By skyforbes 
If you had a television turned on at some point over the past few weeks, you have likely seen ChatGPT ads like this one. As I watched this campaign unfurl, I was struck by what a missed opportunity this was… and how ChatGPT’s miss underscores the need for a new approach to strategy that all brands need to embrace.
ChatGPT’s Failure of Ambition
Before I get into why this is such a miss by ChatGPT, it’s clear what they’re trying to do. With inspiration from Google ads of old like Parisian Love, this collection of vignettes seeks to show how ChatGPT can pleasantly enhance everyday life: helping you impress a date, do a pull-up, etc. It’s also very clear that the ChatGPT campaign seeks to suffuse itself with humanity and not come across as the evil emperor of the next era of technological progress (they not only shot the ads in old school 35mm but they made sure that every article covering the campaign mentions that fact). And last but not least, it’s clear that they think the job to be done is just to get more people to use AI, rather than establishing anything unique about ChatGPT. They’re figuring that they already arrived at their Kleenex moment, so they just need to try to get more people to sneeze.
But the reason why this is such a missed opportunity is the fact that the leading brand of the most transformative technology in decades missed the opportunity to establish anything about itself, its technology, our collective culture… anything. This is a massive failure of ambition, and I’d argue that this is because ChatGPT is missing an element that is increasingly essential for all brands today. And to illuminate this new approach to brand strategy, let’s turn to the rapper MF DOOM.
Becoming MF DOOM: A Supervillain (and Probably Your Favorite Rapper’s Favorite Rapper)
Before becoming MF DOOM, Daniel Dumile found early success in the music industry with a label deal and an initial album that achieved some acclaim. But then, struck by both personal tragedy and professional setback, Dumile disappeared from the public eye entirely. And when he re-emerged several years later, it wasn’t as Daniel Dumile or any of his other prior noms de guerres. It was as the supervillain MF DOOM. Wearing a metal mask meant to focus attention on his music and not his image, embracing enigmatic anonymity instead of celebrity, and writing dense, unconventional rhymes (such as when he opens a song with a bar that manages to rhyme to Eyjafjallajökull which happens to be a nine syllable Icelandic word that includes phonemes that don’t even exist in the English language), MF DOOM achieved cult hero status as the rapper who was the supervillainous counterpart to the crass superficiality of the music industry. DOOM became, as Taylor might say, the anti-hero.
The Essential Animating Power of Anthropic’s (Super)Villain
The plot thickened this year when the supervillain MF DOOM appeared as the music sync for the new Anthropic ad campaign which not only laid bare the missed opportunity by ChatGPT but also showcased the active ingredient needed in every brand strategy today: a villain.
Founded by former employees of OpenAI who were concerned about how AI could go awry, Anthropic has a brand purpose of “building AI systems you can rely on.” While this purpose is a noble statement of intent, had Anthropic stopped there they would have likely landed in a place as forgettable as ChatGPT. But let’s dig into this a bit and show the difference that a villain made.
First, let’s pull their purpose apart to a vision and a mission statement. We’re taking a bit of liberty here, but I think this is likely very close.
Not bad, right? But not sharp enough yet. Let’s see what happens when we add a villain to a traditional vision and mission.
This villain has a few important dimensions. Sure, vanquishing the villain of slop guides differentiated product development. But another dimension of villainizing slop strikes at the core motivation of the user and the company: saying that Anthropic aspires to be a thinking partner to those who are tackling big problems, rather than the place where you (sloppily) outsource your thinking. With this villain, Anthropic not only differentiates itself in the eyes of prospective users but — perhaps more importantly — also in the eyes of prospective employees.
So, when I refer to a brand’s villain, I don’t mean your biggest competitor or such vagaries as “our loss of brand relevance.” Rather, a villain is the dynamic in the lives of your consumers and our culture that you must vanquish to achieve your mission and vision.
Here then is a new framework for brand strategy that adds this active ingredient of a villain:
A villain completes the strategic triangle of a brand’s aspiration, and takes what could otherwise be pleasing but inert aspirations and turns it into an actionable story. Let’s see how it worked for DOOM himself (this triangle courtesy of celebrated strategist, MC, and MF DOOM superfan
).
To further illustrate this, let’s go through another example: Nike.
How a Villain Could Help Re-Invigorate Nike… and More
With a mission statement that has been an exemplar for decades, it could seem sacrilegious to question — let alone tinker with — Nike as an example. But when your stock price has fallen 47% over the past five years, it’s time to take a look at everything.
Bringing “inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world” remains as noble of an intent as ever, and nobody is going to disagree with it. But its breadth and universal positivity doesn’t provide much of a sense of animating focus… especially when results start slipping. So let’s break this down a bit.
First, we’ll take another liberty and craft a vision statement to go along with Nike’s famous mission. In this instance, it’s basically a matter of taking the asterisk in their mission and turning it into a vision of the future: a world where everyone with a body believes they can be an athlete.
And this is where the villain starts to come into focus: because as uplifting as it is to say that “if you have a body, you’re an athlete,” that’s hardly believed by everyone. This fact is reflected by everything from flagging participation rates in sports to the harsh reflection of social media. The villain that Nike needs to vanquish isn’t losing, and though their CFO might beg to differ it’s not Vuori.
What if the Nike brand truly embraced the idea of a villain, and locked in on the limitations we put on ourselves? These self-imposed limitations are what hold people back from believing they can be athletes, and these same limitations are what hold athletes back from their next leap in (athletic or fashion) performance. And, crucially, it’s limitations we put on ourselves — the kind of collective (not individual) power that helped propel Strava to an imminent $2+ billion IPO — when Strava is the kind of thing that should have been created by Nike in the first place.
Here we see what adding a villain to your brand strategy can do. It takes a mission statement that brims with positivity and makes it powerful instead of Pollyannaish. And it takes your strategy from something that can feel paralyzingly all-encompassing and gives it a sharp focus.
If Nike were to focus on vanquishing the villain of limitations we put on ourselves, it could give the Skims partnership a true reason for being and it could illuminate other partnerships they should pursue. This villain could animate the reason why they should push the boundaries of both performance technology and fashion, and how the brand should show up in social media and beyond. And this villain might even help inspire Nike to create the next Strava.
Finding Your Captain Hook
There are countless other examples of once-iconic brands that underscore the need for every brand to make a villain a key pillar of their brand strategy.
As Starbucks stumbles to what will likely be a seventh consecutive quarter of falling same-store sales, a villain could help them find a focal point of how best to re-invigorate their mission to “inspire and nurture the human spirit” in 2025 (because writing “have a great day!” on my cup does not a brand make).
And as Whole Foods locations feel more and more like Amazon distribution centers, a villain could give unique meaning to their increasingly diluted purpose of “nourishing people and the planet” so that they stop surrendering everything that once made them special to upstarts like erewhon.
All of these examples, and the need for their villain, is further underscored by what Vincent Furnier said when asked about how he became a global superstar:
“Rock ’n’ roll needed a villain. True rock ’n’ roll didn’t have a villain,” the singer recalled from his early days in rock. “We had all these Peter Pans… no Captain Hook. And …. I looked around and went, ‘I will gladly be that villain.”
With this realization, Vincent Furnier became Alice Cooper. And, regardless of your feelings about Alice Cooper (the chickens, etc), it’s clear that every brand needs to identify its Captain Hook… or you’ll just be a brand that aimlessly never really grows up.