You do not need a cape to build a memorable brand. You do need a point of view that draws a line. Batman has the Joker. Holmes has Moriarty. Your company has its own antagonist too. The trick is to choose the right one and then tell the story with intent.
When branding expert David Brier explains his craft, he goes straight to the real foe of most companies. It is the category cliché. The bland words, the same stock visuals, the tired promise that every website could copy and paste. He calls branding the art of differentiation. If your story cannot break the pattern, your brand will blend into the feed. That is not a creative issue. That is a commercial risk.
Gartner has found that nearly half of buyers cannot tell one digital experience from another. If customers cannot feel the difference, they will not pay for it either. Marmite understood this and leaned into love-it-or-hate-it. The lesson for B2B is not to be outrageous for sport. It is to accept that resonance requires edges. If you try to please everybody, you end up exciting nobody.
Let us be clear about the lines we will not cross. You are not attacking customers who dislike your style. You are not breaking rules or ignoring regulations. You are not running a smear campaign against rivals. You are not courting outrage for clicks. Making enemies is simply this. Take a position that stands against something real in your market. Name the problem that your buyers already feel. Then build a brand that opposes it with conviction, not with noise.
Founders stay neutral for reasons that sound reasonable. Do not alienate prospects. Do not make legal nervous. Do not hand a competitor free publicity. I understand that logic, especially in regulated categories and enterprise sales where consensus buying is real. But neutrality has a cost that rarely shows up on a dashboard. It erodes memory. It dulls your pitch. It forces your team into safe language that never becomes a story anyone repeats.
Think about the GAP logo reversal. The design did not just miss a trend. It ignored what people felt about the brand. Within six days the company backtracked because the reaction was not a debate. It was rejection. The point is not that change is risky. The point is that losing your edge is riskier.
Every good brand fight is really a fight for a customer’s outcome. Here are three honest ways to frame your opponent without turning your company into a caricature.
Every serious business is built on a cause, even when it is not social or environmental. Maybe your cause is operational clarity for overloaded IT teams. Maybe it is cleaner energy use in data-heavy workflows. When the cause is clear, the enemy is the thing that undermines it. Outdated supply chains. Fossil-fueled compute. Wasteful processes. Unmeasured e-waste.
Look at EcoCart. The company names the carbon cost of ecommerce and shows the mitigation they deliver. The World Economic Forum has warned that emissions from ecommerce logistics could reach tens of millions of tonnes by 2030. EcoCart plants its flag on that hill and then reports hard numbers and audited projects. That is how you oppose something without doom-mongering. You show the scale of the problem and the progress you can actually prove.
Underdog energy is powerful when you use it to spotlight a better way. Almost everyone remembers Mac vs PC. It was cheeky, but it worked because Apple was not just mocking a rival. It was dramatizing a choice. Simple vs clunky. Nimble vs bureaucratic. In B2B, the same arc applies. If you are the newer, more focused player going against a slow incumbent, you can place your solution opposite the big brand’s compromises.
Be careful with this weapon. You do not have to name the competitor unless the legal work and appetite for risk are in place. You can name the pattern instead. Slow rollouts. Bundles that pad invoices. Contract traps. Say what you stand against and let buyers connect the dots.
Simplicity made Canva a phenomenon for small teams. That is a real innovation story. But many enterprise problems are complex for good reasons. If your product goes deep where popular tools stay shallow, then your enemy is the one-size-fits-all mindset. Planisware is a useful example. It serves organizations running multiple complex programs. It integrates with clinical trial systems. It can map large IT portfolios. You would not ask Monday or Asana to pilot a drug launch. Specialism is not arrogance. It is honesty about the stakes.
The line you will not cross depends on your category, your customers, and your risk tolerance. Industries with strict regulators set a hard ceiling on tone. Financial services, health, and government tech require precision and restraint. In Southeast Asia, tone skews pragmatic and respectful, even when you challenge norms. In Saudi, appetite for bold new entrants is rising fast, yet enterprise buyers still expect deference to process. That context matters.
Customer psychology matters too. A recently promoted C-level buyer might cheer a challenger story that solves the pain they used to carry. On the other hand, a risk-averse operations lead may want language that promises stability first, difference second. When appetite for risk inside your own company is low, take aim at the behavior or the norm, not another logo. If your culture embraces sharper moves and your legal counsel is close at hand, you can run a more direct comparative narrative.
Start with a clean brand stand-up. First, write a one-sentence cause that would still matter if your pricing changed and your features were copied. Second, list three market behaviors that violate that cause. Keep them concrete. Hidden fees. Forced twelve-month terms. Unmeasured emissions. Third, translate each behavior into a buyer cost. Lost time. Budget lock-in. Audit risk. Fourth, define your counter-behavior. Transparent pricing. Modular contracts. Verified impact. Fifth, pressure-test the story with customers who already love you and those who passed on you. If both groups can repeat your stance in their own words, you have found your enemy and your language.
Make the conflict constructive. If you publish data, source it and update it. If you run a comparative campaign, check every claim with legal and sales. If you are cheeky on social, be useful in long-form content. The tone can be playful in public and serious in procurement. In demos and docs, bias toward clarity. Show the before and after in numbers. Show where you are still building and why your roadmap choices map to the enemy you named. Buyers trust brands that admit tradeoffs and still take a stand.
Watch for the doom trap. Purpose-driven stories turn into sermons when all you offer is a sense of crisis. Replace alarm with agency. Show the levers a customer can pull right now. Show how the switch is made with low friction. People will sign a statement of work when they can picture the first 30 days, not just the next five years.
A brand fight that lives only in marketing will not last. Sales needs talk tracks that match the stance. Product needs a roadmap that prioritizes the features that uphold it. Customer success needs rituals that reinforce it. If your enemy is lock-in, do not design renewal pressure tactics. If your enemy is waste, do not ship vanity features that add bloat. Internally, recognize and reward the behaviors that make the stance real. Otherwise your enemy story becomes a costume.
The strongest version of this strategy is not louder copy. It is a cleaner choice set. The buyer should feel two paths. Stay with the old pattern and keep paying the silent tax. Switch to your approach and remove that tax with evidence they can explain to a CFO or a compliance lead. If you can arm a champion with that story, you have a brand that can move through committees without you in the room.
I would pick one enemy and live with it for a year. I would write the narrative in simple language the sales team can use without slides. I would measure not just top-line engagement but repeat mentions of our stance in inbound messages, RFPs, and customer reviews. I would train the team to stay on message when a competitor reacts. I would stay generous and keep our proof current. I would avoid the emulation trap where you copy another challenger’s tone and lose your own voice. And I would bring legal and compliance into the creative process early so that bold never becomes reckless.
The making enemies brand strategy is not about noise. It is about nerve. It helps early-stage teams move out of the messy middle and into a position customers can remember and defend. You will make enemies either way. Better to choose them. Better to make the right ones on purpose. If your brand never risks a no, it rarely earns a yes.
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