Sameness Strategy Threatens Brands

Icon Trend | Think Tank

EXCERPT FROM AN ARTICLE BY BRANDING STRATEGY INSIDER BY Mark Di Somma

Our gut instinct as marketers is to go with what is working, because everything in the corporate rewards system is geared towards that: lack of risk appetite; the quest for short term results; even performance incentives.

The irony for brands of course is that the more you embrace what works for others, the less likely those ideas are going to work for you.
I hate case studies [...] because the implication is that if you do what the person/firm in the case study did, somehow you’ll end up with a similar or better result. “Proof” though sparks a hundred copies and in so doing it immediately starts to deteriorate the likelihood that such success will be repeated.

“In today’s world, everyone is searching for the same best practice. 

Everyone benchmarks against each other. 

And everyone optimizes their communications plans. Everyone is copying each other. 

And so their brands are becoming clones.”

Quote by Martin Bishop

There’s a difference between copying an idea and applying it. A brand can work brilliantly when marketers take the learnings from one market and apply them to another. Too often, it’s not that. Copying is a rash of lookalikes jostling to catch up and cash in on whatever’s hot right now. [...] The immediate effect of that is to change the “standards” for the industry. Fashion, success and FOMO (fear of missing out) fuse to make everyone healthier, faster [...]

Democratization is fading into commoditization
The same dynamic plays out at scale. Brands run at tactical channels because that’s where the numbers are. It’s comforting to shout from within the crowd – to believe, subconsciously at least, that the more you do this as a brand, the more accepted you’ll become. But there’s no differentiation in that approach.

It all drives to undifferentiated points of consensus – new industry standard behaviors.
And the jury shows no sign of returning anything resembling a reliable verdict on what difference most of this noise generation makes for sales, margin or share.