Trying to be universally liked is one of the biggest mistakes your brand can make.
When you launch a company, it is entirely natural to want everyone to buy your product. You want the biggest total addressable market possible. You think that by keeping your messaging broad and safe, you will capture more people.
That playbook is cooked.
If you try to be everything to everyone, you end up meaning absolutely nothing to anyone. You become invisible.
One thing I have learned building Laundry Sauce to a $30M business is that finding your brand’s enemy is almost as important as finding your fans.
The Marketing 101 Trap
When a brand does not have an enemy, the messaging gets incredibly lazy. It ends up sounding like marketing 101 copy that absolutely sucks.
Walk down any store aisle or scroll through any social feed. You will see the exact same words used over and over again.
- ❌“Premium quality”
- ❌“Sustainable”
- ❌“Better for you”
Cool. So is everyone else.
If your entire brand positioning relies on telling people your product is high quality, you are already losing. Premium quality is the baseline. It is the bare minimum requirement just to get in the game today. It is not a differentiator.
When you do not know who you are fighting, you default to these boring buzzwords. You rely on safe copy because you are terrified of alienating a potential buyer. But by playing it safe, you strip away the very thing that makes people care. The era of printing money with cheap ads is over. If your copy is boring, your customer acquisition cost will crush you.
People Love A Fight
Human beings are hardwired for conflict. We love a good fight. We want someone to root for. Just as importantly, we want someone to root against.
There has to be a villain in the story. That is what makes it fun.
When you give your customers an enemy, you give them a reason to rally behind you. You are no longer just a commodity they put in their digital cart. You become a shared identity. You become the smart alternative to the thing they suddenly realize they hate.
Look at the brands that are completely crushing it right now. They do not play nice. They pick a fight.
Take DUDE Wipes. They did not just launch a wipe and call it premium. They built their entire identity around the villain. DUDE Wipes openly sh*ts on boring toilet paper brands. They called out the absurdity of using dry paper and made the legacy brands look ridiculous.
Look at Liquid Death. They sell water. But they do not talk about pristine glaciers or basic hydration. Liquid Death openly mocks plastic water bottles. They made plastic the ultimate enemy and turned drinking water out of a tallboy can into a massive statement.
These companies created villains out of the status quo. Their customers love them for it.
Finding The Villain At Laundry Sauce
When we started Laundry Sauce, we knew we had to define our enemy early on.
If we just said we were a premium detergent, we would get lost in the noise of a very crowded CPG space. We had to point at something specific and tell our customers exactly why it was unacceptable.
Our enemy is generic laundry detergent sitting in supermarkets.
We are not competing on price. If you want the cheapest jug of soap on the bottom shelf, retail will serve you just fine. We are not competing on traditional grocery store branding.
We are trying to make you wonder why you ever settled for that fake “Fresh Linen” scent in the first place.
Think about the logic for a second. You buy nice clothes. You care about how you present yourself to the world. You care about how you smell. Then you go home and wash those expensive clothes in a massive plastic jug of blue goo that smells like a synthetic factory.
We picked a fight with that entire concept. We pointed at the generic supermarket experience and called it out. We gave our customers permission to demand better for themselves.
We do not want to be liked by the person who is perfectly happy with their generic blue goo. We want to be loved by the person who realizes they deserve a world-class fragrance in their daily routine.
The Operator Payoff
This is not just a theoretical marketing exercise. Finding your enemy actually makes running your business much easier. It moves the needle on the daily operations of your company.
Once you are clear on who you are fighting, everything falls into place.
- ✅Your messaging sharpens. You never have to wonder what to post or how to write your ads. You just look at what the enemy is doing and you do the exact opposite.
- ✅Your product decisions get simpler. When we formulate a new Laundry Sauce fragrance, we are not looking at what the supermarket brands are doing. The enemy dictates what we refuse to build.
- ✅Customers identify with you. They stop just buying from you and start advocating for you. They feel like they are part of an inside joke that the rest of the world has not figured out yet.
If you are a founder trying to scale a brand right now, take a hard look at your copy.
Are you just calling yourself premium and hoping people care? Or do you have a clearly defined villain?
Stop trying to be universally liked. Critics do not know sh*t anyway.
Find your enemy. Pick a fight.
Keep going.