The Copycat Tax Is Getting Expensive

When every competitor looks reassuringly familiar, being noticed becomes an avoidable expense.

I have spent time recently looking at category websites side by side: fintechs in navy gradients, wellness brands in pale beige, B2B platforms with identical product dashboards and promise-led headlines. Individually, many are well made. Together, they become remarkably hard to tell apart.

That is not merely an aesthetic problem. Familiar category signals can reduce the perceived risk of choosing a business, especially when buyers are new to a market. But once those signals become the default, they stop doing useful work. The business still pays for media, content and sales effort, yet every touchpoint arrives without a strong cue that says who it is from or why it matters.

The result is a quiet tax: more explanation, more repetition and more budget required to secure the same level of attention. It is tempting to call this a creative issue. It is usually a strategic one. If the only answer to crowded competition is to look like a credible member of it, the category has already set the terms of the conversation.

Signal of the Week: Familiarity Has Become a Cost Centre

As categories become easier to enter and easier to imitate, their surface language is converging fast. AI can now produce competent copy, polished visual systems and channel-ready assets at speed. Templates make launch-ready brands available to anyone. The practical result is not simply more content. It is a larger volume of plausible sameness.

That changes the job of marketing. A well-executed campaign can still deliver reach, but reach has less value when the recipient cannot quickly connect the message to a distinct source. People do not compare every offer rationally; they use shortcuts. A recognisable point of view, a memorable visual cue, an ownable framing of the problem or an unusually useful customer experience can all make the choice easier.

The opportunity is not to be different in every direction. It is to decide which category convention is helping buyers feel oriented, and which one is making the business disappear into the shelf. That is a market diagnosis before it is a design brief.

Narratiive Take

Distinctiveness is often treated as the final layer applied after a proposition, campaign plan and website are complete. It should arrive much earlier. Start by mapping what customers repeatedly see, hear and expect in the category. Then identify the conventions worth keeping and the assumptions worth refusing. That choice gives media a stronger job to do: not just deliver impressions, but build recognisable meaning.

One Thing the Industry Is Getting Wrong

Professionalism is being confused with neutrality. Founders are often advised to look established before they have established what they stand for. So they buy the visual codes, language and channel mix associated with the category leader. It can make a pitch deck feel safer. It can also make the company interchangeable.

There is a difference between being legible and being generic. Buyers need enough familiarity to understand the offer quickly. They do not need another version of the same promise, voiced in the same tone, with the same proof points arranged in the same way. The aim is not visual disruption for its own sake. It is meaningful difference that reduces the effort of remembering and choosing you.

Professional polish minus meaningful difference equals expensive invisibility.

Brilliant Brand Building: Specsavers Owns the Everyday Blunder

Specsavers has built enduring recognition around a simple, flexible observation: people make avoidable mistakes when they cannot see properly. “Should've gone to Specsavers” turns a functional product category into a familiar piece of cultural language. The line is not just a sign-off. It gives the brand a repeatable lens through which to make advertising, sponsorship and everyday situations feel unmistakably Specsavers.

Its strength is strategic restraint. The brand does not need to invent a new identity for each execution because the central joke, product truth and brand cue are connected. The work can change context while retaining its source. That makes attention more efficient over time: the audience can recognise the brand before the full explanation arrives.

A smaller business does not need a famous line or a large media budget to apply this. It needs a sharply chosen view of the customer problem that can travel across touchpoints without becoming vague.

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The Data Point: Recognition Makes Media More Useful

Evidence from long-running effectiveness research, including work associated with the IPA and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, points in a consistent direction: brands benefit when their communications are easy to identify and when they reach buyers before the immediate moment of purchase. The precise mix will vary by category, price point and buying cycle. But the implication is practical. Media does not create value in isolation. A message that is recognised as yours has a better chance of contributing to memory, consideration and future response than one that could plausibly belong to anyone.

Steal This Idea: Run a Category Blur Test

Choose ten competitors and take screenshots of their homepages, paid social posts or packaging. Remove the logos and put the examples in a single document. Ask five people who know the category to identify each one and explain what makes it distinct. Do not ask whether they like the work; ask what they can reliably attribute.

Then make two lists: conventions that help customers understand the category, and conventions that make every business sound identical. Keep the first list. Challenge the second. This is a quick way to turn vague concerns about sameness into useful choices for positioning, creative and media.

Question of the Week

If your logo disappeared from your next campaign, what would still tell a buyer that this could only have come from you?

Find the clearer growth path

If your marketing is busy but the business is becoming harder to distinguish, the Narratiive Growth Diagnostic can help. We look at the market, the category signals, your positioning and the system connecting brand to demand. You will leave with a more useful view of where effort is being lost and what to sharpen first. Start with strategic clarity.