In marketing, we know it is vital to identify a villain a brand truly fights. Now these villains are tricky because they don’t wear all black, they don’t ride around in flashy cars, and they don’t make threats like, “You have ten minutes to stop the timer on this bomb, save the girl, and give me the briefcase full of money (or the secret codes or the plutonium), or the world will be destroyed.” The villains that marketing heroes like ThoughtLab fight are more subtle and less flashy.
Villains
In movies and TV shows, we love a good villain. Someone who creeps us out, makes us hope for their horrific end, and yet keeps us hoping they don’t die. We want to see the villain, root against him, and marvel at his villainousness. The more cruel and wicked the villain, the more we like him. Hans Gruber in Die Hard, smooth, cool, witty, and mean. Love that guy! How about Darth Vader? Now that’s a villain: classic, dressed in black, evil powers, knew the right path and yet deliberately took the dark path. That is some serious villain behavior. Luke and Obi-Wan would be nothing; their story would be so lame if they didn’t have a great villain to fight. And, thankfully, Lucas gave us the heavy-breathing, psychotic, force-bending villain of our dreams.
A good villain can move a story along nicely. A poorly constructed villain—nothing under the villainy, just villain for villain’s sake—doesn’t cut it. A good villain has depth, and if played right, they can elicit sympathy and even empathy from an audience if their backstory is good enough—if we see that, inside, the villain is really a decent guy, just misunderstood, or lacking good guidance to help them make non-villain choices. Hannibal Lecter, that’s a villain that defies logic. He kills people, and he eats them. How villainous is that? On top of that, he’s brilliant, a great cook, and a lover of all things fine and luxurious. You have a brilliant and driven agent, Starling, who is compelling and noble and fighting for what’s right. Of course, she needs a good, brilliant opposite, and Hopkins gives us that in his Lecter. We can’t take our eyes off him, and he’s the thing we remember most about the film. Here’s something fun: Hopkins won the Oscar for Best Actor for that performance, and yet, in a one-hour and fifty-eight-minute film, Hopkins’s Lecter has only 16 minutes of screen time. That’s how much he dominated the film’s psychological landscape. Now, that’s a villain.
There are so many villains through history, ones in novels, short stories, and then the great film villains. We love to hate them and hate that we love them because they should be evil and hated, but secretly, don’t we all wish we could be that evil and do some of the things villains do? No? Maybe that’s just my pile of revenge slips and me. Revenge slips are the pieces of paper jammed in my wallet with the names of people who have “wronged” me, and now my life is lived purely in pursuit of revenge.
Of course that’s not true, but wouldn’t that make a great villain origin story?
But villains don’t exist solely in the pages of novels or on screens big and small. There are villains all around us, and ThoughtLab, the heroes that we are, fight villains all the time.
Villains of Marketing
In marketing, we know it is vital to identify a villain a brand truly fights. Now these villains are tricky because they don’t wear all black, they don’t ride around in flashy cars, and they don’t make threats like, “You have ten minutes to stop the timer on this bomb, save the girl, and give me the briefcase full of money (or the secret codes or the plutonium), or the world will be destroyed.” The villains that marketing heroes like ThoughtLab fight are more subtle and less flashy. Their threats are destructive to the brand, but not destroy-the-entire-planet destructive. Certainly destroy-your-brand destructive. The villain in a marketing campaign is usually a core problem, obstacle, or antagonist your customer, the hero, must defeat. Instead of a literal person, the villain is usually a root-cause pain point—like wasted time, high costs, confusion, or a frustrating status quo—and your brand acts as the guide or tool that helps the customer win.
Types of Marketing Villains
External problems: Tangible hurdles like a broken-down appliance, a messy inbox, or a physical illness.
Internal frustrations: Emotional struggles such as self-doubt, fear of failure, or feeling overwhelmed.
Systemic barriers: Flawed industry standards, red tape, or traditional ways of doing things that waste people’s money.
Now, you may ask, why does my marketing campaign need a villain? Because they work. A good campaign has a clear target, and a villain is that target. So, having a villain in your campaign does the following:
Creates tension: A story feels flat without an opposing force pushing back against the buyer’s goals.
Drives action: People are often more motivated to run from pain and frustration than to chase a generic reward.
Builds community: Sharing a common enemy unites customers and builds fierce brand loyalty toward the company fighting by their side.
A great story has a hero’s journey and a villain to vanquish. When you have one that feels universal, then you have something for your hero, your brand, to triumph over. And nothing builds loyalty like a triumphant hero. Find that villain, give your brand the tools to vanquish that villain, and stay true to that hero you’ve created, and your brand will be fine.
The End.
But not really.
Recognizing the villain
The villain, in any story, has got to be real and has to represent real danger to the public. Without a real danger, a certified villain, you’re just creating problems so you can solve them, and eventually, people will see through that, and once they do, you’ll have a hard time getting people to come back to your brand because they won’t trust you. They’ll see you as creating panic and fear, just to sell a few more units. The villain must be real, or your hero, your customer, is not real either.
Finding and recognizing that villain, naming them, calling out their power, and offering real, tangible solutions isn’t easy, which is why not everyone can be a marketer at the level of ThoughtLab.
For help finding, naming, and vanquishing that villain, it’s not a bad idea to look at how an actor plays a villain.
Finding a villain
In acting, we have something we call the magic if. The master himself, Stanislavski, created it and passed it down to us. The magic if states it simply: what would I do IF I were this particular character in this particular situation? It creates a personal connection between the actor and the character, so the actor isn’t putting on the shell of a character but instead seeking it within themselves. Seeking within helps the actor stay grounded in the reality they create, and it helps them find a reliable, playable, accessible emotional life, because instead of pretending emotions, actors use their actual emotional experiences to fill in the character gaps.
