How do you find an angle that stops your brand disappearing into its category? Start by mapping what everyone else already says. Most brands look alike not because they lack ideas but because they borrow each other's. Analyse the whole category, see where the crowd is standing, find a relevant tension nobody owns, then commit to it long enough for people to notice.
Sir John Hegarty put the problem bluntly to Marketing Week ahead of his Festival of Marketing keynote. Marketing, he said, is "repetitive, cliché, boring, all at a time when the ability to attract attention has never been more important." He pointed out that something like 95% of new product launches fail, a rate he says has barely moved in 20 years despite all the extra data.
Why does so much advertising look the same?
Behavioural economists call it herd behaviour. When people are uncertain, they copy what others are doing, on the assumption that the crowd knows something they don't. Each individual choice is reasonable. Added together, they produce a stampede.
Agencies see it every week. The competitor section of the brief lists the same three rivals. The "best practice" deck shows what worked for someone else last year. A format takes off on TikTok and half the category jumps on it within a month. Generative AI tools built on what already exists can nudge first drafts towards the average. Nobody chooses sameness. It accumulates.
The herd also feels safe. Few marketing directors have been fired for following category conventions. The cost of sameness is invisible: it shows up as campaigns nobody remembers, not as a line in a post-mortem.
Is data the cause of creative sameness or the cure?
Hegarty blames brands and agencies staffed by "left brain thinkers" who understand spreadsheets but not ideas, and argues that taste is the overlooked metric, mattering most in crowded markets. "Data doesn't have the answer. Data is knowledge," he told Marketing Week. "It doesn't imagine tomorrow. That's what marketing should be doing."
He is right about how data is usually used. Most category analysis asks "what's working for competitors?" and then recommends doing more of it. That is herd behaviour with a spreadsheet attached.
Ask the same data a different question, though, and it does the opposite. "Where is everyone standing?" is a question about the herd's position, and the answer shows you where it isn't. Data cannot make the creative leap. It can show creative people exactly which fence to jump.
What does a brand differentiation strategy look like in practice?
Strip away the jargon and a differentiation strategy is a deliberate choice about what your brand will say, look like and stand for that competitors don't. It has to pass three tests.
- Distinct: nobody else in the category is saying it, or saying it credibly.
- Relevant: it speaks to a tension the audience actually feels, not one invented in a workshop.
- Sustainable: the brand can keep saying it for years. Hegarty warned that "it's very hard to become a part of culture when you keep changing unnecessarily."
The first test needs category evidence. The second needs audience evidence. The third needs nerve.
How do you find an unclaimed angle in your category?
- Pull the whole category, not the client's shortlist. Include challengers, adjacent categories and direct-to-consumer players, across paid ads and organic content.
- Code every piece consistently. Record the core message, the audience tension it addresses, the tone, the visual codes, the proof points and the call to action.
- Map the crowded territory. Cluster the codes and see where most of the category sits. That cluster is the sea of sameness your client is currently swimming in.
- Map audience tensions from real conversation. What are people complaining about, wishing for or joking about that no brand is addressing?
- Overlay the two maps. The interesting space is a real audience tension with no brand standing on it.
- Test the gap for credibility. Can this brand own it, given its product, history and permission? If not, keep looking.
- Brief with the map, then get out of the way. Show creatives the conventions to avoid and the tension to own. Leave the idea to them.
What should a category convention audit record?
Use the same headings for every competitor ad and post, so patterns become visible rather than anecdotal.
| Dimension | What to record | Sameness warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| Core message | The single thing the ad wants you to believe | Most competitors promise the same benefit in similar words |
| Audience tension | The problem or desire it speaks to | Everyone addresses the same tension while others go untouched |
| Tone | Earnest, playful, expert, aspirational | One tone dominates the category |
| Visual codes | Colours, settings, casting, product shots | You could swap the logos and nobody would notice |
| Proof | Claims, data, reviews, endorsements | Identical claims backed by identical evidence |
| Format and platform | Where and how it runs | Everyone piles into the same trending format at once |
Done by hand, this audit takes weeks and covers a fraction of the category. That is why so many briefs settle for three competitors and a hunch.
How do you sell a different idea to a nervous client?
Show them the herd. A client who has seen hundreds of competitor ads making the same promise in the same tone finds divergence far less frightening. The risk flips: following the category starts to look like the dangerous choice.
This is where tooling earns its keep. Defy Monitor can analyse a full category's competitor ads and organic content in minutes, more than 980 ads in a single pass, and cluster audience content into personas and tensions, so the map exists before the brief is written. Every conclusion can be checked against the real posts behind it, which matters when you are asking a client to bet on being different. It is one part of the Defy platform.
Then do what Hegarty suggests and write the brand's point of view down, as a manifesto if you like. Data tells you where the herd is. Taste and courage decide where you go. To truly connect, dare to diverge from the trending path.
