Win Customers’ Attention with This Clever Strategy

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show that solves entrepreneurs' toughest problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and each week I take a problem that you're probably dealing with and get tactical solutions from people who have been there and solved that. So let's get solving. If you turned on the television in 2004, you were likely to see this commercial. It opens on a close-up shot of this blonde woman, and then you zoom out and see that she is a mom. She's in a very messy house. She has a child jumping on the couch that she is sitting on, and then people just start coming into the room.

2:14And she tells us this. If you're busy like me, going to the video store is a hassle. Then we cut to a laptop where she shows us this crazy new thing called Netflix. Just make a list of the movies you want to see. And in about one business day, you'll get three delivered to your house. She tells us a little bit more about this fascinating news service. But of course, her family just keeps interrupting her. So by the end, she just loses it. Can you get that? Mommy! Mommy's doing a TV commercial! So, okay, what was Netflix doing there? What was the intention of this advertisement? The answer is that, well, obviously, it was trying to introduce the convenience of Netflix, but the way in which it was doing it was by drawing a contrast to the video store.

3:06But the video store wasn't actually the central part of this ad. Instead, busyness was the central part of this ad. You could argue that Netflix was declaring war on busyness. And there's a good reason for that. It's because this thing that Netflix was doing, it is a time-tested marketing and positioning strategy. And it is called the strategic enemy. A strategic enemy is what you're positioning against. This is Laura Reese, chairwoman of Reese, a global positioning company. Laura grew up working with her dad, Al Rees, who created the word positioning, considered the father of positioning. It is an idea that is now taken as gospel in the world of marketing and branding.

3:55Positioning means owning a word or an idea. It's the way that, for example, Volvo owned the idea of safety. It poured all its energy and marketing into getting people to associate Volvo with safety. Why? Positioning! This was the way that Volvo differentiated itself and competed in a crowded market with lots and lots of other car companies. The strategic enemy is an important concept inside of positioning, because to own an idea, you also must draw a contrast. The mind appreciates not superiority, but difference, and boldly positioning against something else makes it much clearer what you stand for.

4:36And that's the big idea. If you first set up what you're against, that is what people get excited about. And what you're against is much more believable. If you say, for example, you know, if it's Salesforce saying no software, the end of software was how they built that brand, not by claiming how great cloud was, but by first taking down that enemy. And that's what more companies and particularly entrepreneurs should be focused on. Laura just wrote a new book on this subject. It is called The Strategic Enemy, How to Build and Position a Brand Worth Fighting For. And that point she just made is one I really hadn't thought about exactly, which is that the reason or one of the reasons to position yourself against a strategic enemy is because it just seems more believable.

5:23I mean, if you're Netflix, then you could spend all this energy saying, we have the best system to deliver movies to your home. It is the best. You should trust us because it's the best. But you know, that doesn't sound that believable. When a brand is talking all over the place about how great they are, sometimes you might say, well, that's coming from the brand. What else would they say? But if they position against an enemy, an enemy that you already hate, like I am so busy, my kids are driving me crazy, I can't get out of the house to rent a movie and relax. well, then you might trust this brand that also knows how much you hate that other thing.

6:05It's also important to remember that people are always making a choice, right? It's not just one choice out there. You have to realize that they are making a choice. And what is that choice that you want to set yourself up against to make yourself look great? Listen, there's many companies, you face lots of enemies, but that strategic enemy is the one you identify. And it needs to be an actual, you know, believable idea, right? It can't be a fake faux or made up concept. It has to be something that's actually actually the inverse position should also be a very strong position to have. So one of the greatest campaigns McDonald's ever had was you deserve a break today.

6:41They were the leading fast food chain. So they weren't really competing against the other smaller brands. Their biggest competition was mom staying home with the kids. And so when they said, what's the alternative, stay home and cook for the kids or make it easy on yourself? Let's enjoy the happy meal at McDonald's and let them play in the playground. The strategic enemy is really an act of understanding what frustrates your audience so that you can position yourself not just against another competitor, but against the thing that your audience really hates, because that's how you become a brand that they love.

