The Enemy Is Us
With this background, we can return to the question that started it all: What does Netcore—or any Martech company—truly stand against?
The conventional answer would be predictable: we stand against Adtech’s exploitation, against wasted budgets, against the complexity of modern marketing. But these are symptoms, not enemies. They’re problems, not adversaries. And as Ries makes clear, you can’t rally troops against a problem—you need a villain with a face, a foe worth fighting.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that emerged from that colleague’s question: if we apply Ries’s framework honestly, Martech’s strategic enemy isn’t Google or Meta. It isn’t even AdWaste.
Martech’s strategic enemy is Martech itself.
This isn’t wordplay or contrarianism. It’s a sober recognition of reality. Consider the evidence: Martech promised personalisation, delivered mass segmentation. Promised retention, chased only the easy buyers. Promised simplicity, buried brands in complexity. Promised accountability, hid behind input pricing.
Every one of these failures created the vacuum that Adtech filled. When Martech failed to retain customers, brands had no choice but to reacquire them through Google. When Martech ignored the “Rest” and “Test” customers—that crucial 80% who aren’t yet loyal—it forced brands into expensive remarketing campaigns. When Martech made itself so complex that brands needed armies of specialists, it made the simplicity of Facebook and Instagram ads irresistible.
Take Ria, a customer who bought once from a D2C beauty brand. Martech labelled her “female, 25-34, urban” and sent her the same email as 50,000 others. She ignored it. After ten generic emails, she vanished. Six months later, that same brand paid Google to show her an ad for the product she’d already bought. That’s not Adtech’s victory—it’s Martech’s surrender.
We need to fight against our own industry’s failures—the broken promises, the abandoned customers, the complexity that killed adoption, the input-based pricing that destroyed accountability. We need to stand against the very thing we’ve been.
This is what will make our position unique and powerful. We must not be another Martech company claiming to be 10% better. We must become the anti-Martech, the cure for what marketing technology has become. As Ries writes, “The mind understands opposition faster than superiority.” By positioning ourselves against Martech itself, we can achieve the clarity she advocates.
Think about the implications through three fundamental inversions:
Traditional Martech focuses on the Best customers; we champion the Lost 90%. Traditional Martech charges for software; we guarantee outcomes. Traditional Martech adds complexity; we deliver radical simplicity.
These aren’t incremental improvements—they’re categorical rejections of everything Martech represents.
This isn’t about internal reform or gradual improvement. You can’t fix something that’s fundamentally broken. You can’t iterate your way out of a category failure. You don’t cure a disease by treating symptoms—you replace the failing organ. When an entire industry has become the problem, the only solution is transplant, not treatment.
We’ve seen this pattern before. Netflix didn’t improve Blockbuster; it eliminated it. And as Ries documents, breakthrough brands don’t iterate on existing categories—they replace them by defining clear enemies. Salesforce didn’t build better CRM software; it positioned against software itself with “No Software” as its rallying cry, moving everything to the cloud. Tide didn’t improve soap; it declared war on soap itself with synthetic detergents. Tropicana didn’t make better frozen concentrate; it stood against frozen entirely with “not from concentrate.”
Each identified their category’s fundamental limitation and built the alternative. They didn’t fight for position within an existing market—they created markets that made the old ones obsolete.
That’s what Next Marketing must represent—not better Martech, but Martech’s replacement. We’re not fighting for market share within a broken category. We’re creating the category that makes the current one extinct.
The enemy is us. And recognising that changes everything about how we build, sell, and position our future.
