Nobody Hates Your Brand (And That's The Problem)

The most common thing I hear from founders and brand teams who are onto something real: "people are going to hate this." They usually say it like a warning, like their business is going to fail because they can't get every single person on board with it.

I hear that unease as a green light; a fear that signals something worth diving deeper into.

Most brands treat haters as a problem to solve:
"Tone down the edge."
"Let's broaden this to make it more appealing."
"Can we make the packaging a little friendlier?"

Probably worth defining what I mean by villain. A villain is any brand that somebody in the room doesn't like—and who has made peace with that. An identity strong enough that certain people will scoff at. Or get angry with, or criticize, or avoid, put back on shelf, unfollow. The list goes on.

I can bet that there's at least one thing all of these smart brands have in common: they've intentionally chosen a point of view over needing universal approval. A point of view that's distinct, that's curious, that's ownable. A point of view that they're proud of and believe in.

Making that choice and defining that point of view is harder than it sounds. Most brand teams operate under a logic that's almost gravitational. It's a simple equation in their minds: more people that like you = more sales, more distribution, more velocity. Sand off the edges, soften the tone, and find the language that doesn't turn anybody off, all in pursuit of "growth."

It's the exact kind of tone and language that doesn't turn anybody on, either.

We heard a version of this recently in a strategy session. A founder kept circling back to the same anxiety: "[These] people are going to hate it." They were talking about the establishment in their category—credentialed voices who'd find their approach too commercial or too willing to meet people where they're at. They saw it as clearly going against the grain. Our job in that room was mostly to just keep telling them and their team: yes. That's the point. The people they were afraid of alienating were exactly the ones their brand didn't need in the first place.

It's a reasonable instinct, but it produces brands that nobody feels anything about. They've made it on shelf, sure. But they're invisible in consumers' memories. The mistake is treating broad appeal as a strategy when it's actually just risk management. The brands that are building real equity right now are made with a totally different equation. They've decided that depth of connection with the right people was worth more than surface-level comfort with everyone.

Liquid Death comes up every time this conversation happens, so let's get it out of the way. It's the most-cited case study in this territory for a good reason: it proved you could sell water—literally just water—by building a brand strong enough to repel someone. The reason lives in the friction: friction creates memory. It stops and grabs attention in a way that warmth rarely does.

Oatly is a more interesting example because the antagonism has good purpose-driven substance behind it. "It's like milk, but made for humans" is a direct attack on an entire industry. When the Swedish dairy lobby sued them over that line, Oatly published the lawsuit. They turned a legal threat into a brand asset. That's what belief with a spine looks like. The friction came from actually standing for something that made powerful people uncomfortable.

Then came their Blackstone investment. When it emerged that a private equity firm with a controversial environmental track record had taken a stake in Oatly, a huge portion of their audience felt genuinely betrayed. The backlash was loud and real. That level of betrayal only exists because the belief was genuine first. Consumers don't feel betrayed by brands they were indifferent to. The anger is proof of equity—the kind that takes years to build and can't be manufactured. I'm not here to debate the morality of this move and I'd argue these kinds of decisions also destroy equity. And that it takes even more time to gain that trust back. But, the moral of this story is that a lot of brands will never experience that kind of reaction. Why? Because they haven't put themselves in the shoes of the villain.

Vacation Inc. is a different flavor of this entirely. They make sunscreen. A category that has spent thirty years in the language of clinical obligation and UV anxiety: protect yourself, prevent damage, be responsible. By now, everyone knows why SPF is important, but brands are still focusing on building an awareness that already exists. Vacation walked in and said: sunscreen used to be fun, and we're going to make it that again. Viral whipped cream canisters, coconut and pool toy scent profiles, a whole elaborate fictional brand world set in a Miami resort circa 1986. A certain kind of consumer finds this deeply irritating, I'm sure. Someone who wants their skincare to feel serious finds Vacation frivolous and gimmicky. That reaction is a strategy. In a category built on fear, choosing joy is a counter-cultural act—and the people who don't get it just self-select themselves out. And that's okay.

Fishwife's provocation starts with their name: a reclamation of an insult that originated around the 16th century when women were selling their husband's fish at their family's fish market stalls. But the deeper friction lives in founder Becca Millstein's read on the category itself: she called it "dusty," "brandless," and pointed out she was eating the same canned tuna her great-grandma ate in Brooklyn in the 1930s. That's their implicit challenge to the consumer: your pantry standards have been embarrassingly low, and we're here to raise them and make them better. What followed was the "hot girls eat tinned fish" meme. Some people found it resonating as a liberating take on a boring category. Some people found it annoying. Fishwife was fine with both.

All of these brands share a commitment to an identity strong enough to lose someone. They look different, sound different, and operate in totally different categories, but each one made a deliberate choice about who they were for and let that choice do its filtering work.

Here's the thing about timing: manufactured villain energy is becoming legible. Brands have started noticing what's working and trying to reverse-engineer it with edgy naming or provocative copy. Consumers are increasingly good at detecting any level of inauthentic performance. The tell is usually that the friction is purely aesthetic. The voice is sharp, but the belief system built underneath is soft—or doesn't exist at all. You can almost feel the committee that approved "bold" but pulled back from anything actually risky. Conviction resists that process. The authentic version requires a brand to hold a position that someone with real purchasing power genuinely disagrees with, and hold it anyway.

The window for faking it is closing. The real thing, though, remains available—but it requires a question most brand teams haven't honestly answered: who is your brand willing to lose?

Not who you're theoretically fine with not reaching, or who falls outside your defined target demographics. Who would you look in the eye and say: "this brand is for someone else, not you," and mean it? Who in the room makes you nervous when they say they don't get it? Those brands that last—the ones that feel real—are all the brands that have made someone uncomfortable, on purpose.