Name three things your company is against.
Not competitors. Not “bad customer service,” “wasted time,” or any of the other things nobody has ever been in favour of. Three things that a reasonable, intelligent person could stand up and defend, and that you have decided, deliberately, to be on the other side of.
Most businesses cannot do this. They can tell you at length what they’re for. Ask what they’re against, and you get a slightly stunned pause, followed by a synonym for “not being good.”
That pause is the reason their messaging doesn’t stick. A story without an antagonist isn’t a story. It’s an anecdote, and anecdotes are what people politely sit through.
Why your villain should not be a competitor
The instinct, when someone tells you to pick a villain, is to pick a rival.
Resist it. It’s wrong on two counts, and both of them are fatal.
It makes you small. The moment you build your identity in opposition to a specific company, you have accepted their frame, agreed to be measured on their terms, and told the room that you are one of two similar things. Nobody has ever won a category by talking about the other options in it.
And it isn’t true. Your customer is almost never choosing between you and them. They’re choosing between you and nothing. They’re choosing between you and the spreadsheet, the paper diary, the way they’ve always done it, the plan to get round to it in the new year. You already know this if you’ve ever looked honestly at a lost deal, and you have almost certainly never built a single piece of messaging around it.
So the villain is not the company down the road. The villain is bigger than that, and it’s already sitting in your customer’s building.
Two examples of a brand villain done properly
Let me show you two real ones, because the abstract version of this advice is useless.
Villain one: the all-or-nothing cycle.
Priya has downloaded three calorie apps in four years and deleted every one of them.
The easy villain here is obesity, or junk food, or a lack of willpower. All of them are wrong, and the third one is actively cruel.
The real villain is a design. It’s the engineered belief that a diet is a state you’re either in or out of, so that one bad Friday means the week is dead, which means you may as well finish the week properly, which means you start on Monday. She has started on Monday about forty times. And after forty times, she has drawn the only conclusion available to her, which is that the failure is her.
It isn’t. It’s the design. Every app that sends her a notification with a small sad face because she missed a day is manufacturing the exact cycle it claims to be treating. The streak counter is not a motivation feature. It’s a punishment schedule with a nice icon.
Now watch what naming that villain does. It doesn’t just describe a competitor. It tells Priya, in one sentence, that the last four years were not her fault, and it tells her precisely what this product will refuse to do to her. Everything else, the pricing, the features, the onboarding, follows from it without further argument.
Villain two: the model that rents a business its own customers.
Marco runs a bistro. He signed up to one of the big booking platforms two years ago. It filled his Tuesdays. It also charged him a couple of pounds per cover, put a competitor’s advert on the page his own regulars used to find him, and kept the guest data.
So the couple who have been coming in every fortnight for six years, whose anniversary he knows, whose table he holds without being asked, are now customers he pays a fee to serve. And the better his restaurant does, the more that costs him, which is a strange definition of a partner.
The villain is not a company. It’s a business model. It’s the entire architecture of renting business access to the people who already love it, and it is defended, articulately, by clever people in public, which is exactly what makes it a real villain rather than a strawman.
The two kinds of villain: a broken system, or a wrong belief
Every villain worth naming is one of two things.
A system that is broken by design. Not badly built. Working precisely as intended, with the harm as a feature rather than a bug. The agency retainer that rewards activity over outcomes. The strategy document that exists to justify the invoice. The streak counter.
A belief that is quietly wrong. Something everyone in the market has agreed to without ever examining. That a good product markets itself. That visibility is the same thing as demand. That founders should learn marketing by doing it badly for eighteen months first.
Notice what both have in common. Neither is a person, neither is a competitor, and both of them are things your customer is currently participating in without having chosen to.
That’s the emotional engine. You are not accusing them. You are showing them the machine they’re standing inside, and telling them it isn’t theirs.
How to test whether your villain is real
Test one: could someone defend it?
If nobody on earth would stand up for your villain, you haven’t got a villain. You’ve got a strawman, and strawmen persuade nobody, because your reader can tell you picked an easy fight.
“Bad marketing” is a strawman. “The belief that awareness is the goal” is a villain, because there are extremely intelligent people who will argue that with you at a conference.
Test two: does it cost you anything?
This is the test that kills most of them.
If you can be against your villain at no commercial cost, and lose no customers, and offend no one, it isn’t a position. It’s a slogan.
A real villain excludes people. It means some prospects read your page, recognise themselves in the thing you’re attacking, and leave. That is not a bug in the strategy. That is the strategy. A position that excludes nobody has positioned you against nothing, which means the next person who comes along can sit in exactly the same square as you and neither of you will be able to explain the difference.
You have to be willing to lose something. If you aren’t, you don’t want a villain. You want a mascot.
The villain is your positioning, and you already knew that
Here’s the part that ought to make this worth an afternoon of your time.
Write the sentence.
It is wrong that a restaurant should pay a fee to serve a couple who have been coming in for six years.
It is wrong that a woman should conclude, after four years, that she is the failure, when she has been handed the same broken week four times.
Read those back. Each one is a villain, a stake, and a positioning wedge, all in the same breath. You cannot say either sentence and remain undifferentiated, because you have just told the market what you will not do, and every competitor who is currently doing it has been named without you having to name them.
That’s the trick, and it’s why the villain beats the battlecard. You don’t attack the company. You attack the model, and the companies fall out of the sky on their own.
Where the villain belongs: sales calls, landing pages, and what you refuse to build
Not on a manifesto page. Nobody reads manifesto pages.
It goes in the second minute of the sales call, in one sentence, before you have described a single feature.
It goes in the first line of the landing page, where you currently have a description of what you do.
It goes in the answer to “so what do you actually sell”, which is a question you have been dreading at parties for years, and which becomes a great deal easier once you can say what you’re against instead of listing what you make.
And it goes into every decision about what you will not build, which is the real reason to have one.
So, again
Name three things your company is against.
If the pause is still there, that’s your finding. It means you have a description rather than a position, and a description can be copied by anybody, in an afternoon, for nothing.
Nobody has ever repeated a description back to a friend.