Pick a Fight: Why Every DTC Brand Needs a Strategic Enemy (and How to Choose One)

Ask twenty DTC founders what their brand stands against, and roughly nineteen of them go quiet.

I don't mean what they sell, or who their customer is, or what their margins look like. Those they can rattle off. I mean the enemy. The thing they exist to fight. The villain that makes a stranger scrolling Instagram feel something in two seconds flat.

Most can't name one. And I think that single gap explains why so much ecom creative feels interchangeable, why so many brands are stuck arbitraging the ad platform instead of building something, and why ROAS quietly grinds down as costs grind up.

So let's talk about strategic enemies. What they are, who's done it well, how to pick one without being a jerk about it, and how it actually shows up in the ads you run.

The pattern hiding inside the biggest brands

Look at the brands that scaled fast over the last few years and a pattern jumps out. Almost all of them are fighting something.

There's a canned water brand whose entire ethos is death to plastic. They hate single-use bottles, they hate the idea that water has to be marketed to "yoga mums", and they put their product in a tallboy can and tell you they'll murder your thirst. The enemy is plastic and boring beverage branding, and every piece of creative they make is a punch thrown at it.

There's a greens brand whose enemy is powders. The scooping, the clumping, the chalky taste, the mess. So they made gummies, and they will never launch a powder, because the powder is the villain and you don't become the thing you're fighting.

There's a coffee brand built for veterans whose enemy is everything that comes after service: the PTSD, the struggle, the feeling of being forgotten. Will a non-veteran buy that coffee? Maybe, if it's good. But the people who share its identity buy it on sight, because it's clearly for them and against what hurts them.

Here's the thing none of those three are doing: they're not picking on their customer. The enemy is always a force, a category, an old way of doing things, a shared frustration. Never the human holding the credit card.

That distinction is the whole game, and it's the part founders get wrong.

Why an enemy works when fear-mongering doesn't

You could try to grow by scaring people. Plenty do. "Your current routine is ruining your skin." "You're poisoning your family." It converts in the short term and it rots your brand in the long term, because the person on the other end eventually feels got at.

A strategic enemy does something cleaner. It gives the customer a side to be on rather than a flaw to feel bad about. You're not the problem. The sugar is. The powder is. The plastic is. The fungus is. Come stand over here with us and we'll fight it together.

My take is that this is the single most underrated edge left in ecom. Everyone has worked out that you need good creative, tested offers and decent landing pages. That's table stakes now. The next edge, the one that compounds, is a position the customer can actually feel. And a position needs an enemy, because nothing defines what you're for as sharply as naming what you're against.

There's a side benefit worth flagging too. As more buying gets filtered through AI assistants, the brands that get recommended will be the ones with a crisp identity: "the greens for people who hate the taste", "the water for people who like rock and roll". A brand that stands for nothing is hard to recommend to anyone. A brand with an enemy is easy to match to a person.

The worksheet: choosing your villain without being a villain

When we onboard a new brand, this is one of the first things we work through, and it's threaded straight into the creative testing roadmap rather than left as a poster on the wall. Here's the worksheet, more or less, so you can run it yourself.

1. Name the force, not the face. Finish this sentence: "We exist because we're sick of ______." Your blank has to be a thing or a behaviour or an industry default, never a person. "Sick of greens that taste like grass." "Sick of supplements that hide what's actually in them." If your blank is "sick of customers who don't read the label", bin it and start again.
2. Make sure it's true to the product. The enemy has to be something your product genuinely defeats. The greens brand can fight powders because gummies actually solve the powder problem. If your enemy is "overpriced skincare" but you sit at a ~$90 price point, the market will smell the lie. The villain and the product have to line up.
3. Blame the cause, exonerate the customer. This is the ethical line, and it's also the more effective line. Don't tell someone their dry scalp is their fault. Tell them the real culprit is something they couldn't have known about, and that it was never on them. People will follow you a long way once you've taken the blame off their shoulders.
4. Check it splits the room. A good enemy makes some people lean in and some people walk away, and that's the point. If your positioning offends literally nobody, it's probably too soft to move anybody. The water brand is fine with not being for everyone. They're still enormous. Standing for something means accepting you won't be for all.
5. Pressure-test it for a year, not a week. Pick an enemy you'll still want to be fighting in twelve months, because the whole value of a position is that it compounds. Switch villains every quarter and you've got no position at all, just noise.

Run those five and you'll usually land somewhere uncomfortable and specific. Uncomfortable and specific is exactly where you want to be.

How the enemy actually shows up in the ad

This is the part founders miss. An enemy isn't a brand-deck flourish. It's the spine of your highest-performing ads, and you can see it frame by frame. Let me walk a typical winning script the way I'd review one with a brand.

The hook names the easy version of the dream: "here's the easiest way to finally fix this." Two seconds, scroll stopped. No enemy yet, just the promise.

Then comes the turn, and this is where the enemy enters: "most people think the problem is X. It's actually the opposite." You've just told the viewer that the thing they blamed (and quietly blamed themselves for) was the wrong target all along. You've challenged a belief and reopened their attention at the same time.

Then you reveal the real villain: "the actual cause is this specific thing you've never heard of." Now you've done two jobs at once. You've named the enemy, and by knowing something the viewer didn't, you've positioned yourself as the authority who can be trusted to fight it.

Then you twist the knife, gently and ethically: "and the common solution you're using is quietly making it worse." Not "you're an idiot for using it". The blame sits on the solution, never the person.

Then the product arrives as the weapon: "here's how we kill the real villain, and we've got more of the thing that actually does it than anyone else." The brand and the customer are now on the same side of the table, fighting a common enemy together. That framing ("us versus it") converts far better than "you have a flaw, buy this."

Then proof closes it: "sixty thousand-odd people are already in this fight with us." The enemy gave the whole ad its shape. Pull the villain out and you're left with a list of ingredients and a discount code, which is precisely the interchangeable stuff that doesn't scale.

That's the thread. Enemy in the positioning, enemy in the hook turn, enemy as the thing the product destroys, enemy as the reason your customer feels like a hero instead of a mark.

The question to sit with

So before the next batch of creative, before the next offer test, I'd sit with the quiet one: if a stranger asked what your brand is against, could you answer in a single sentence that blames a force and not a person?

If you can, your ads have a spine to hang everything on, and your position will keep compounding while your competitors keep arbitraging the feed. If you can't yet, that's not a creative problem or a media problem. It's the thing underneath both, and it's worth more of your attention than another round of hooks.

What's the enemy your brand has been too polite to name?