7:15Today on Problem Solvers, I am talking with Laura Reese about how this works and how you can find the strategic enemy that you can challenge. It's all coming up after the break. All right, we're back. I'm talking with Laura Reese, author of the new book, The Strategic Enemy. And let's pick up the conversation. And I'm going to start by drilling into something that you may have picked up on, but that we haven't explicitly said yet, which is that the strategic enemy is sometimes abstract, sometimes not exactly what you think a company is competing against. Let's make sure that we understand the real nuance here.

7:59This is what I said to Laura. When you're talking about the strategic enemy, you're not always or maybe even often talking about a specific competitor. The enemy of McDonald's might be Burger King, but that's not how McDonald's is going to talk about its strategic enemy. Instead, the enemy is going to be a concept or a feeling. It's going to be overwhelmed. The enemy is overwhelmed that you're too busy doing all these different things in your life. And so McDonald's is going to attack your enemy by making this meal as easy and cheap as possible. And that's a really interesting nuance that I think people often miss when they think about what they're competing against.

8:44Because you're not always competing against another company, are you? You're sometimes just competing against an idea. Sure. I mean, ideas themselves are very powerful of the way things used to be done, right? And many times it's the old category. And so it's a concept, it's an idea. It doesn't have to be a specific company. Absolutely. And even nonprofits benefit from this idea of having a strategic enemy. And what it comes down to, you'll never have an enemy without a focus. Way too many companies are into way too many things, even with nonprofits. I mean, if you can be very specific, that makes what you're fighting against ever more clear.

9:22Tunnel to towers, right? Mortgage-free homes for heroes. That's something that's very memorable, powerful, and you know exactly what you're fighting against. We're doing great things for veterans. That's nice, but what's the alternative? And that's always what it's about and thinking about what that is out there and how we can be different, how we can be focused and how we can be memorable. So now let's get strategic here, Laura. How does a founder identify what strategic enemy they are campaigning against? what does a founder do or a company i mean i'm just you know because we're usually because we're usually talking about you in your work you're probably working with massive companies and maybe the founder is long gone but the people who are listening to this show are usually running smaller businesses so the person who's making the decision i just often think of as the founder not the ceo but it's all the same basically like what does the who does the leader if you want to position your brand against a strategic enemy, then you have to decide what enemy you're going up against.

10:27So where do you begin in that process? Well, you have to begin with a focus. I mean, what are you actually going to focus on and how can that be different from what's out there? For example, Farmer's Dog. Fresh Pet was in the supermarket, but they were selling cat food, dog food, all sorts of food. Farmer's Dog said, we're going to narrow the focus, right, just to dogs. We're going to sell it by subscription. It's going to be very personalized. Your dog's name's on the package and they're selling fresh food direct. What enemy should they go against? The fresh pet that's in the supermarket? No, they went after the kibble, right?

11:00And they said, our enemy is brown burnt balls. If you feed your dog highly processed food every day of its life, it's going to shorten its life. And it relates to what we already know in the mind. And that again, if you can relate to something they already believe about something else, the contrast and clarity then comes in of, well, of course, well, eating processed food for myself is bad. Why would I do that to my dog? You know, my most loved best friend in the world. That made it instantly clear and cut through. But most importantly, along with that, because, you know, for many companies, there's lots of companies out there.

11:32What you need to do is you need to be first in the mind. Because many times when there's a, you know, revolutionary idea, there's many companies playing around. The winner is the one that builds the brand in the mind first. Listen, iPod wasn't the first high-capacity music player, Creative Technologies was. Nobody knows Creative. They made a whole bunch of stuff. You know, the player was only one of them. Apple, of course, built that brand by positioning it in the mind and going up against the enemy that was the cheap MP3 players, right? And what did they do? They made the oversimplified message of what made them better than the enemy, a thousand songs in your pocket.

