Why positioning against a rival makes you a footnote in someone else’s category, why positioning against a practice can make the category yours, and the one test that stops you picking a fight you are quietly losing at home.

1. What does “name the enemy” mean? Isn’t it just trash-talking a rival?

No. Trash talk names a company. Naming the enemy names a habit. The difference decides where your money ends up.

Say “we’re the alternative to Rival Inc.” and you have accepted their definition of the problem, their vocabulary, and their evaluation criteria. You are a row on someone else’s comparison grid. The Play Bigger team tracked more than 10,000 venture-backed companies since 2000 and found that whoever defines a category captures roughly 76% of its total market capitalization. Everyone else splits the other 24%. Naming a rival is a formal application for a slice of that 24%.

An enemy is different. An enemy is a practice: the annual retainer no one reads, the forty-page deck that arrives where a decision should be, the dashboard everyone watches and no one acts on. Practices have no owner and no legal department. Name one, offer the cure, and the category assembles around you rather than around the incumbent.

Figure 1. Competitive positioning is aimed at the thinnest slice of your losses.

2. Where does the money actually go, if not to competitors?

Into the gap your battlecards ignore.

1. Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna ran machine learning across 2.5 million recorded sales conversations for The JOLT Effect and found 40% to 60% of qualified deals end in no decision at all. Of those, 44% are true status-quo preference and 56% are indecision: buyers who wanted to change and froze.
2. 87% of calls in that dataset showed moderate-to-high buyer indecision regardless of outcome. Win rates run 45–55% when indecision is low, 25–30% at moderate levels, and collapse below 5% when it is high.
3. In published win/loss audits, roughly 51% of losses go to the status quo and about 17% to an actual named competitor.

Read that last one again. Most firms build elaborate battlecards for the 17% and leave the 51% to sort itself out. A rival is a small problem wearing a name tag. The habit is the big one.

3. Why does a named practice reach buyers a rival comparison can’t?

Because a comparison only works on someone already shopping, and hardly anyone is. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, put the figure near 5%. At any moment roughly 95% of your buyers are out of market: firms change banks about every five years and buy computers about every four. In that same research, 96% of B2B marketers expected campaign effects inside two weeks. The cadence does not permit it.

A rival comparison is legible only to a buyer mid-evaluation. A named practice is legible to anyone who recognizes their own Tuesday. From the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn report, roughly 3,500 management-level respondents across seven countries: 73% say a company’s point of view is a more trustworthy read on capability than its marketing materials; 86% would invite that firm into an RFP, while only 38% of producers expect it; 60% say it makes them willing to pay a premium; 70% of C-suite respondents say a competitor’s point of view made them question an existing supplier. Only 15% rate what they read as very good.

Figure 2. Demand for a real position is enormous. Supply is not.

4. What makes a good enemy?

Three conditions, all three at once.

1. Widely tolerated. It has to be normal, boring, standard practice. If it were already a scandal, you are late.
2. Privately resented. A meaningful cohort of buyers must already dislike it without saying so. You are not manufacturing a grievance, you are giving one a name and a receipt.
3. Structural rather than personal. “Some agencies do lazy work” is an insult. “The retainer model pays us to be available rather than finished” is an enemy, because it indicts the mechanism instead of the people.

Good enemies live where the numbers are lopsided and checkable. BARC and the Eckerson Group surveyed 214 organizations and found about 25% of employees actively use the BI tools their employer buys, a figure barely moved in seven years. NewVantage Partners’ 2023 survey of 116 Fortune 1000 data executives found 24% call their firm data-driven, while 79.8% blame culture rather than technology. One more thing here, because it demonstrates the method. The statistic everyone quotes, “60 to 70% of dashboards go unused, according to Gartner,” traces to no Gartner publication. It traces to a social media post. If your enemy needs a fabricated number to stand up, it is not an enemy. Use the 25%. It is real, it is sourced, and it is worse.

