by David Meyer
There’s a strange comfort in consensus.
Same industry reports. Same benchmark studies. Same conference speakers. Same “best practices.” If you’re a small business owner, odds are you and your competitors are swimming in the exact same pool of insights.
Which explains why so many brands sound, well, identical.
No one is trying to be boring. But when everyone starts from the same inputs, they often end up with the same outputs. Similar language. Familiar promises. Nearly interchangeable positioning.
Safe? Yes. Memorable? Not even close.
For many businesses, this is the quiet moment when something needs to change – not because anything is broken, but because staying the same no longer fits who you’ve become.
Insight overload creates sameness.
Market research is supposed to help you stand out. Ironically, it’s often what flattens differentiation.
Don’t get me wrong: at Spoke, we do our homework – always. But when everyone studies the same data, the temptation is to look for patterns to duplicate instead of tensions to explore. What worked for them. What they said. How they framed it. Before long, originality gets crowded out by validation.
The result is a sea of brands all saying the “right” things – just not saying anything distinct.
And customers feel that. Even if they can’t articulate it, they sense when a message sounds pre-approved. At Spoke we believe that people long for things (and messages) that feel refreshingly human. Something that may be inspired by research but goes well beyond this data to make a meaningful connection.
Originality requires discomfort.
The brands that break away from sameness aren’t the ones with better data. They’re the ones willing to ask harder questions:
What do we believe that others don’t? What truth about our customers isn’t showing up in the research? Where are we over-polishing instead of being honest?
Those questions don’t produce instant clarity. They produce friction. Debate. Occasionally, awkward silence. But they also produce something far more valuable than consensus: perspective.
And perspective is what customers remember.
Clarity beats clever every time.
Standing out doesn’t require being louder, weirder, or more provocative than your competitors. It requires being clearer about what makes you you – and being willing to say it even if it doesn’t sound like everyone else. (You’ve seen how this plays out before when brands like Cracker Barrel tried to modernize by borrowing from everyone else, they didn’t gain greater relevance so much as they lost the familiarity customers actually came for.)
The irony is that the moment you stop trying to sound “on trend” is often the moment your message starts to resonate again.
So if your brand feels a little too familiar lately, that might not be a failure. It might be a sign that you’ve outgrown the script you’ve been reading from.
And that’s usually where the most meaningful change begins.
Content Authenticity Statement:
95% of this content was written by a human. AI was used for idea shaping and final editing support.
David Meyer is the Chief Marketing Officer at Spoke Marketing. Spoke Marketing (www.spokemarketing.com) provides fully-integrated marketing and sales programs that define and activate the customer buyer journey.