Branding & Identity
by OneZeroEight
Oct 01, 2026
4 mins read
Open ten websites in a crowded SaaS, AI or consulting category and try a small experiment.
Hide the logos.
Now guess which company is which.
It gets difficult rather quickly.
“AI-powered.” “Built for growth.” “Seamless.” “Enterprise-ready.” “Trusted.” “Faster.” “Smarter.”
The problem isn’t that these claims are necessarily false. Many companies making them may genuinely be fast, smart and reliable.
The problem is that everyone else is saying them too.
And when every competitor positions around the same desirable attributes, sharper copy can only do so much.
Competitive advantage has an annoying habit: once the market sees something working, competitors respond.
Gartner made this point rather directly in its 2024 research for technology CEOs. Product feature differentiation is often difficult to sustain because competitors can match features through their own product roadmaps and promises. Gartner also identifies lack of differentiation as a recurring reason technology providers fail to make buyer shortlists.
So a claim can be valuable and still be weak positioning.
Security matters. Speed matters. Ease of use matters. AI capability certainly matters in many categories.
But importance and differentiation are not the same thing.
If every credible player is expected to provide an attribute, owning that attribute in the buyer’s mind becomes much harder.
This creates a familiar trap. The category converges, so the brand team rewrites the sentence.
“Fast” becomes “built for speed.”
“Easy” becomes “effortlessly simple.”
“AI-powered” becomes “intelligent by design.”
Different words. Same comparison.
OZE VIEW: Different wording is not different positioning.
This is where positioning becomes a strategic question rather than a copywriting exercise.
Michael Porter’s classic work on strategy argued that sustainable positions depend on choices and systems of activity that are harder to imitate than individual features. A competitor may copy one feature. Copying an interconnected way of creating value is considerably harder.
That distinction still matters.
When ten companies compete to prove who is “easier,” the interesting move may not be finding a cleverer synonym for easy. It may be identifying another basis on which the company can credibly win.
Perhaps the difference is who the product is built for.
Or the problem it chooses to own.
Or the operating model behind the experience.
Or proprietary expertise, distribution, data, service, community or proof.
The point isn’t to be different for the sake of being different. Strange is not a strategy.
The difference has to matter.
There’s evidence behind that idea.
Kantar analysed 40,000 brands in its BrandZ database and found a strong relationship between relative uniqueness and consumers’ willingness to pay more. Its research connects perceived difference with lower price sensitivity and stronger pricing power.
That doesn’t mean a distinctive positioning line magically creates margin. The relationship is not that simple.
It does suggest something more useful: when buyers see alternatives as less interchangeable, price has less work to do.
And that’s the commercial danger of category sameness.
If Brand A, Brand B and Brand C appear to solve the same problem, for the same audience, in roughly the same way, using roughly the same promise, the buyer has fewer reasons to resist comparison on price, features or procurement terms.
Positioning should make that comparison less automatic.
Here’s the slight contradiction.
Brands need difference. They also need familiarity.
In 6sense’s 2025 global study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, 95% of winning vendors were already on the buyer’s Day One shortlist. Four out of five deals were won by the vendor buyers preferred before speaking with sellers.
Research cited by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, Bain & Company and NewtonX found something similar: 81% of B2B buyers said everyone or almost everyone in the buying group knew the brand eventually purchased at the start of the process. Only 4% said the purchased brand had initially been known solely by the recommending function.
So the answer isn’t “be radically different and forget everything else.”
A brand still needs to be known, remembered and trusted.
Difference without familiarity can become obscurity. Familiarity without difference can become interchangeability.
Strong positioning has to negotiate both.
There’s another layer here: distinctive brand assets.
Ipsos analysed more than 12,000 assets across 900+ brands worldwide and found that only 15% qualified for its highest level of distinctiveness. Brands with stronger asset portfolios were 31% more likely to be considered and 38% more likely to be used than brands with the weakest portfolios. These are associations, not proof that assets alone caused the difference.
That matters because competitive positioning isn’t carried by words alone.
Colour. Shape. Sonic cues. Characters. Typography. Product experience. Naming. Memory structures. Reputation.
They help buyers recognise whose promise they are looking at.
The strategic job, then, is bigger than finding a line nobody else has written.
When a category becomes crowded, teams often attack the messaging layer first.
Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. Often it isn’t.
If five competitors are making essentially the same argument, rewriting the sixth version more elegantly doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
The harder questions sit underneath:
What does this company genuinely do, believe, know or deliver that changes how it should be compared?
And just as importantly:
Does that difference matter enough for a buyer to care?
Positioning doesn’t create the difference. It decides which difference the market should notice.
That’s why the strongest positioning work often feels less like writing and more like editing strategy. It removes claims that merely qualify the company to compete and gives disproportionate weight to the few things that can shape preference.
Because when everyone says the same thing, the answer isn’t necessarily to say it louder.
Sometimes the smarter move is to give the market a different question to ask.
What is brand positioning?
Brand positioning defines how a brand wants to be understood relative to alternatives. Strong positioning connects a relevant customer need with an advantage, perspective or source of value the brand can credibly own.
Why do competitors often sound the same?
Categories develop common expectations. Successful features and claims are noticed and copied, while companies often respond to the same customer research and trends. Over time, useful claims can become category conventions.
What makes a strong differentiator?
A useful differentiator is relevant to buyers, meaningfully different from alternatives and supported by something the business can actually deliver. Different language without a real underlying advantage is simply messaging.
Is differentiation more important than brand awareness?
They solve different problems. Awareness helps a brand enter consideration. Differentiation gives buyers reasons to prefer it or perceive it as less interchangeable. Strong brands usually need both.
How can a brand improve its competitive positioning?
Start beneath the tagline. Examine which category claims are merely expected, then identify differences in audience, problem ownership, product experience, expertise, operating model, proof or worldview that could change the basis of comparison.
Share