12:11Oh my God, we didn't know we needed such a thing, but a thousand songs in your pocket. and they combine that with the visual hammer of those white earbuds coming out to make sure that you knew and it was very distinctive out in the marketplace that you indeed were a cool kid with an iPod. So all of these things come together, but you do have to act fast. And not only that, the name is incredibly important. Consumers care more about categories than they do about brands. Everyone blows their mind when they hear that, but it's true. What do you mean by that? because it's the category itself. I mean, do you get excited about the brand Red Bull or the brand Tesla?

12:47I think so. Or Starbucks? No, it's not the brand that's so exciting. It's those categories that each of those brands represent. So Red Bull being the first energy drink, Tesla being the first electric vehicle, Starbucks being the first high-end coffee shop. It's those categories that really got people excited. Now, when they talk, they speak in brands, but they think in categories. And it goes to the point of when you think about buying anything in a category, what do you think about first, the brand or the category? For example, if you're going to go shopping, you're going to have a party for your house there with your friends over.

13:22Do you say, well, I think I'm going to get Bud Light. What kind of Bud Light should I buy? Should I get the non-alcoholic, the seltzer, the one with lime, the Bud Light Arita? I mean, are you going to pick what kind of Bud Light? No. You're going to think, what kind? Do we want beer? Right? Do we want hard seltzers? We'll get the White Claw. Do we want spirit seltzers? We'll get the High Noon. Dominating that category is the most important position. And it's best done when you have a strong brand name that also lends itself to a visual. Weak generic brand names like Fresh Pet, like Light Beer, like Lyft, they're not uppercase in the mind.

13:59In the mind, there's only sounds. And that's confusing in the long run and leaves those companies vulnerable to competitors. You saw Miller Lite lost his way, very duft with a line extension and that weak generic name to build a strong position. That's really interesting. Let me, we're going to bring us back to the strategic enemy specifically, though, because I want to unpack more about how somebody could actually start to think about this for themselves and use it. And Laura, I'll give you an example from a friend. So my friend, Lisa Barnett, was the co, I guess she technically, you're always a co-founder, but she's not there anymore, but she was co-founder and president of Little Spoon.

14:37And Little Spoon is a company that makes baby food, or now makes kids food as well. But it started with baby food. One of their earliest campaigns was to launch a website called

14:49nomoreoldbabyfood.com. And if you go to nomoreoldbabyfood.com, what you see is this very charming montage of little babies in a high chair with like a jar of baby food and they're just crying, right? Because every parent has had this like either old baby food sitting around or seen baby food that's been on the shelf and it's been on the shelf for a long time because it's full of preservatives. And so what Little Spoon is going up against as a organic, fresh baby food and now kids' food brand was the idea of old baby food, which was something that parents recognize is a thing out in the market and parents are trying to find a solution to it.

15:38I love this example because it is not going after one specific thing. It's not saying no more Gerbers. And I think my hypothesis, Laura, you tell me if I'm right, but my hypothesis is that no more Gerber would actually pretty bad strategic enemy. And the reason for that is because maybe people have bought Gerber and maybe liked it and are looking for something better, but don't want to feel insulted by this other brand that's like now telling me that my purchase was bad. So you don't want to go up against a specific brand that your consumer might have actually used and liked. But also, it just seems kind of petty.

16:13But if it's no more baby food, that's an idea. That's a concept. That's a thing that everyone can say, yeah, I don't want old baby food either. And it's really compelling. That brand, Littlespoon, could have gone in so many different directions. There were so many ways in which they could have identified a strategic enemy. They chose that one. So number one, Laura, I wonder if you think that was a smart positioning play. And then number two, what would you say people could extract from that example as some kind of guidance for how they can find their own strategic enemy? It's a great example. I haven't heard of that one.

