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Pick a Fight Worth Having.
Startups · 7 min read · 1618 Media Insights
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Most startups launch by describing themselves. The better ones pick an opponent.
The usual startup launch goes like this. A website explains what the company does, who it is for and why it is better. It is clear, polished and accurate, and almost nobody remembers it an hour later.
There is a very different way to begin. Instead of describing what you are, you describe what you are against. A habit in your category that everyone follows and nobody questions. A convention that makes your customersʼ lives a little worse. A standard everyone has agreed to treat as normal.
Picking an opponent is not about being aggressive. It is a strategic shortcut. It gives people an instant way to understand what you stand for, and a reason to care about it.
One of the clearest recent examples comes from the least likely place: bottled water.
Liquid Death sold water by refusing to look like water
Water is the ultimate commodity. It is clear, tasteless and sold in nearly identical plastic bottles with pictures of mountains and a calm, wellness-flavoured tone. Competing on taste is impossible. Competing on price is a race to the bottom.
Liquid Death, founded by Mike Cessario, a former advertising creative director who had worked on marketing for Netflix shows, took a different path. It didnʼt try to make a better version of the water brand. It decided that water brands themselves were the problem.
The name carries the whole idea. It is a joke about “murdering your thirst” and a statement about bringing death to plastic bottles, in a category where most plastic is not actually recycled. The product is plain mountain water, but it comes in a tall aluminium can that looks like craft beer, with metal-inspired design, and it is marketed the way edgy drinks like beer and energy drinks are, not the way water traditionally is.
The content strategy followed the same logic. Instead of posting pictures of bottles, the brand set out to make actual entertainment, with mock public-service announcements, absurd ads and stunts that people would choose to watch. Its founder has said that if you create real entertainment instead of just selling, you build a fandom that money cannot buy
The results are hard to argue with. The company reported 263 million dollars in retail sales in 2023 across about 113,000 stores in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in March 2024 it raised 67 million dollars at a valuation of 1.4 billion dollars. Third-party estimates put its 2024 revenue at around 333 million dollars, though that figure is an outside estimate and not an official one.
The product is water. The business is a point of view.
The enemy does three jobs.
Why does an opponent work so well? Because it quietly solves three problems at once.
It sharpens the positioning. “A better water brand” is vague. “Death to plastic bottles and boring water” is specific. A clear opponent tells people instantly what you believe, who you are for and, just as importantly, who you are not for.
It gives people something to join. Nobody joins a product. People join a side. When a brand stands against something its audience already dislikes, buying it becomes a way of saying who you are. That is how the brand ends up selling merchandise and building a community, not just selling drinks.
It feeds the content. A brand with a point of view has a permanent supply of ideas. Every time the category does something predictable, the brand has a reaction. The creative team never has to ask what to talk about, because the opponent keeps providing material.
Notice what this does to marketing costs. When positioning, community and content all come from the same idea, each piece of work is doing three jobs. That is the kind of efficiency a small team can use.
A loud brand still needs a quiet operation.
There is a danger in telling this story only through the content. The provocative marketing gets the attention, but it is not the whole business.
Liquid Death also did the unglamorous work. It put its product into tens of thousands of stores, hired experienced sales and distribution people, including an executive who had helped scale a major drinks brand, and partnered with live music and entertainment businesses that fit its audience. Behind the humour there was a serious plan for how the product would reach people.
The brand also lives with scrutiny that comes from being loud. One outlet has observed that its marketing has been so effective that it has kept many consumers from asking harder questions about the business behind it. When your promise is that you are the honest alternative, people will check whether the substance matches the style.
That is the price of picking a fight. You will be examined more closely than the brands that stay quiet, and you need to be able to hold up.
The lesson: a bold position gets you noticed, but only a solid product and a reliable operation keep you in business.
How a smaller brand can pick a fight without picking a stupid one.
You donʼt need to be edgy to do this. You need to be honest about your category, and brave enough to say what others wonʼt.
Find the convention nobody questions. Every category has habits. The same visual language, the same promises, the same tone of voice. Write down five things that all your competitors do. At least one of them is probably a habit, not a necessity.
Check that your customers feel it too. The opponent has to be real to your audience, not just to you. Talk to ten customers and listen for the frustration they express without being prompted.
Choose a side you can live with for years. A fight is a long commitment. Pick a stance that you will still believe in when the novelty wears off, because switching it every season destroys the point.
Keep it proportionate. The opponent should be an idea, a habit or a category norm, never a person or a competitor by name. Wit travels well. Spite does not.
Back it up with proof. Whatever you claim to stand for needs to show up in the product, the packaging, the pricing and the service. People will check.
If you can complete those five steps, you have more than a tagline. You have a position that does a lot of the marketing for you.
What not to copy.
It would be easy to read this and conclude that every startup should be loud, dark and ironic. That would miss the point entirely.
Liquid Deathʼs aesthetic fits its category and its audience. The same tone would sink a law firm, a childrenʼs brand or a healthcare service. What carries over is the method: find a category convention, build your identity against it, and make everything you do consistent with that stance.
The opponent might be complexity, in a field full of jargon. It might be waste, speed, secrecy or sameness. A quiet, serious brand can pick a fight as firmly as a loud one. It just does it in its own voice.
And resist the urge to copy the stunts. Stunts without a strategy are decoration. The strategy is what makes the stunts feel connected, and gives each one a reason to exist.
Where this leaves you.
When everything in a category looks and sounds the same, being sensible is not enough. Sensible gets you ignored.
A clear opponent gives your brand shape. It tells people what you believe, gives them something to join and keeps your content honest. It is not a trick. It is a way of being specific in a world full of vague promises.
Pick something worth standing against. Be sure your product can back it up. Then say it clearly, and keep saying it.
A brand with nothing to push against has nothing to stand on. Find the thing worth opposing, and build from there.
Sources
These are for fact-checking and can be removed before publishing.
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Liquid Death: https://www.aol.com/water-became-billion-dollar-business120041107.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Death, https://www.freethink.com/energy/canned-water-50379, https://www.bigblue.co/blog/how-liquid-death-built-a-1-4b-brand-bybreaking-the-rules, https://sacra.com/c/liquid-death, https://dot.la/tag/liquiddeath and https://drupalcloudfront.benzinga.com/news/24/03/37635061/liquid-death-drinks-in-newfunding-at-1-4b-valuation-investor-anthony-pompliano-calls-putting-water
Good ideas are everywhere now. A well-chosen problem, held with discipline, is what turns one of them into growth.
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