The tolerated practice	The evidence it is real and widespread	Who defends it out loud	Who can never name it
The annual retainer no one reads	Retainer agencies run 18% annual churn against 42% for project shops; retainer clients last 56 months against 24 (Focus Digital, 2026). Average AOR tenure is 7 years, but clients with mandatory reviews average 3.8 years against 8.1 without (ANA/4As, 2025).	Every holding company and most of the ANA membership. A funded, defended position.	Anyone billing a monthly minimum. Roughly 60% of agencies.
The forty-page deck sent instead of a decision	77% of B2B buyers call their last purchase very complex or difficult. Buying groups spend 17% of total purchase time with all suppliers combined, and 5–6% with any single one. Committees run 6 to 10 people, each carrying 4 to 5 independently gathered sources (Gartner).	Consulting, agency and enterprise sales orthodoxy. No one has yet apologized for a deck.	Anyone whose proposal template specifies a page count instead of a recommendation.
The dashboard everyone watches and no one acts on	About 25% of employees actively use the BI tools their employer buys, flat across seven years of tracking (BARC / Eckerson, n=214). Only 24% of Fortune 1000 firms call themselves data-driven; 79.8% blame culture rather than technology (NewVantage / Wavestone, 2023, n=116).	Every analytics vendor and every CDAO with a roadmap to defend.	Anyone who ships a dashboard as the deliverable and calls the job done.

Table 1. Three candidate enemies, and the arithmetic underneath each.

5. How do I know if I picked a bad one?

Badly chosen enemies fail one of three ways. Run every candidate through all three before you publish a word.

Failure mode	What it sounds like	The test	Damage
Too broad to be falsifiable	“We’re against complexity.” “We fight the status quo.” “Data should drive decisions.”	Does it predict anything? A real enemy makes a claim that could be proven wrong next quarter. If it cannot fail, it is a mood.	Low. You are simply invisible, which is the default anyway.
Too obvious to be interesting	“Spam is bad.” “Meetings waste time.” “Silos hurt collaboration.”	Name three credible people who would publicly defend the practice. If you cannot, you have named a consensus, and consensus buys nodding, not movement.	Moderate. You spend the budget and buy agreement without action.
Something you quietly do yourself	Any enemy that survives your enthusiasm but not your invoices.	Pull twelve months of contracts, deliverables and pricing pages and search them for the practice. One hit and you choose: kill the practice, or change the enemy.	Severe, and permanent. You built your critics’ frame for them.

Table 2. The three failure modes. The third is the expensive one.

6. That third failure mode. What is the real risk?

Here is the twist most people skip: an enemy you name in public is one you can never again sell in private.

Naming a practice is not a campaign. It is a constraint you volunteer for. From the moment you publish, every invoice, contract and pricing page becomes evidence in a case you opened yourself. Your critics never have to build the frame. You built it and handed it over, gift-wrapped. Three companies, three outcomes:

1. Salesforce held it. In 1999 Marc Benioff put the word “software” inside a red prohibition circle and rented billboards on Highway 101 facing Oracle. The enemy was never Siebel, it was installed enterprise software as a practice. It survived because the claim sat at a level Salesforce could actually keep: nothing runs on your servers. Twenty-seven years and $41.5 billion in annual revenue later, people still point out that Salesforce is a software company, and it still doesn’t land.
2. Amazon paid for it. On June 9, 2004, Jeff Bezos emailed his senior team with the subject line “No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam.” His argument: writing a four-page memo is harder than writing a twenty-page deck, because narrative forces you to work out what matters more than what. The price was that he then had to sit in silence and read for the first twenty to thirty minutes of every senior meeting, forever. He was still defending it in the 2018 shareholder letter.
3. Everlane broke on it. The brand named opacity as the enemy, called the cure “Radical Transparency,” and published cost breakdowns on every product. In December 2019 employees moved to unionize over pay and scheduling, reporting they had been told at an all-hands they could not discuss wages. In March 2020, days after a union recognition request, the company cut 42 of its 57-person customer experience team and 180 part-time retail staff. Bernie Sanders called it union busting. The New York Times covered the hypocrisy allegations that July. The enemy Everlane named became the lens for every later decision.

The self-audit is not optional, because your instinct is not evidence. Bain’s delivery-gap study of 362 firms found 80% believed they delivered a superior experience while 8% of their customers agreed. Your gut feeling that “we don’t really do that” is worth about eight cents on the dollar.

7. Show me someone who ran this at scale. With receipts.

Thomas Jefferson, April 18, 1802. He wrote it in cipher.

Robert Livingston had been in Paris since 1801 running the conventional play: treat France as the competitor, negotiate for a port. That framing made the United States a supplicant inside somebody else’s category, asking for a concession at a door it did not own. A year of it produced nothing.