16:48But as a mom of two kids, you can absolutely resonate with the old baby food and not wanting to have it, not knowing what to do with it, the kid not wanting to eat it. And it strikes an emotional chord when you say what you're against, right? And then instantly makes clear that you are healthy and fresher and organic. It's such a perfect example of how this works in practice, of when you clearly say what it is. And that's the thing about the strategic enemy. It is not about calling out a name brand. It works in very few cases and only when those enemies are very clear. The Mac versus PC, for example, it's Starbucks versus Dunkin' Donuts.

17:26They made a very funny Super Bowl commercial because everyone knows that rivalry. It's a well-known thing. Actually, interestingly, Mac versus PC, as I think about that now, which was an incredibly effective campaign. On both sides. They both benefit. Yes, that's true. But PC wasn't a specific thing. There is no company called PC. There's Dell and there's HP and there's a lot of companies that make products that we thought of as the PC, but it was still going up against more of a category or a concept than it was an individual brand. It was, but we all kind of knew the subtext that it was really Microsoft, right?

17:59All the products that ran the Microsoft Windows and that operating system. And, you know, it was a clear contrast. But what it also did is it didn't say the other side was wrong. It was also just saying how they were different, which is the whole point of it is that there are two sides to everything, and people want to line up with whichever side they find most appealing. And saying the other side is awful is usually a bad idea. But making, again, that contrast clear, and not calling out a named company, but calling out the concept that they represent, again, it's that category idea. What you're really fighting against, and the most important strategic enemy is that other category out there that you're trying to distance yourself and pioneering a new idea for.

18:43Do you have a guidance? I'm thinking I've got a brand and I'm trying to figure out what is the thing that's frustrating my consumer the most that I can then be the hero about? Is that a good starting point for where to find that strategic enemy? And where do I go from there? Does stuff come out of consumer research? Well, nobody can be a hero without a villain, right? It's part of the storytelling process. And figuring out exactly what that villain is starts with what's in that mind of the prospect. So it is about a little bit about research in terms of what are the perceptions or what are people doing now and how are they feeling about it?

19:17And in some cases, it is just about a big, bold move. It's what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone. I mean, that was a kind of uncertain time, but he said, this is not just the internet phone, this is the first smartphone and you are going to need this. I know it. He felt very strongly about that. Saying that the iPhone was smart instantly repositioned the enemy, which was Nokia, as the dumb phone. A brilliant move. I mean, really dethroning the king of cell phones at the time that everyone thought was an impossible task. Yet it was done with very smart marketing and positioning moves as that category name is incredibly important because what you name that category sets up what that enemy may be.

20:02So, for example, Spanx was a footless pantyhose initially. That was the category. And that was good because there were a lot of shapewear out there. That was kind of a, you know, the term meant a lot of things to a lot of people. She got very specific and her product was very specific. And that's how she had the idea for it. She said, these, you know, you probably don't wear them, but I've worn a lot of control top pantyhose. They're fantastic, but nobody wanted the hose part anymore. So her big idea was to cut off the bottom. And she then positioned it as a footless pantyhose, making, you know, pantyhose the enemy and all the other shapewear products that gave you bulges.

20:37And this didn't very strong way of naming the concept so that it was instantly understood and relatable. As you're talking about this, what I'm thinking of is what are the best ways to communicate and campaign against your strategic enemy. Is this something that you suggest becomes core to marketing overall? Is this about specific campaigns? Is this just about the language that you use when you're describing your brand or your product? You know, it depends on the situation. I mean, some brands very strongly go out and call out the strategic enemy by name, if you will. One great example is Chick-fil-A, right?

21:19For 30 years, eat more chicken. They have cows telling us to eat more chicken. So they have made it front and center. The visual hammer, the centerpiece of their campaign talking about, you know, eating more chicken and have succeeded again, the rise of the category itself. We are eating more chicken. That's an interesting one. I hadn't thought about that. Who's the enemy there, though? Beef? Hamburgers. Absolutely. But what's the enemy part of that? Because it's not, But Chick-fil-A is not saying, for example, beef is bad for you, right? Do you think they are? Do you think that's what's implied?

