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  "description": "Your reader is already fighting something. Name it.",
  "path": "/impact-needs-an-enemy/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-20T15:59:37.000Z",
  "site": "https://lennartnacke.com",
  "tags": [
    "Authority Lab",
    "in the Authority Lab",
    "April Dunford in Obviously Awesome (2019)",
    "Donald Miller's Building a StoryBrand (2017)",
    "BTW: I created a quiz that lets you check your current positioning.",
    "According to Nielsen Norman Group research on landing-page comprehension",
    "Harvard Business Review's analysis of B2B messaging",
    "a tactic the FTC notes can violate truthful-advertising standards",
    "I am opening the waitlist for a free Authority Lab Mastermind called",
    "How to create hooks for your writing.",
    "Subscribe now"
  ],
  "textContent": "#### TL;DR (updated May 20, 2029\n\n  * Enemy-based positioning names the obstacle your reader is already fighting, not the reader themselves.\n  * Vague expert positioning (\"clear, evidence-based, inclusive\") fails because audiences feel problems, not adjectives.\n  * The formula: ****I help [specific reader] get [specific outcome] without [specific enemy].****\n  * A good enemy is a habit, system, environment, or false belief → never a person.\n  * Positioning theorists April Dunford and Donald Miller both argue conflict drives recall.\n\n\n\n#### What Is Enemy-Based Positioning?\n\nEnemy-based positioning is a copywriting and brand-strategy method where an expert defines themselves by the obstacle they oppose (e.g., a habit, system, environment, or false belief) rather than by credentials or features. It earns attention because readers recognize the friction immediately, then engage with the expert's nuance.\n\nI started last Friday’s Authority Lab hot seat with the least heroic opening possible.\n\n“Hello everyone, or no one yet.”\n\nThen I sat there for a short minute, waiting to see if anyone would show up.\n\nI wondered if I should have sent an announcement. I wondered if the time was wrong. I wondered if Friday was a bad idea. Very strategic founder behaviour. Sitting alone in a video call, questioning my calendar choices.\n\nThen many people joined. Phew. Awkward minute over.\n\nAnd the session turned into one of the clearest conversations we’ve had in the Authority Lab so far.\n\nThe format was so simple. People brought their positioning statements that I helped them formulate over the last month. The classic “I help X do Y without Z” kind of thing.\n\nI expected us to clean up at least the language, but I had a bigger plan: Confrontation.\n\nSo, we found the missing fight.\n\n## What is positioning, and why do most expert statements fail?\n\nPositioning is the deliberate choice of which problem you solve, for whom, and against what alternative, a definition popularized by April Dunford in Obviously Awesome (2019).\n\nExperts love accurate language. I do.\n\nAnd this all sounds good until you watch it turn into pudding.\n\nMost expert positioning fails because it stacks careful adjectives (\"timely, relevant, inclusive\") that are technically correct but emotionally invisible. Readers feel problems.\n\n> \"Safe language is the pot belly of positioning: accurate, comfortable, and useless in public.\"\n\nNone of this language is wrong. That’s the problem.\n\nIt's too safe to be useful in public.\n\nYour audience does not feel a pair of careful adjectives. They feel a problem. They feel the thing in their way.\n\n  * They feel the athlete who performs beautifully in practice and freezes in competition.\n  * They feel the meeting where nobody understands the local context.\n  * They feel the student who wants the grade more than the learning.\n\n\n\nYour public positioning gets 100% better when it names that friction. Even better, it names what causes the friction.\n\nThat’s the enemy.\n\nImpact needs an enemy.\n\n## Get The Write Insight\n\nTurn deep expertise into scalable leverage.\n\nJoin 14k+ experts\n\nEmail sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.\n\nNo spam. No fluff. Unsubscribe anytime.\n\n## **Your customer is not the enemy**\n\nThe word _enemy_ makes thoughtful experts nervous. I get that.\n\nMost of the people I work with do not want to bash anyone. They do not want to flatten complex problems into cheap conflict. They do not want to become LinkedIn theatre people yelling about how everyone else is stupid.\n\nGood.\n\nPlease keep that instinct.\n\nThe trick is to aim the fire at the obstacle, not the person.\n\n→ Your reader is the person stuck in the fight.\n\n→ Your customer is not lazy. The enemy might be inertia.\n\n→ Your client is not ignorant. The enemy might be the technical gap that makes a good decision feel risky.\n\nYou become useful when you name the thing they are already fighting.