One must take care to choose one’s enemies well

Translated from the original Spanish article.

“Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have wished, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants appear, with whom I intend to do battle and take all their lives.”

Last year I was at Branders Magazine’s BrandersFest in New York, in a small room where Laura Ries gave a talk on brand positioning.

Everything she said was stimulating, but what particularly caught my attention was the logic of positioning a brand around a strategic enemy. She develops this, by the way, in her book “The strategic enemy: How to build and position a brand worth fighting for,” which I recommend reading.

The idea is simple.

If we define ourselves clearly against something, we immediately occupy a clear, defined position. And every clear, unequivocal classification is precisely the successful outcome of brand positioning.

It holds up because people’s minds organize opposition better than superiority, or than subtle difference. Choosing an enemy forces you to say what you are NOT, and that makes what you ARE easier to understand.

This enemy is what rallies people and makes the cause resonate: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Done right, the brand stops competing to be better and starts leading a side.

In 1999, enterprise software meant CDs, expensive licenses, servers, IT projects and a real pain with every update. Salesforce, despite being software itself, made THAT software its enemy: “No Software,” no half measures: the word crossed out inside a red circle. It positioned itself against the old model of installing, licensing and maintaining. And with that enemy it defined an entire category, the cloud.

But one must take care to choose one’s enemies well.

Those fictional narratives that take us away from reality will make us run into it sooner or later, usually with a spectacular crash, perhaps one as spectacular and merciless as the world’s indifference. “Foe enemies,” Laura calls them: enemies invented because they are comfortable and convenient.

The enemy has to be genuine, tangible, tied to a real pain or desire of the customer. That is, or implies, truly taking a stand against reality.

It reminds me, in boxing, of the contrast between playful glove-tapping and serious sparring. With an opponent who hits back, everything changes. As in life itself, facing what is real, what hits back, is exactly what’s hard. And where the money is.

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.

If our enemy is a fictional delusion far removed from reality, born of a lukewarm, put-on courage, we not only run the risk of receiving an accolade across the back from the sail of a windmill, but not even Sancho Panza could join our cause.