Jefferson reframed the entire problem in one sentence. He did not write that France was the enemy. He wrote: “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market.” Look at what that sentence does.

1. It names a practice, not a party. The enemy is dependence itself, whoever holds the door. Spain had held New Orleans for four decades and it was tolerable. That is exactly the widely tolerated bad habit that makes a strong enemy.
2. It is falsifiable, and it predicted something. The claim: whoever owns that spot turns hostile. Tested six months later, in October 1802, when the Spanish intendant suspended the American right of deposit and the western states nearly marched on the city.
3. It is quantified. Three-eighths of American produce. Not “a great deal.” A fraction anyone could check.
4. It closed every escape hatch, including his own. Once the enemy was dependence, a lease would not do, nor a treaty guarantee, nor a friendly landlord. Only ownership resolved it.

8. What did naming the enemy actually buy him?

A deal no one in the room was authorized to sign. Livingston and Monroe carried instructions to spend up to $10 million for New Orleans and the Floridas. On April 11, 1803, Talleyrand asked what the United States would pay for the whole of Louisiana. The French opened at 100 million francs; Baring and the bankers talked it to 80 million. On April 30, without waiting for word from Washington, two envoys signed for 828,000 square miles.

Item	Figure	Why it matters
Livingston and Monroe’s spending authority	Up to $10,000,000, for New Orleans and the Floridas	Instructions written for a competitor problem: outbid France for a port.
Price signed, April 30, 1803	$15,000,000 (60M francs cash, plus 20M francs in assumed citizen claims)	Fifty percent over authorization, agreed without waiting for Washington. The enemy statement was the authorization.
Territory acquired	828,000 sq. miles, about 530 million acres	Under three cents an acre. Roughly 23% of the modern United States, all or part of 14 states.
Treasury cash on hand, Oct. 1, 1803	$5,860,000	Jefferson’s own Treasury notes put annual revenue near $10.4M. The purchase ran about 1.4x federal income.
Senate ratification, Oct. 20, 1803	24 to 7	Jefferson thought he might need a constitutional amendment. He ate his own doctrine instead. That is the price clause.

Table 3. The Louisiana Purchase, itemized.

Figure 3. The gap between what he authorized and what they signed is the whole argument.

They could sign because the enemy was already named. If the problem is a port, $15 million for a continent is insubordination. If the problem is dependence, $15 million for a continent is the minimum viable answer. Naming the enemy changed the definition of an acceptable close. It cost him too, which is the point: Jefferson the strict constructionist believed he might need a constitutional amendment, and bought anyway.

Napoleon ran the same play from the other side. His enemy was not the United States, it was the practice of holding an asset he could no longer defend. Saint-Domingue anchored the whole American scheme, and by the end of 1803 roughly 55,000 French soldiers had died there, mostly of disease. With war against Britain resuming, the Royal Navy would sever Louisiana on day one. So he stopped selling a port and started liquidating a liability. Both sides signed a deal neither was authorized to sign, and both got there by refusing to treat the other as the problem.

9. How do I write mine?

Three clauses. The third is where most people quit.

[The tolerated practice] is not merely inefficient. It is structurally guaranteed to produce the outcome you say you hate. We [do the opposite]. Which costs us [a specific, verifiable price].

If your enemy is…	The statement, with its price clause attached
The annual retainer	“A monthly retainer pays us to be available. We would rather be paid to be finished. So we price by decision delivered, and we eat the revenue in any month you don’t need one.”
The forty-page deck	“A forty-page deck is a sophisticated way of not making a recommendation. We send six pages and one recommendation, with our name on it, before you have agreed with us.”
The unused dashboard	“A dashboard no one opens is a receipt for money already spent. We build one number per decision-owner per week, and we delete anything untouched for thirty days, including ours.”

Table 4. Worked examples. The sentence after the period is the one that makes it real.

Without the third clause you have a slogan, and buyers have seen thousands. With it you have a position, because you have made yourself falsifiable against your own conduct. Same trade Jefferson made with the Constitution and Bezos made with his own calendar.