\n\nIt makes all the difference.\n\nIf you make your customer the villain, they will defend themselves. If you make their obstacle the villain, they will lean in.\n\nThey’ll finally feel seen.\n\n## Who is the _enemy_ in enemy-based positioning?\n\nThe enemy is the obstacle blocking your reader's outcome. Donald Miller's Building a StoryBrand (2017) frames this as the villain in the customer's hero journey. Valid enemies include habits (perfectionism), systems (assessment-driven schooling), environments (algorithmic feeds), and false beliefs (nuance = trust):\n\n  * A habit: Saving habits that drain money, writing habits that keep smart people polishing the first paragraph for three weeks, research habits that make every new project start from zero.\n  * A system: Assessment systems that reward performance over learning, academic systems that ask for public impact while punishing anyone who writes in public, corporate systems that turn clear thinking into slide sludge.\n  * An environment: The 9-to-5 treadmill, the inbox, meeting culture, the algorithmic casino pretending to be professional networking.\n  * A false belief: “If I am more nuanced, people will trust me.” “If the work is good, the right people will find it.” “If I use AI, my voice will disappear.” “If I take a public stance, I will lose my intellectual integrity.”\n\n\n\nThese enemies work because you already feel them and your audience does, too. You’re naming the conflict that has been running in the background.\n\n## **The moment it clicked**\n\nOur session in the Authority Lab.\n\nOne Authority Lab member works with athletes.\n\nHis first framing was about performance pressure. Athletes train well, then score lower in competition. The obvious solution was mental training.\n\nUseful, but still a little broad.\n\nSo we kept digging.\n\nThe enemy was the inner voice. The self-talk. The fear of losing. The fear of winning and then having to keep winning. The tiny internal commentator that turns a competition into a referendum on your entire identity.\n\nNow the positioning had heat. Spicy. I loved it.\n\nHe could stand against that voice.\n\nAnother member teaches pre-service teachers.\n\nHer first framing was full of strong ideas: Creativity, process-based learning, risk-taking, student engagement, meaning-making.\n\nAll good.\n\nStill too clean.\n\nThen she named the thing she stands against it all: Shallow learning.\n\nThe grading system. The product-based logic. The classroom habit where students learn to ask, “How do I get the A?” before they ask what the work is trying to teach them.\n\nThat is a real enemy. Boom.\n\nEveryone who has been through school recognizes it immediately.\n\nEven AI fits this story. AI did not create shallow learning. It accelerates the shallow learning already built into the system.\n\nNow, she had a sticky point of view.\n\nOne member works with literary scholars.\n\nHer challenge was different. She resisted the customer language, which made sense. In scholarship, people do not always think in terms of markets and solutions. They think in terms of knowledge, methods, traditions, and ways of seeing.\n\nSo we stayed with that.\n\nThe enemy became institutional sameness. The Eurocentric lens. The habit of talking about diversity while keeping the same old epistemological frame.\n\nThat’s strong.\n\nIt gives her public access into deep work without making the work shallow.\n\nYou know, this is the piece that many experts are afraid to admit.\n\nAn enemy does not reduce your nuance.\n\nIt earns attention long enough for your nuance to matter.\n\n## **A simple positioning test**\n\n## Get The Write Insight\n\nTurn deep expertise into scalable leverage.\n\nJoin 14k+ experts\n\nEmail sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.\n\nNo spam. No fluff. Unsubscribe anytime.\n\nMost expert writing fails because it always starts with the answer.\n\nHere is my\n\n  * framework\n  * method\n  * service\n  * research\n\n\n\nThe reader has no reason to care yet.\n\nThey don’t know what fight you’re entering. They have to learn about what problem you’re refusing to tolerate. They must be convinced why your sentence should interrupt their day.\n\nFriction creates this hook.\n\nThis is true in stories. A good story needs pressure. Something has to be at stake. A character wants something, and something blocks them.\n\nPublic authority works the same way.\n\nYou want to be known for something. Your audience wants a result. The enemy blocks the result. Your position becomes the stance you take against that enemy.\n\nThat is where attention starts.\n\nForget your list of credentials.\n\nMove past your polished bio.\n\nDon’t write another sentence that sounds like it survived three committee reviews and a light afternoon nap.\n\nIt starts with a fight.\n\nTake your current positioning sentence. Find the outcome. Then find the obstacle.