Everyone Sounds the Same

Open the websites of your four closest competitors. Read the headline on each one, then read yours.

Most founders go quiet for a second. Platform. Unified. End to end. Built for teams who. Four companies with different products, different founders and different origin stories, sharing one voice between them.

The comfortable explanation is laziness, or a bad agency, or marketers copying each other. That explanation is wrong, and it lets everyone off the hook.

Sameness is manufactured. It happens in the review cycle.

Somebody writes a first draft with a real sentence in it. The sentence takes a position. It says who the product is not for, or names the thing your competitors do badly, or makes a claim that would be embarrassing if it turned out to be untrue.

Then the draft goes around.

Sales asks for the word the analysts use, because that is what prospects type into a search bar. Legal removes the comparative claim. The board wants the category label investors recognise. A senior engineer points out the claim only holds for eight of the twelve deployment types. Someone in customer success worries an existing account will read it badly.

Every one of those notes is reasonable. Each one removes a little risk. What survives twelve reasonable notes is the one sentence nobody could object to, and that is the same sentence your competitor's committee arrived at last quarter by exactly the same route.

Nobody kills positioning. It gets sanded down by people doing their jobs properly.

Years ago I was one of those people.

I was running marketing for CPLEX at ILOG and I wanted an ad that put the competition in the ground. The product team had already written a line. It was dense with specifics, it read almost like a formula, and it was accurate.

I wanted a number instead. One number, big enough to end the argument.

We settled on a multiple, with an asterisk, and a link that said find out why.

It was catchy. It also made our own engineers uncomfortable in front of their technical peers.

The asterisk was where the two sides met. By then every vendor in that market had one.

The other half of this is what gets treated as too obvious to say out loud.

The real differentiator is usually something the people inside the company find boring, because they have lived with it for six years. Ask a customer why they chose you and they will tell you something oddly specific. The way an escalation actually works. The fact that you did the migration yourselves instead of selling a services package. The person who answered on a Sunday.

Nobody puts that on a homepage, because it sounds small next to the category language. It is also the only part a competitor cannot copy by Friday.

Then the part that makes this genuinely hard. A message that excludes nobody moves nobody. Real positioning costs you a slice of the market on purpose, and somebody has to be willing to sign off on losing those deals by name. That signature is a CEO decision. It is also why this problem survives every marketing hire brought in to fix it alone.

One question worth sitting with this week: which sentence on your website could your closest competitor not put on theirs?

If you cannot find one, more content will not help.

Alex

P.S. The quicksand doesn't feel like failure. It feels like being very busy.