21:56Cows are talking to us. They don't want you to eat them. I appreciate that perspective from the cows, but I never got, or maybe it was just so subtle that I never really thought about it, which is why I wanted to dig in as soon as you said it. I always thought of that as a kind of cute, most fast food is beef oriented. So the cows are saying like, hey, lay off us and go eat the chicken, which actually, when you think about it, it actually sort of sounds like psychotic that they're putting it out like this. But what I never felt was that Chick-fil-A was leaning on me perceiving beef to be bad the way that Little Spoon was expecting that people would immediately understood that old baby food is bad.

22:40That's a very good point. And in some cases, yes, it is a very strong, you know, strategic enemy like liquid death. You know, we are killing the environment with the plastic bottles like death to plastic. Right. That is a very strong take against the enemy. Very strong. In other cases, it's not so clear that, you know, that's the, you know, killing the environment. But it's the choice. You have a choice out there. You can eat, you know, hamburgers at all of the hamburger places or you can eat chicken. And chicken has a better, more, it's a healthy halo. Right. I mean, it's that subtle and people do feel they're eating better and more healthy at Chick-fil-A.

23:14It's a very subtle difference. And it comes from, A, they don't sell any hamburgers. So they can very strongly take that stand. McDonald's can't do that. They've got chicken. They've got hamburgers. They've got wraps. They've got breakfast. They've got everything. They can't take a very strong case on any one part of their menu. And that's a big advantage for Chick-fil-A. I mean, because they can own the idea. I mean, they pioneered the chicken sandwich. They were the first fast food chain also in a mall. That was a big idea. Yes, absolutely. Right here in Atlanta, Georgia. He saw the big idea of that there was no food court.

23:43Young kids today, I mean, well, they don't even go to the mall anymore. But anyway, the food court, the rise was the first one was Chick-fil-A to put that food in the food court. And again, there was a chicken sandwich there. There's a whole story behind it. But you make a really compelling point there about recognizing what the primary choice is that the consumer has. If the consumer is looking for fast food, they basically are looking at beef versus chicken. It kind of comes down to that. And so Chick-fil-A is using the other choice as the enemy. Absolutely. And that's the best way to do it.

24:19The problem most companies have is that, you know, if you go to Wendy's, sure, there's healthy items. but you see the good stuff that you want and then you're enticed. It's a mind-bending situation. It's very hard to sell healthy items in those stores. When you focus only on one thing, it's a much pleasurable, easier experience even making the decision of what you want to have. There's no thought, do I want beef today or chicken? We're at Chick-fil-A. We're going to have chicken today. And what kind of chicken? It might be in a sandwich, might be in a salad, but it's going to be chicken and it's going to come with waffle fries.

24:49It better come with waffle fries because that's the reason I go to Chick-fil-A is just for the So waffle fries, this is reminding me of something a couple of years ago, entrepreneur had hosted this retreat for CMOs in the franchise space. And part of that retreat was breaking the CMOs up into groups of like six or seven. And we were sitting around tables and we would go around and everybody brought one problem to work on. And this guy from Stratus Building Solutions, which is a janitorial service. So that franchise services office buildings with janitorial services. They clean the office for you.

25:28They clean the office for you. He comes and he says that his problem is that he wants to create a 30-second commercial and he doesn't know what should be in the commercial. And so we're going around and we're talking about it. And the company has positioned itself as an eco-friendly cleaning brand. That's a lot of their messaging. And that's where they see a lot of their differentiation is in the eco-friendly products that they use. And then somebody at the table asks him, what is the reason that most of your customers leave your competitor and come to you? What a really interesting question. And his answer was, oh, well, that's very simple.