Let me tell you about two clients. Same industry. Same approximate revenue. Same geographic market. Both came to me within six months of each other. Both had a "competitor problem." Both described it the same way: there's another company out there saying the same things we're saying, and we can't figure out how to differentiate.
Client A wanted to attack. Run comparative ads. Highlight the competitor's weaknesses. Position themselves as the better version of the same thing. They'd already drafted some copy. It used phrases like "unlike the competition" and "don't settle for less" and "the difference is clear." The copy was fine. It was also, in Girard's terminology, a perfect mimetic escalation disguised as differentiation.
Client B didn't want to attack anyone. They wanted to understand why their messaging felt hollow. They couldn't articulate the problem, but they could feel it. "We say all the right things," the founder told me. "We say what we do and why we're good at it and what makes us different. And none of it lands. It's like we're talking into a void."
Same industry. Same problem. Completely different instincts. And Girard would have diagnosed both of them in about thirty seconds.
Rene Girard's career is, in some sense, one long argument: human culture is built on a mechanism of collective violence that nobody wants to acknowledge. The mechanism works like this. A community experiences internal tension. Rivalry, conflict, anxiety, competition. The tension threatens to tear the community apart. So the community, unconsciously, selects a victim. A scapegoat. Someone or something that can absorb the collective hostility. The scapegoat is expelled or destroyed, and the act of collective violence against the scapegoat restores order. Unity returns. The community feels cleansed. And the mechanism repeats, because the underlying tensions never actually resolve. They just get displaced.
Girard traced this through mythology, religion, anthropology, literature. The pattern is universal. It predates writing. It predates agriculture. It might predate language itself. Every culture has its foundational murder. Every religion has its sacrifice. Every myth has its monster that must be slain so the community can survive.
I spend most of my time reading about buyers and desire and marketing strategy. But the scapegoat mechanism is the Girardian insight that haunts me most, because it shows up in branding with a regularity that borders on liturgical.
Every brand has an enemy. If you don't think yours does, you haven't looked hard enough. Or, more likely, the enemy grew organically, without anyone deciding it should exist, and now it's embedded in your messaging so deeply that it feels like a feature instead of a choice.
Look at any brand's positioning. Underneath the value proposition and the differentiators and the "why us" section, there's a scapegoat. Something the brand defines itself against. Not just a competitor. A concept. An approach. A way of doing things that the brand positions as the old way, the wrong way, the thing that existed before this brand came along with the right way.
Apple's scapegoat was conformity. The "Think Different" campaign didn't sell computers. It expelled the beige-box PC user from the tribe and made everyone who remained feel like a creative rebel. The PC user was the scapegoat. Not personally. Symbolically. Their uncool-ness was the thing that bound the Apple community together.
Crossfit's scapegoat was the traditional gym. The culture wasn't just about fitness. It was about the explicit rejection of the globo-gym, the machines, the isolation, the individualism of conventional exercise. You had to hate the old way before you could love the new way. The hatred was the entry ritual.
Every SaaS company I've ever worked with has a scapegoat that sounds like "the old way of doing things." Spreadsheets. Manual processes. Disconnected tools. The scapegoat is always the status quo, which is Girard's insight in miniature: the community needs a victim, and the safest victim is the thing that came before, because you can destroy it without anyone fighting back.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable.
Client A wanted to make their competitor the scapegoat. Explicitly. Name them. Attack them. Build the brand's identity around the act of opposing a specific, named rival.
This is the most common branding instinct and it's almost always a mistake. Not because it doesn't work short-term. It works great short-term. People love a fight. People love taking sides. People love the feeling of belonging to the group that's against the other group. It's Girardian to the bone. The mimetic rivalry generates intensity, and intensity generates attention, and attention generates revenue, and everyone feels like the brand is winning.
But Girard also showed what happens next. The mimetic rivalry escalates. It always escalates. You attack the competitor, they attack back, you attack harder, they respond, and the two brands become locked in a cycle of mutual definition where neither can exist without the other. You stop being defined by what you offer and start being defined by what you oppose. Your identity becomes parasitic on the rival's identity. And the audience, the community you're trying to build, starts bonding over hostility instead of value. The scapegoat mechanism has taken over your brand.
I've watched this happen. A client in the home services space decided to go after their main competitor publicly. Social media. Comparison pages. Ads that directly referenced the other company's failures. It worked for about three months. Engagement spiked. Sales went up. The team felt energized by the clarity of having a named enemy.
Then the competitor responded. And the audience started splitting into factions. And the conversation about the client's actual service disappeared, replaced entirely by the conversation about the rivalry. New customers were coming in motivated by antagonism, not by desire for the service, and those customers churned faster than organic leads because their attachment was to the fight, not to the offering.
The scapegoat consumed the brand. The brand became about the enemy, and when the enemy eventually changed their messaging and stopped engaging with the rivalry, the brand had nothing left. The identity had been hollowed out. Everything that made them interesting was reactive, and when there was nothing to react to, there was nothing.
Client B had the opposite problem. No enemy at all.
Their messaging was positive, inclusive, aspirational. It said all the nice things. Quality. Integrity. Service. And it landed with the force of a wet napkin. Not because those values aren't real. Because values without tension are just words. They're the linguistic equivalent of a stock photo. Nice to look at. Impossible to feel.
Girard would say that Client B's brand was in sacrificial crisis. The community, their audience, had internal tension. The buyers were frustrated, anxious, uncertain about the category. They had bad experiences. They'd been burned by previous providers. They carried hostility that needed somewhere to go. And Client B wasn't giving it anywhere to go. The brand was all comfort and no catharsis.
