This paper analyzes how firms use repugnance, here understood as the deliberate transgression of moral norms, to differentiate their products. We study the firm Extreme Championship Wrestling (1993-2001) which offered a more violent and transgressive version of professional wrestling in which blood, sex, and controversial storylines were used to attract attention and capture a niche audience. A firm which relies on moral transgressions to set its products apart risks crossing the line and being banned or cancelled. For ECW staging this extreme product also increased the physical risks for athletes and stimulated demand among its niche audience for even more violence. We demonstrate how the wrestlers and company managed the associated challenges, through interpersonal norms, ensuring that certain moral lines were not crossed, and constant product innovation to avoid a slippery slope toward more violence. We argue that ECW reinvented ‘kayfabe,’ the maintaining of the illusion that the show is ‘real,’ and during its flourishing years, successfully managed to portray itself as more repugnant than it was. We present a visual model to analyze the moral positioning of firms. This model helps us distinguish between two different types of moral effects transgressive firms can have, ‘mainstreaming’ of niche elements and ‘norm-shifting’ within the industry. We conclude by drawing analogies to other industries in which repugnance is used as a form of product differentiation such as online content creation as well as political competition and populism.

KEYWORDS: Repugnance, Product Differentiation, Professional Wrestling, Moral Norms, Morality and Markets