The Copycat Tax Is Getting More Expensive

When every business can make polished work quickly, professional sameness becomes an expensive habit.

I have started noticing a particular kind of confidence in marketing meetings: the confidence of having made something quickly. A decent landing page, a month of social posts, several ad variants and a neat strategy deck can now appear in an afternoon. The work looks finished because the surface is finished. But the important questions often remain untouched. Which customer are we really trying to win? What belief in the category are we prepared to challenge? What can only we credibly say? The danger is not that AI makes marketing worse. It makes competent-looking output abundant. And when competence becomes cheap, resemblance becomes costly. A business can be busier, more visible and better produced than ever, while becoming harder to distinguish from the category around it.

Polish Has Become the Default

Generative tools are moving rapidly from experiment to everyday production. They help teams write, design, edit, localise and test at a pace that was previously reserved for much larger organisations. That is a genuine advantage. It removes friction from making things. Yet it also removes some of the friction that used to force a useful conversation before making things. A prompt can turn a vague brief into plausible copy. Templates can turn a loose idea into a campaign system. The output often follows the visual and verbal habits already dominant in its training material: safe claims, familiar layouts, category language and agreeable optimism.

The result is not a shortage of content. It is a rising supply of work that is difficult to object to and even harder to remember. In crowded categories, this matters commercially. Buyers do not compare every feature with care. They use shortcuts: familiarity, relevance, emotional response and the confidence that one option feels more made for them. If every competitor sounds reassuringly similar, the choice defaults to price, convenience or whoever was already known.

Narratiive Take

AI should accelerate expression, not decide the argument. Before asking it for twenty versions, decide which single market tension is worth owning. Look at the category promises customers hear repeatedly, then identify the trade-off, frustration or ignored audience within them. That diagnosis gives the tools something useful to amplify. Without it, efficiency simply distributes a more polished version of the category average.

Brilliant Brand Building: Specsavers Keeps the Joke Useful

Specsavers has kept a simple platform alive for decades: "Should've gone to Specsavers." The line works because it is not merely repeated. It gives the business a distinct role in culture. Everyday lapses in judgement, misplaced confidence and absurd misunderstandings become entertaining proof of the same thought: better sight and hearing can prevent avoidable mistakes. The work has stretched across television, outdoor, social and sponsorship without needing to explain the proposition from scratch each time.

That is especially instructive in an era of rapid production. Specsavers does not need a new personality for every channel or trend. It has a clear enough organising idea to make many executions feel recognisably its own. The humour earns attention; the product relevance makes it useful; the long-running platform builds memory. A smaller business does not need a famous line. It does need an idea with enough tension to generate more than one piece of content.

Search the case study

Data Point: Familiar Is Not Always Memorable

Evidence from long-running advertising effectiveness research, including work associated with the IPA and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, points in a consistent direction: broad reach and distinctive memory structures help brands remain available when buyers enter a category. The qualification matters. Reach only creates value when people register who the message came from and what it leaves behind. In a feed full of polished, interchangeable creative, an impression can be served without a brand being noticed. AI may lower the cost of producing variations, but it does not lower the cost of creating a memorable association. That still depends on recognisable cues, a clear proposition and creative choices that interrupt expectation.

Steal This Idea: Run a Resemblance Audit

Take five recent pieces of your marketing and remove the logo, company name and product image. Put them next to five competitors' examples. Ask three people outside the business to identify the source of each. Do not ask whether they like the work. Ask what company they think made it, what it is promising, and whether any line or image belongs to one brand alone. Where answers blur, do not begin by redesigning the asset. Write down the repeated category claims and visual habits. Then choose one convention you can reject, reverse or make more specific. That is a practical starting point for difference.

Question of the Week

If your logo disappeared from this week's marketing, what evidence would remain that it could only have come from your business?

Find the clearer growth path

If your marketing is moving quickly but the underlying choices still feel unresolved, book a Narratiive Growth Diagnostic. We will look at the market, the category, your current story and the practical opportunities to make future activity work harder. You will leave with a clearer view of what deserves attention next.

Find the clearer growth path