As far as direct data-driven design is concerned, no matter the design approach to be exploited, the objective of the control problem is to make the closed-loop system to match, as close as possible, the behavior of an assigned reference model M. In this work, we investigate the problem of designing a suitable reference model M by using the H ∞ control techniques. More specifically, we propose a procedure that provides a reference model guaranteed to fulfill a number of quantitative performance requirements for both minimum-phase (MP) and non-minimum phase (NMP) stable plant, by solving a suitably formulated fictitious H ∞ control problem. The effectiveness of the presented technique is demonstrated by means of a simulation example using the set-membership based direct data-driven control approach.