Can Good Marketing Still Be Forgettable?

Last year, we wrote about the sea of sameness: what happens when companies in the same category gradually start looking and sounding so alike that it becomes difficult to tell them apart.

We followed that with a second article, From lab coat to brand voice, looking at why this is particularly common in life science and how brands can stand out without losing the trust and credibility their audiences expect.

Since then, the subject has kept coming back. We have had conversations with clients, colleagues and people across the industry who recognise the problem, and we have received plenty of questions about what it actually means to break free from it.

So, rather than leaving the sea of sameness where we left it, we thought we would explore some of those questions further. Starting with one that sounds simple enough:

Can your marketing be good and still be forgettable?

Admittedly, there is a bit of a contradiction in that question. If your marketing is forgotten, it is difficult to argue that it was particularly good in the first place. But that is also what makes the question interesting, because a lot of marketing looks good when we judge it by the usual criteria.

It can be well designed, well written, strategically sound and perfectly appropriate for the category. There may be nothing obviously wrong with it at all. And yet, when you put it next to the communication of five competitors, something happens. The differences become harder to see.

The curse of best practices

Companies rarely set out to look like their competitors. More often, they get there by making a series of perfectly reasonable decisions, many of them based on what we like to call best practices.

And best practices are useful. They exist because someone has figured out what tends to work, which means you don’t have to reinvent every decision from scratch. You use terminology your customers recognise, choose imagery that feels appropriate for your industry and look at successful companies in your category to understand what good communication looks like.

The problem starts when everyone else is following the same best practices.

This doesn’t necessarily mean companies are copying each other. They may simply be following the same advice, looking at the same benchmarks and responding to the same expectations. But over time, all those perfectly sensible decisions can lead to remarkably similar results.

In life science, the result is particularly easy to spot. Blue, green and white. Laboratories. Molecules. Scientists in lab coats. Innovation. Solutions. And, as we have pointed out before, an extraordinary amount of accelerating.

One company at a time, it can all look perfectly professional. Put ten of them next to each other and you have a sea of sameness.

So should you ignore your category?

No. That would make things easy, but probably not very useful.

Categories need familiar signals. If you are a biotech company talking to investors, partners or potential employees, there are things people need to recognise and understand quickly. Scientific credibility matters. So does accuracy. Trying to be different at the expense of either would be a strange definition of good marketing.

The question is therefore not whether you should follow or reject your category. It is which parts of it you actually need.

Some conventions help people understand you. Others are simply conventions because everybody has been repeating them for years.

Knowing the difference is where things get interesting.

What does it mean to challenge your category?

At Phosworks, we talk a lot about challengers. And by that we do not necessarily mean startups taking on market leaders.

A challenger can be a small biotech company entering a crowded field, but it can just as easily be an established global company. A startup can follow every convention in its category, while a global market leader can decide to challenge them. Being a challenger, at least in the way we use the word, has much more to do with the latter.

It means being willing to ask questions about things everyone else in the category seems to take for granted.

Why does everyone describe the problem in the same way?
Why are we all making the same claims?
Why do our websites follow the same visual conventions?
Why does everyone talk about innovation using almost identical language?

Most importantly: do we have to?

Challenging your category does not mean breaking every convention or trying to be provocative. It means making conscious choices about where fitting in helps you and where it makes you disappear.

Sometimes the thing worth challenging is your visual identity. Sometimes it is the language everyone in the industry has learned to use. It could be the way you explain a complex product, the story you choose to tell, or simply the assumption that because something has always been communicated in a certain way, it should continue to be.

Being different is not the goal

There is an obvious trap here. If sameness is the problem, it is tempting to conclude that difference must be the answer.

Not quite.

You can be extremely different and still communicate badly. A biotech company could replace all its scientific imagery with pictures of kittens. It would certainly stand out. We are less convinced it would help with the next funding round.

The aim is not difference for its own sake. It is to find an expression that belongs to you, communicates what matters and gives people something they can recognise and remember.

That requires more than changing blue to orange or replacing one stock-photo scientist with another. It requires an idea about what makes your company worth paying attention to and a way of expressing that idea consistently.

This is where being a challenger becomes useful. Not as a personality trait or an excuse to be loud, but as a way of looking at the category with enough distance to ask which rules still serve you.

How do you know if your marketing looks like everyone else’s?

There is a very simple test we like.

Remove your logo.

Look at your website, presentation, campaign or LinkedIn post without the company name attached. Then put it next to the communication of your closest competitors.

Would someone know which one was yours?

It is an uncomfortable question, particularly when the work itself is polished and professional. But that is precisely why it is worth asking. The sea of sameness is not filled with bad marketing. Much of it is beautifully produced.

It is simply very difficult to remember who produced what.

And if people cannot remember you, we are back to our original question about whether the marketing was really that good in the first place.

At Phosworks, that is why we want to work with challengers. Companies that are willing to look at their category, understand its rules and then question the ones that are holding them back.

Because avoiding the sea of sameness doesn’t require you to challenge everything. But it does require you to challenge something.