.
As businesses grow, different teams, leaders, locations and agencies can gradually develop different interpretations of the brand.
The business drifts.
Messaging becomes inconsistent. Decisions become harder. Marketing becomes disconnected from strategy. Eventually, nobody has quite the same answer to the question: Who are we and what do we stand for?
That’s why our approach isn’t simply about changing how a business looks.
Through the Unified Brand Framework™ — Clarify → Unify → Amplify — we help organisations create clarity around who they are, unify the business around it and then amplify that brand consistently.
Because amplifying a fragmented brand simply amplifies the confusion.
How do you turn your brand enemy into a strategy?
Don’t stop after naming it.
Once you’ve identified your enemy, ask how it changes:
- the language you use
- the services and experiences you create
- the things you’re prepared to say no to
- the behaviours you encourage internally
- the decisions leadership makes
- the future you’re promising customers
That’s when a brand enemy stops being a marketing device and starts becoming a strategic tool.
And that’s ultimately the goal.
The best brand enemy isn’t something you’ve invented to make your marketing more interesting. It’s something your organisation is genuinely committed to changing.
FAQs
Can a brand have more than one enemy?
There may be several problems surrounding your category, but one central enemy usually creates clearer positioning. Supporting problems can sit underneath it.
Does a brand enemy have to be negative?
The language can sound negative, but its purpose is positive. The enemy creates contrast so people understand the better future you’re trying to create.
Should you publicly name a competitor as your enemy?
You can, but it’s rarely necessary. Challenging the problem or convention behind the competitor often creates a more enduring strategic position.
What’s the difference between a brand enemy and a competitor?
A competitor sells an alternative solution. A brand enemy is the problem, belief, behaviour or convention your brand exists to challenge. Competitors can change. A strategically useful enemy should be more enduring.
What should you do next?
Start with one question:
What are we unwilling to accept about our industry, our customers’ experience or the way things are currently done?
Your answer may reveal more about your positioning than another competitor matrix ever will.
If you’re working through questions like this, the Strategic Shifts guide can help you think more deeply about the strategic changes your brand needs to make.
You can also take the Brand Power Assessment to understand how effectively your brand is performing across strategy, marketing, personality and identity.
And if the bigger problem is that different parts of your organisation are pulling in different directions, book a Discovery Call with Elements Brand Management. As a Unified Brand Agency, we help ambitious businesses move from fragmentation to clarity, alignment and a brand that actually works.
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