Most brand positioning asks the same question: what do we stand for? Mark Ritson calls this the "about" position — promoting your features, your benefits, your story. It works. It's just not always the fastest route. The "versus" position defines you by contrast. You pick the enemy, make the audience watch them lose, and let the shared contempt do the bonding work. The villain doesn't have to be real. They just have to be recognisable.
Here are six tactics from the Storytelling Engine that turn your least-wanted audience into your best asset.
- Anti Target Audience
- Consumer Antagonists
- Brand Antagonists
- Status Quo Antagonists
- Thwarted Antagonists
- Hateable Heroes
1. Anti Target Audience
Exclude someone publicly — and the right audience self-selects.
1/JBR: It's Not for Everyone — Dubai Properties, FP7, 2017
The brief: reposition a luxury property in a market where glitz is the default language. FP7's answer was a campaign that deliberately repelled the wrong buyers. Using the line "It's Not for Everyone" across OOH, digital, and print, the campaign dismissed loud luxury in favour of studied discretion — signalling to high-value clients with minimalist tastes that this was the property that understood them. It didn't try to win everyone. It repositioned 1/JBR for exactly the people who pride themselves on not needing to be impressed.
Volkswagen's City Boy (BBH, pre-2000) featured a brash, shallow test-driver rejecting the car as boring — which made everyone who valued reliability feel completely seen. Heetch (BETC Paris, 2024) asked Olympic tourists to use Uber instead, protecting its local audience's wait times and deepening brand loyalty through deliberate self-sacrifice.