\n\nMost people stop too early. A little less Mr. Spock, a little more Captain Kirk.\n\nThey write:\n\n→ I help experts communicate their ideas more clearly.\n\nFine. Clear enough. Also forgettable.\n\nNow add your enemy:\n\n→ I help experts communicate their ideas clearly without cutting off the depth that made those ideas valuable in the first place.\n\nBetter.\n\nThe sentence now has friction. It names the fear many of your carry: That visibility will make you shallow. And, yes, that’s how I position myself.\n\nHere is another:\n\n→ I help researchers write papers faster.\n\nUseful. Flat.\n\nAdd the enemy:\n\n→ I help researchers write papers faster without letting perfectionism turn every draft into a swamp.\n\nThat’s what I have done for years now. Now, the reader can feel it.\n\nThey know that swamp.\n\nThey’ve lived in that swamp.\n\nThey’ve probably decorated it like Shrek.\n\nThe formula is quick and simple:\n\nI help [specific reader] get [specific outcome] without [specific enemy].\n\nThe _without_ part is where the positioning gets serious.\n\nBTW: I created a quiz that lets you check your current positioning.\n\n## How do I find my enemy? (A 3-step positioning test)\n\nTake your current positioning sentence, isolate the outcome, then name what blocks that outcome for 80% of your audience. According to Nielsen Norman Group research on landing-page comprehension, users decide relevance in under 10 seconds, which means the obstacle must appear in the first sentence.\n\nThe positioning formula on a napkin: reader, outcome, enemy.\n\n## Why does naming an enemy increase attention without reducing nuance?\n\nConflict is the oldest attention mechanism in narrative. Harvard Business Review's analysis of B2B messaging found that contrast-driven value propositions outperform feature lists in recall tests. Naming an enemy front-loads contrast, so that your nuance then has somewhere to land.\n\n> \"An enemy does not reduce your nuance but it earns attention long enough for your nuance to matter.\"\n\nIf your positioning feels vague, you probably do not need more adjectives.\n\nYou need a sharper enemy.\n\nName the habit, system, environment, activity, or false belief that blocks your reader from the result they want.\n\n## How is this different from negative or attack marketing?\n\nEnemy-based positioning focuses on obstacles. The customer is the hero and the enemy is the friction. Attack marketing names competitors or shames audiences, a tactic the FTC notes can violate truthful-advertising standards. Enemy-based positioning stays empathetic to the reader while being smart about the system.\n\nKeep your empathy for the person.\n\nAim your fire at the obstacle.\n\nThat is how your writing gets clearer.\n\nThat is how your hooks get stronger.\n\nThat is how your authority starts to feel like a point of view instead of a professional summary.\n\n​I am opening the waitlist for a free Authority Lab Mastermind called How to create hooks for your writing.​\n\nWe will take this exact idea and turn it into a practical hook system.\n\nBring the topic you keep circling. Bring the sentence that feels too soft. Bring the idea that deserves more attention than it is getting.\n\nWe will find the fight hiding inside it.\n\n#### FAQ\n\n****Q: What is enemy-based positioning in one sentence?****\n\nIt is positioning that defines an expert by the obstacle they oppose, not the features they offer.\n\n****Q: Can my enemy be a competitor?****\n\nGenerally no. Effective enemies are habits, systems, environments, or false beliefs that your audience already feels, competitors invite legal and reputational risk.\n\n****Q: How do I know if my enemy is specific enough?****\n\nA stranger in your target audience should nod within 10 seconds. If they ask what you mean, the enemy is still abstract to them.\n\n****Q: Does this work for academics or scholars?****\n\nYes. Scholars can position against institutional sameness, methodological orthodoxy, or epistemic flattening, all without market language.\n\n****Q: Won't naming an enemy make me look polarizing?****\n\nOnly if you target people. Targeting an obstacle increases recall while preserving credibility, consistent with StoryBrand research.\n\n****Q: What is the positioning formula?****\n\n__I help [specific reader] get [specific outcome] without [specific enemy].__\n\n****Q: How often should I revisit my positioning?****\n\nAt least every 6–12 months, or whenever your audience changes. Dunford recommends re-testing whenever win rates drop.\n\n## **Worth your time this week**\n\n### This post is for subscribers only\n\nBecome a member to get access to all content\n\nSubscribe now",
  "title": "What Is Enemy-Based Positioning (and Why Does Impact Need an Enemy)?",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-21T00:03:45.481Z"
}