10. Give me the checklist.

1. Write the practice in one sentence a client would recognize from their own week.
2. Find two independently sourced numbers proving it is widespread. If you can’t, you have a hunch.
3. Name three credible people who would defend the practice in public. If no one would, you have named a consensus, not an enemy.
4. Audit twelve months of your own invoices and deliverables against it. Assume you are guilty; the base rate says you probably are.
5. Write the price clause, and ask your CFO whether the firm can carry that cost for three years. Category positions take three to five years to pay.
6. Publish where the 95% will find it, not where the 5% are shopping. Then count RFP invitations: 86% of decision-makers say a real point of view earns one.

Pick something normal. Prove it is expensive. Say what you will give up to be rid of it. And then, forever after, do not sell it.

SOURCES

1. Play Bigger, “Category Contenders.” 76% of category market cap accrues to the category king. https://www.playbigger.com/media/category-contenders

2. Dixon & McKenna, The JOLT Effect (2022), 2.5M analyzed sales conversations. 40–60% no-decision; 56/44 indecision split. https://www.jolteffect.com/blog/what-is-the-jolt-effect

3. Gartner B2B Buying Survey. 77% call the last purchase very complex or difficult; 17% of buying time with all suppliers combined. https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/topics/b2b-buying-journey

4. John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, with the LinkedIn B2B Institute. The 95-5 rule. https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-institute/b2b-research/trends/95-5-rule

5. 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (n≈3,500, seven countries). https://www.edelman.com/expertise/Business-Marketing/2024-b2b-thought-leadership-report

6. BARC / Eckerson Group, adoption and usage of BI and analytics (n=214). About 25% active adoption. https://barc.com/news/new-study-identifies-drivers-of-bi-and-analytics-adoption-in-companies-today/

7. NewVantage Partners / Wavestone, 2023 Data and Analytics Leadership Executive Survey (n=116). 24% data-driven; 79.8% cite culture. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/newvantage-partners-a-wavestone-company-releases-2023-data-and-analytics-leadership-executive-survey-301711081.html

8. Bain & Company, “Closing the Delivery Gap” (2005, n=362). The 80% / 8% perception gap. https://media.bain.com/bainweb/PDFs/cms/hotTopics/closingdeliverygap.pdf

9. ANA / 4As, Client-Agency AOR Relationship Tenure study, April 2025. 7-year average; 3.8 vs. 8.1 years by review mandate; $408,500 average pitch cost. https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/pr-2025-04-tenure

10. Focus Digital, Average Marketing Agency Churn 2026 Report. 18% retainer vs. 42% project churn; 56- vs. 24-month lifespans. https://focus-digital.co/average-marketing-agency-churn/

11. Jeff Bezos to the S-Team, June 9, 2004: “No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam.” https://www.panopto.com/blog/amazon-doubles-down-powerpoint-ban-in-flipped-meetings/

12. Thomas Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, April 18, 1802. The “one single spot” letter, written in cipher. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/02-03-02-0209

13. U.S. National Archives, Louisiana Purchase Treaty, April 30, 1803. $10M authorization; 828,000 sq. mi.; the 60M and 20M franc conventions. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/louisiana-purchase-treaty

14. Founders Online, Jefferson’s Notes on Treasury Estimates for 1804 (ca. Oct. 10, 1803). $5,888,000 balance; about $10.4M annual revenue. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-41-02-0374

15. Britannica, “How Much Was the Louisiana Purchase?” $27,267,622 total repaid by 1823 at 6% interest. https://www.britannica.com/topic/How-Much-Was-the-Louisiana-Purchase

16. Howe & Rusling, “The Louisiana Purchase and the Birth of American High Finance.” The 100M to 80M franc negotiation; Baring and Hope. https://www.howeandrusling.com/the-louisiana-purchase-and-the-birth-of-american-high-finance/

17. Inc., on Everlane’s “Radical Transparency” and the wage-discussion and union allegations. https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/the-radically-transparent-fashion-startup-everlane-is-finding-out-why-that-idea-should-extend-to-employees-too.html

18. MediaPost, summarizing New York Times coverage of the Everlane hypocrisy allegations, July 2020. https://mediapost.com/publications/article/354164/fashion-brand-everlane-faces-backlash.html

19. Salesforce corporate history and Benioff’s Behind the Cloud. The “No Software” campaign, 1999. https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-history/

20. Elevated Signal, on the unverifiable “60–70% of dashboards go unused, per Gartner” claim. https://elevatedsignal.com/insights/business-intelligence-dashboard/