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Every compelling story has an enemy. The hero needs a dragon to slay, a mountain to climb, or at least a really stubborn jar lid to open. Yet when businesses craft their value propositions, they often skip straight to the solution without properly introducing the problem. They’re selling dragon-slaying swords to people who don’t believe dragons exist.
This matters because the human brain doesn’t process solutions in a vacuum. We need context. We need tension. We need to understand what we’re fighting against before we care about the weapon being offered.
The Psychology of Opposition
Think about how you remember your favorite meals. Chances are, the ones that stick in your memory involved serious hunger first. The sandwich after a long hike tastes better than the same sandwich eaten at your desk on a Tuesday. The solution becomes meaningful only in proportion to the problem it solves.
Psychologists call this contrast effect. Our brains are wired to perceive value through comparison. A product or service that solves a problem we deeply feel is worth more than one that solves a problem we barely notice. The villain makes the hero valuable.
But here’s where most companies stumble. They assume their customers already understand the problem. They present solutions to battles their audience doesn’t know they’re fighting. It’s like offering someone an umbrella when they haven’t noticed it’s raining.
What Makes a Good Villain
Not all problems make good villains. The best antagonists in your value proposition share three qualities.
First, they must be real and present. Vague threats don’t motivate action. “Inefficiency” means nothing. “Spending three hours every week manually updating spreadsheets that could be automated” paints a picture. One is abstract. The other is a thief stealing your time.
Second, they must be growing or persistent. A problem that goes away on its own isn’t worth solving. The villain should be getting stronger, not weaker. This creates urgency. Climate change works as a villain because it compounds. A single rainy day doesn’t.
Third, they must be painful enough to matter but solvable enough to inspire hope. If the problem feels insurmountable, people shut down. If it feels trivial, they ignore it. The sweet spot is that zone where the problem hurts but victory seems possible.
The Mistake of Invisible Enemies
Many businesses make their villains too abstract. They talk about “digital transformation challenges” or “market volatility” when they should be talking about the specific moment a customer loses a major account because their competitor responded to an email faster.
Abstraction feels professional. It sounds sophisticated. But it doesn’t stick. Our brains evolved to handle concrete threats, not conceptual ones. We react to the tiger in the bush, not to the general concept of danger.
Consider how Apple introduced the iPod. They didn’t talk about “portable music solutions” or “digital audio optimization.” Their villain was specific: carrying around a bulky Walkman or a CD player that skipped when you jogged. “1,000 songs in your pocket” worked because everyone understood the problem of choosing which 12 songs to bring on a road trip.
The abstraction trap is particularly common in B2B companies. They assume other businesses think in systems and processes. But businesses are run by humans, and humans think in stories and struggles. The CFO doesn’t lie awake worried about “inefficient resource allocation.” She worries about explaining to the board why they’re over budget again.
Multiple Villains, Same Story
Sophisticated value propositions often have more than one antagonist. These villains work together to create what marketers call a “problem stack.”
Take Slack as an example. Their primary villain was email overload. But they also positioned themselves against the secondary villains of lost information, difficult collaboration across time zones, and the frustration of searching through endless threads to find one attachment. Each villain reinforced the others.
This approach works because real problems rarely exist in isolation. When you have a toothache, you’re also dealing with difficulty eating, trouble sleeping, and anxiety about the dentist bill. Addressing multiple dimensions of a problem makes your solution feel more complete.
The trick is ensuring your villains are related. Random problems bundled together feel incoherent. Connected problems that stem from the same root cause feel like a pattern worth breaking.
The Contrarian Truth About Creating Problems
Here’s something that makes people uncomfortable: sometimes your job isn’t to identify an existing villain but to help your audience see one they didn’t know was there.
This sounds manipulative. In some cases, it is. But often, it’s educational. People adapt to broken systems until someone points out the cracks. Before ergonomic keyboards existed, most people didn’t think about repetitive strain injury. The problem existed, but it was invisible until someone named it and offered a solution.
The ethical line here is intention. Are you inventing a problem that doesn’t exist to sell a solution? That’s dishonest. Are you highlighting a real problem that people have normalized or overlooked? That’s valuable.
Think about how personal finance apps work. They don’t create the problem of overspending. They make it visible by showing you that you spent $400 on coffee this month. The villain was always there. They just turned on the lights.
Villains in Different Contexts
The same solution can have different villains depending on who’s buying. Enterprise software sold to IT departments fights different battles than the same software sold to end users.
For IT, the villain might be security vulnerabilities or compliance headaches. For end users, it’s the frustrating experience of forgetting another password or waiting for IT to reset their credentials. Same product, different antagonists.
This is why good companies segment their messaging. They’re not changing their solution. They’re identifying which villain matters most to each audience. A project management tool helps executives battle the villain of missed deadlines, helps team leads battle the villain of unclear responsibilities, and helps individual contributors battle the villain of confusing priorities.
The mistake is trying to fight all villains at once in the same message. That dilutes impact. Better to pick the primary antagonist for each audience and craft your narrative around that specific battle.
When the Villain Is Internal
Sometimes the enemy isn’t an external problem. It’s an internal limitation.
