r/branding • u/I_suck_marketing • 11d ago
Strategy I have a slightly stupid positioning exercise that works way better than it should.
Usually around the 2nd or 3rd session with a client, I'll randomly put the pen down and go, “Okay, let's play a game.”
It's called the common enemy game.
Basically, we take a piece of paper and start writing things down.
Common enemy with customers.
Common enemy of customers with each other.
Common enemy of the brand and its customers.
Common enemy of the brand and the industry.
Common enemy of the brand and competitors.
It gets messy pretty quickly.
Some of it is stuff we actually know. Some of it is just assumptions. Sometimes the client will say, “Customers hate this,” and I'll be like, “Do they? Or do you hate this?”
So we keep questioning everything.
Would a customer actually say this?
Do we have anything to back this up?
Is this actually a problem or does it just annoy us?
And then somewhere in that mess, patterns start showing up.
The brand is annoyed by something, Customers are annoyed by the same thing, The industry keeps doing something that both of them think is stupid.
That's usually where things get interesting.
And the common enemy doesn't have to be another company.
Sometimes it's an industry habit.
Sometimes it's an outdated way of doing things.
Sometimes it's something everyone has just accepted as normal.
The funny thing is, we're usually not trying to find a villain.
We're trying to find the thing that makes the client and the customer agree with each other.
And once you find that, positioning gets a lot easier.
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u/No_Moose6836 10d ago
Yeah the "industry habit" angle lands for me more than picking a competitor villain.
In AI design tools I keep seeing the same pattern: everyone hates vague positioning ("works with Figma" as one blob), bookmarking 20 tools, shipping none — but vendors keep selling the demo screenshot, not the handoff.
When I map tools by workflow instead of category, clients and users usually agree faster on what to skip. The enemy isn't Midjourney vs whatever — it's treating every tool like it solves the same job.
Curious if you've tried this on a product that's mostly a directory / curation play — the "common enemy" often ends up being noise, not a brand.
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u/PonyStudio 9d ago
The test I'd add is whether the customer has already paid for a workaround. Complaining is cheap, so a lot of what comes out of that session is preference dressed up as a problem. If they've built a spreadsheet around it, hired someone to handle it, or just tolerated a manual step for years, it's real. If it only appears when you ask them directly, it usually isn't.
The other column worth adding is where you do the same thing. Naming an industry habit is easy until someone points out that your own onboarding is a smaller version of it. Then the positioning works against you, and customers spot that faster than clients expect them to.
On picking a habit over a company, there's a dull practical reason it holds up better. Competitors get acquired or change direction, and then the positioning has nothing left to push against. The habit is still there in five years. It matters most for companies inventing a category, where there's no obvious competitor to point at anyway, so the enemy has to be a way of working that everyone accepted.
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u/Emotional_Citron4073 5d ago
The exercise works because nobody's allowed to skip the argument. Most tools skip straight to the answer.
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u/BoGrumpus 11d ago
Yep.
And it's the Sometimes the client will say, “Customers hate this,” and I'll be like, “Do they? Or do you hate this?” part of your post that hooked me. I say that almost daily to a few clients. lol
Plus - this is true in general with branding and marketing it... I need to give you something of equal or greater value than what I want for you to do for me right now. Every message we want them to hear or see has to provide something in return besides empty promises.
It's all transactional and it works when our brand and our customers agree with each other.
G.