This approach can feel a little intimidating. The reality is, you have to look inside yourself and find the part of you that could be a villain. You have to admit that in you is a Hannibal Lecter or someone equally awful. And you have to love that part of yourself in order to make the villain work.
One of the best ways to do this is to be willing to be the villain in your own story. Not a character, not words written on a page or a screen, but in your actual life. When have you been on the edge of being a villain, and when have you crossed that edge and become an actual villain? This, dear readers, takes courage.
My Villain
It’s easy to sit in an ivory tower and write about what you should do. Create blogs like: Best practices for lulling your customers into a false sense of security. Or Top ten things your branding agency needs to have in the office. Sitting back, gathering a tidbit of information and stretching it into 1800 words is a copywriter’s job. We do it in our sleep. Why use one word when seven is more words?
But I would be remiss and a big ol’ coward if I didn’t discuss my villains in this piece. Because I have them and they taught me something. So …
I have made no excuses for the fact that I’m an alcoholic. I am in recovery and have been sober for close to ten years now. I’m happy about that and proud to discuss it with anyone who is struggling with addiction. However, I could never have gotten sober if I hadn’t done one thing: and that is to be willing to be the villain in my own story. To admit that I was doing terrible things and allowing alcohol to take the blame. Of course, I was the one who took the drink, but I was also the one who blamed the drink for all my problems.
I used to dismiss the problem with things like: “I’ve never been drunk at an audition, a rehearsal or a performance.” Which is true apart from one time during a production of Much Ado, when I was directed to be sharing shots with Don John, and on closing night, the actor playing Don John, who brought the flask onstage that we were sharing, put actual whiskey in the flask, and by the end of the scene, we were both pretty hammered. But I prided myself on the fact that I kept drinking out of my work. Yay me, I’m not a drunk.
Not so true. When I started thinking it was time to get sober, I had to see myself as the villain in my story. I was telling only half the story; I don’t drink when work is an issue. I keep the art sacred and free of drinking. That’s the story I sold to everyone. But when the day was done, I drank from my own flask as soon as I stepped out of the theater. I was also closing bars like Johnny’s on Second, every single night. I was very fond of drinking at home as well and often mixed up being blacked out for a good night’s rest. None of that was hero behavior.
So to get sober and healthy, I had to admit that I had been hiding behind my brave brag of never allowing my art to be hindered by my drinking. But, of course, it did. All those nights being drunk wreaked havoc on my ability to learn lines. It also kept me from forming any true, deep connection to a character. My hero was this concocted person who never allowed liquor to touch his lips during a show, but lived by W.C. Fields’ life view: “I never drink water, fish fuck in it.” I was lying to myself, and I knew it.
When I started taking actual stock of my life and my drinking, I had to look at those things with clear-eyed honesty. I had done some terrible things when I was drunk. I said things and treated people badly. I was always devising a way to have a drink, yet I desperately held on to this image of the conscientious artist. But once I accepted the reality, I was the villain in my story, not the drink, not the pub, not the people I drank with, me. Side note: most of the time, I drank alone.
The reality I finally accepted was that my villain was and still is me.
What I see in me
Once I fully admitted and accepted that I was indeed a villain, it became the start of my journey to sobriety. It also helped me recognize the villain in myself and in others on the same journey more easily.
And here’s the strange thing about recognizing the villain: once you know who it really is, you can stop fighting all the wrong things. I spent years blaming alcohol, circumstances, bad nights, bad decisions, bad influences, stress, loneliness, celebration, boredom, whatever happened to be handy. I had a whole rogues’ gallery ready to take the blame. But none of those things could change anything because none of them was actually in charge. I was.
That’s not an especially comfortable realization, but it’s an incredibly useful one.
Because once I could see the villain clearly, I could finally understand what he wanted, how he operated, what lies he told, and, most importantly, how to fight him. I knew his tricks because they were my tricks. I knew his excuses because I’d written them. I knew how persuasive he could be because I’d spent years being persuaded by him. The villain wasn’t some mysterious force lurking outside of me. I knew the guy intimately.
And knowing your villain changes the fight.
That’s true in life, acting, storytelling, branding, and marketing. If you identify the wrong villain, you spend all your energy fighting something that isn’t actually causing the problem. Worse, you might invent a villain because it makes your story easier to tell. But if you’re willing to look closely enough, and sometimes uncomfortably enough, you can find the thing that’s really standing between where you are and where you want to be.
That’s when you have something worth fighting.
The Takeaway
We talk a lot in marketing about heroes. We want the customer to be the hero. We want the brand to help them on their journey. We want transformation, triumph, victory, and all the other lovely things that happen right before the music swells and the credits roll.
But heroes don’t mean much without something real to overcome.
Finding that something requires more than deciding what sounds good in a campaign meeting. It means understanding your customer well enough to know what’s genuinely frustrating them, frightening them, costing them time, costing them money, or keeping them from getting where they want to go. Sometimes the villain is a competitor. Sometimes it’s an outdated system. Sometimes it’s confusion, complexity, complacency, or the way an entire industry has always done things. And sometimes, uncomfortable as it may be, the villain might be something your own company is doing.
That’s why the villain has to be real.
At ThoughtLab, finding that villain isn’t about manufacturing an enemy so we can write a clever headline and ride heroically into battle. It’s about looking closely enough at the customer, the brand, the market, and sometimes ourselves to identify what’s actually getting in the way. Name the wrong villain, and you solve the wrong problem. Name the right one, and suddenly the story becomes clearer. The customer understands what they’re fighting, the brand understands its role, and the marketing has a reason to exist beyond simply asking people to buy something.
Maybe that’s why we love a good villain so much. A great villain doesn’t just give the hero someone to fight. A great villain shows us who the hero really is.