Duolingo doesn’t primarily battle the difficulty of learning languages. Their main villain is the user’s own inconsistency. They know people want to learn Spanish or French. The problem isn’t lack of resources or even lack of time. It’s lack of sustained motivation.
So they gamified the experience and added streak counters and sent passive-aggressive notifications from their owl mascot. They made the invisible villain of human inconsistency visible and beatable.
This internal villain approach works particularly well for products related to health, education, and personal development. The external problem might be “I want to be fit” or “I want to learn to code,” but the real antagonist is usually procrastination, self-doubt, or competing priorities.
Acknowledging this internal struggle builds trust. It shows you understand the real battle. Products that pretend the only obstacle is lack of information or tools feel naive. Products that acknowledge the psychological dimension feel honest.
The Villain Makes You Credible
When you clearly articulate the problem, you demonstrate understanding. This builds authority. Someone who can describe your struggle better than you can becomes someone worth listening to.
Doctors do this instinctively. Before prescribing treatment, good doctors describe your symptoms back to you in detail. This isn’t wasted time. It’s establishing credibility. It proves they understand what you’re experiencing.
The same principle applies in business. A consultant who can articulate the specific pain points in your industry immediately seems more qualified than one who talks generically about “helping companies succeed.” They’re showing their work.
This is why content marketing focused on problems often performs better than content focused on solutions. A detailed article about the specific challenges of managing remote teams builds more trust than a generic pitch for collaboration software. You’re proving you’ve been in the trenches.
The Evolution of Villains
Problems change over time. Yesterday’s dragon becomes today’s annoyance. The villain that motivated your first customers might not resonate with your next wave.
Zoom’s original villain was expensive, complicated video conferencing systems that required IT support. As they grew, their villain evolved to become the friction of communication itself. Then the pandemic hit, and their villain became physical distance and the inability to maintain human connection.
Same product, evolving antagonist. Companies that recognize when their villain has shifted can adjust their messaging to stay relevant. Those that don’t risk sounding like they’re fighting yesterday’s war.
This is particularly important for mature companies. The problem you solved brilliantly ten years ago might be solved well enough by multiple competitors now. You need a new villain to differentiate, or you need to go deeper on the same villain and find dimensions others have ignored.
The Temptation of Fake Villains
Some companies create straw man villains to knock down. They invent problems their competitors supposedly have but don’t, or they exaggerate minor issues into catastrophes.
This backfires. Audiences are smarter than we give them credit for. When the villain feels manufactured, the whole value proposition becomes suspect. It’s the business equivalent of a movie where the bad guy is evil for no reason. We stop caring.
The strongest villains are the ones your customers already feel. You’re not convincing them the problem exists. You’re naming it and showing them you understand it better than they thought possible.
Villains Create Communities
Shared enemies build tribes. When you identify a clear antagonist, you’re not just selling a solution. You’re inviting people to join a movement against a common foe.
This is why some brands build cult followings. Tesla owners don’t just drive electric cars. They’re part of a rebellion against gas-guzzling, planet-damaging, outdated technology. The villain unites them as much as the product does.
This community effect amplifies over time. Early adopters who fought the villain with you become advocates who recruit others to the cause. They’re not just satisfied customers. They’re fellow warriors who’ve seen the enemy and lived to tell about it.
But this only works if the villain is real and significant. Manufactured outrage or trivial problems don’t build movements. They build skepticism.
Making Peace With Your Villain
Here’s a paradox: the best companies eventually make their primary villain irrelevant. If you truly solve the problem, you eliminate the enemy that made you relevant in the first place.
This is why successful companies continuously identify new villains. Amazon started fighting the villain of limited selection and inconvenient shopping. Then they fought the villain of slow shipping. Then expensive shipping. Then the villain of having to leave your house at all.
Each conquered villain revealed a new one underneath. The game isn’t to preserve your enemy. It’s to keep finding new battles worth fighting as you win the old ones.
The Villain Test
Before finalizing your value proposition, run it through this filter: can your customer clearly picture the villain you’re fighting? Can they feel it? Have they experienced it recently?
If the answer to any of these is no, your villain needs work. You’re either being too abstract, too broad, or addressing a problem that isn’t actually painful enough to matter.
The best test is to describe the problem to potential customers without mentioning your solution. If they lean forward and say “yes, exactly, that drives me crazy,” you’ve found your villain. If they look confused or indifferent, keep searching.
The Long Game
Building a value proposition around a clear villain isn’t just about making better marketing. It’s about building a better company. When you deeply understand the problem you’re solving, you make better product decisions, hire better people, and create a stronger culture.
Your villain gives you focus. Every feature request, every partnership opportunity, every strategic decision can be filtered through one question: does this help us fight our enemy more effectively?
Companies without clear villains drift. They chase trends, copy competitors, and lose their identity. Companies with clear villains know exactly what they stand for and against. That clarity compounds over time into something far more valuable than any single marketing campaign.
The villain isn’t just a rhetorical device. It’s the organizing principle that transforms a business from a collection of features into a focused force with purpose and direction. Heroes need dragons. Not because dragons are fun, but because dragons make heroes necessary.