Every great brand needs an enemy.

Brand strategy 

Not a competitor. Not a category rival. An enemy: the thing your brand exists to defeat. The brands that understand this are the ones consumers remember.

In 2013, T-Mobile was losing. AT&T and Verizon owned the market, the narrative, and the consumer's imagination. T-Mobile was third, an also-ran in a category defined by its two biggest players. Then it named its enemy.

Not AT&T. Not Verizon. The enemy was the entire wireless industry: its contracts, its fees, its contempt for the people it was supposed to serve. T-Mobile called it what it was. A racket. And it became the Uncarrier. Within four years it had added 30 million customers and fundamentally changed what the category was allowed to do to consumers.

The brand didn't win by being better at the same game. It won by refusing to play it.

The enemy isn't a company. It's a condition.

This is the mistake most brands make when they try to find their enemy. They look across the competitive set and pick a rival. That's not an enemy. That's a target. And targeting competitors makes you look reactive, and obsessed with the wrong thing.

T-Mobile's enemy was industry complacency. Apple's enemy,Think Different, was conformity. The enemy wasn't IBM or Microsoft. It was the assumption that computers were for corporations, that creativity was a luxury, that thinking differently was a liability rather than a gift. Apple didn't beat IBM by being a better IBM. It made IBM irrelevant by standing for the opposite of everything IBM represented.

"Turo didn't declare war on Hertz. It declared war on the rental car: the fluorescent-lit counter, the upsell, the damage waiver, the bus to the lot."

We helped understood the same thing. They weren’t the AirBnB of cars, they were poised to take on an industry. Rent a car, not a rental car. The enemy wasn't Enterprise or Avis. It was the experience of renting a car. The indignity of it. The sameness of it. The way it made you feel like a transaction rather than a traveller. Turo named that enemy and built everything: product, language, community, around defeating it.

Why most brands won't do this.

Naming an enemy requires courage that most brand teams don't have. Not because they lack conviction, but because the organisational forces around them punish it. Legal doesn't like it. The board worries about alienating someone. The agency softens it in the third round of revisions. By the time it reaches the market it says nothing to no one.

The brands that get this right: T-Mobile, Apple, Turo, Patagonia, Oatly. They share a common trait. Someone in the room had the authority and the conviction to keep the enemy alive all the way through. Usually it was the founder, or a leader close enough to one to behave like it.

This is also why the enemy has to be real. Not manufactured in a workshop. Not a positioning exercise that produces a beautifully formatted slide about challenging the status quo. The brands that endure found their enemy by listening: to consumers who were frustrated, underserved, condescended to, ignored. The enemy was already there. The brand just had the nerve to name it.

What this means for the brief.

When we work with brands on positioning and strategy, we almost always arrive at this question: what are you against? Not as a provocation. As a diagnostic. Because in our experience, a brand that can't answer that question clearly doesn't yet have a positioning. It has a description.

The enemy focuses everything. It makes the target consumer obvious: they're the ones who share your frustration with it. It makes the product decisions easier: does this defeat the enemy or distract from it? It makes the communication sharper, because every brief, every campaign, every piece of content has a clear antagonist to push against.

And it gives consumers a reason to choose you that goes beyond features and price. Because people don't just buy products. They join causes. They back underdogs. They want to be on the right side of something.

The brands that find their enemy and have the nerve to name it are the ones consumers don't just buy. They champion.

The question worth sitting with: what does your brand exist to defeat?