The audience needed a scapegoat. Not a competitor. A concept. A named, identified source of the pain they were feeling. And Client B was refusing to name it, because naming it felt negative, and they wanted to be positive, and positivity is the religion of modern branding, and questioning positivity is like questioning oxygen.
But here's Girard's uncomfortable truth: communities cohere through exclusion. Not through inclusion. The thing that binds a group together isn't what they all share. It's what they all reject. The scapegoat is the centripetal force. Without it, the community is just a collection of individuals with overlapping demographics.
So what did we do?
With Client A, we redirected. We took the energy of the rivalry, the genuine intensity the team felt about being different from their competitor, and we pointed it at a concept instead of a company. The enemy wasn't the competitor. The enemy was the approach. The methodology. The assumption underlying the entire category that nobody had questioned because it was invisible.
We named it. Gave it specific language. Made it concrete. "The assumption that X means Y." The audience recognized it instantly because they'd felt it, they'd experienced it, they'd been victims of it. But they'd never heard anyone name it. The naming was the catharsis. The community formed around the shared recognition that this assumption had been shaping their experience without their consent, and our client's brand became the alternative to the assumption, not the alternative to a specific company.
This is what I mean by choosing your scapegoat consciously. You're going to have one. Your brand mythology requires one. Girard would say human culture requires one. The question is whether you select a productive enemy, one that can be expelled symbolically through the act of choosing your brand, one that the buyer actually experiences as a source of pain, or whether you let the mechanism run unattended and end up locked in a mimetic rivalry that eats both brands alive.
With Client B, we did the opposite work. We identified the thing their buyers were angry about. Not at Client B. At the category. At the experience of being a buyer in this space. The frustration was real and specific and nobody was acknowledging it. Client B was so busy being nice that they'd missed the fact that their buyers didn't want nice. They wanted someone to say the thing out loud. To name the problem. To validate the anger.
We wrote messaging that named it. Not aggressively. Not as an attack. As a recognition. "You've been told X. You've been promised Y. You've been disappointed Z times. Here's why." The messaging didn't attack anyone. It acknowledged something. And the acknowledgment was enough. The scapegoat was the broken promise. The category-level failure that every buyer had experienced and no brand had bothered to articulate.
I keep thinking about what Girard means for branding at a deeper level. Not tactically. Philosophically.
If desire is mimetic, and if communities cohere through scapegoating, then branding isn't what we think it is. It's not communication. It's not persuasion. It's ritual. It's the modern version of the founding murder. Every brand is a mythology, and every mythology requires a sacrifice, and the sacrifice is always the thing that came before, the old way, the wrong belief, the false promise.
When you see branding this way, you start noticing things. You notice that the most powerful brands don't sell products. They perform rituals. The Apple keynote is a liturgy. The Crossfit WOD is a sacrament. The Harley-Davidson rally is a pilgrimage. And at the center of each ritual, unnamed but present, is the scapegoat. The thing that's being symbolically destroyed so the community can feel renewed.
This is powerful and dangerous. Powerful because it works. Communities built on shared exclusion are tighter, more loyal, more emotionally invested than communities built on shared interest. Dangerous because the scapegoat mechanism is, in Girard's analysis, the engine of collective violence. It starts with symbolic expulsion and, if unchecked, escalates to real harm. Every cult started as a brand. Every brand has the potential to become a cult. The distance between community and mob is shorter than anyone in marketing wants to admit.
I work with this tension every day. I help clients build brands that cohere, that have identity, that mean something specific to specific people. And I know, because Girard taught me, that coherence requires exclusion. You can't mean something to everyone. The boundary that includes must also exclude. The story that welcomes must also reject.
The ethical question isn't whether to have a scapegoat. You're going to have one. The question is what kind. Is it a real rival? A named competitor you're trying to destroy? That's the path to mimetic escalation, and it ends badly for everyone. Is it a person? A demographic? A political group? That's the path to genuine harm, and it's the path that most of the world's current problems are walking.
Or is it an idea? An assumption? A methodology? A false belief that your buyers have already experienced as painful? That's the productive scapegoat. The one that can be expelled symbolically, through education, through recognition, through the act of choosing differently. Nobody gets hurt. The community forms around a shared insight instead of a shared hostility. The mythology works without the violence.
I don't have a formula for this. I have a question I ask every client: who or what is your enemy, and did you choose it, or did it choose you?
The ones who didn't choose are usually in trouble. Their brand mythology grew in the dark, fed by mimetic rivalry and unexamined assumptions, and the scapegoat at its center is something they'd be embarrassed to name if they could see it clearly.
The ones who chose, the ones who selected their enemy with intention, who aimed the scapegoat mechanism at an idea worth opposing, they have brands that feel alive. Brands with real communities. Brands where the audience doesn't just buy the product. They join the mythology.
It's 5 AM. The chai is doing its job. I keep thinking about Girard in his office at Stanford, this soft-spoken French literary critic who saw the engine of human violence hiding in mythology and religion and then, near the end of his life, started seeing it in everything. In politics. In media. In the way we form communities and destroy them.
He never wrote about branding. He didn't have to. The mechanism is the mechanism. It operates the same way whether you're founding Rome or launching a DTC skincare line. The only difference is scale.
I'm sitting at my desk, thinking about clients, thinking about enemies, thinking about the foundational murder that lives inside every brand that's ever meant anything to anyone. And I'm thinking about whether it's possible to build a brand without one. Whether you can create a community that coheres through something other than exclusion.
Girard would say no. The mechanism is too deep. Too old. Too wired into the human operating system.
I'm not sure he's wrong. But I keep looking. Because the alternative, building brands on violence even symbolic violence and calling it strategy, is something I want to be wrong about. Even if I'm not.