This is food for thought and NOT etched in stone!
Your brand differentiation delusion might be killing your brand. So, time to stop being a marketing masochist!
The reality today is that if you are not spreading the word about your brand, you might as well get ready to die forgotten. Sorry, but that’s the brutal truth.
Most brands are obsessed with concentrating their message—polishing it, perfecting it, locking it in a vault like it’s the frigging Kohinoor diamond. Meanwhile, the brands that actually win? They’re too busy multiplying their message, not manicuring it.
Remember when Old Spice went from “grandpa’s aftershave” to “viral sensation”? They didn’t do it by whispering about ‘olfactory differentiation.’ They screamed absurdity into every screen, meme, and timeline until you couldn’t escape Isaiah Mustafa’s shirtless charm. Result? Sales up 107%. And the overthought cologne brands?? Far too busy glorifying differentiation. Maggi didn’t become India’s 2-minute addiction by waffling about ‘premium noodle experiences.’ It was ubiquitous—in trains, dhabas, hostels, and midnight cravings. The brand didn’t differentiate; it dominated through sheer repetition.
In the University of Branding, differentiation is a marketing masturbation. Brand marketers love to fetishize differentiation like it’s the holy grail. Reality: Consumers don’t give a shit. Differentiation is a byproduct, not the goal. Familiarity is the goal.
Apple doesn’t win because it’s ‘different’—it wins because you see that damn logo everywhere. Zomato doesn’t thrive on ‘unique food delivery tech’—it thrives because its ads are unavoidable, like the drunk friend at a get together calling anything and everything in pants his brother.
Tesla didn’t wait for ‘perfect differentiation’—Elon Musk turned Twitter into a free Tesla billboard.
The brutal truth is that your customers don’t give a flying fig about your “unique brand proposition.” They care about one thing and one thing only—whether they’ve heard of you before when it’s time to buy. As Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman elicits brilliantly- ” a poorly differentiated brand that everybody has heard of has a lot better chance of success than a well-differentiated brand that nobody’s heard of “.
Coca-Cola doesn’t win because people passionately believe in the “Real Thing” mythology. It wins because you literally cannot escape it. From Times Square billboards to remote village shops in Myanmar, that red logo is more ubiquitous than oxygen. They’ve made familiarity their superpower, not differentiation. Result? While craft cola brands agonize over their “artisanal positioning,” Coke sells 1.9 billion servings daily. Every. Single. Day. Little wonder that it is the Red Menace that conquered the earth.
McDonald‘s food isn’t winning Michelin stars anytime soon, yet they serve 70 million customers daily. Why? Because those golden arches have burned themselves into our collective retina. From Manhattan to Mumbai, from São Paulo to Stockholm, McDonald’s achieved something no brand strategist’s whiteboard ever could: unavoidable familiarity. Meanwhile, countless “better burger” brands with superior “brand stories” die quiet deaths in strip malls.
Unilever doesn’t win because Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign touched your soul. They win because they own shelf space in your brain through sheer omnipresence. When you need soap, shampoo, or ice cream, a Unilever brand pops into your head not because of emotional connection, but because of neural pathway dominance built through relentless exposure.
Crocs – they are ugly as sin. But worn by surgeons, rappers, kindergarten teachers, and Snoop Dogg. Not because it whispered, “I’m different,” but because it screamed “I’m everywhere and I don’t care what you think!”
Amul India-They didn’t just build a brand. They built a culture. That little Amul girl doesn’t just advertise. She comments. She connects. She’s a content marketer in polka dots, out posting every global agency on relevance.
If you want to bring in real neuroscience( not the brand consultant pseudoscience ) of what our brain does when making purchase decisions:-
Step 1: “Do I recognize this?”Step 2: “Good enough.” Step 3: Purchase complete.
That’s it. No brand journey mapping. No emotional storytelling analysis. No values alignment assessment. Just pattern recognition running on autopilot.
The psychological principle is called the “mere exposure effect“—people prefer things they’re familiar with, even if they can’t remember where they encountered them. It is quite possible that your million-dollar brand strategy is competing against basic human psychology and losing. Worth introspecting??
Social media promised to democratize branding. Instead, it created a generation of marketers who think 50,000 Instagram followers and a viral TikTok make a brand.
Reality check: Those followers aren’t buying. They’re scrolling. The brands making actual money are still the ones buying massive reach through old-school channels while everyone else fights for engagement rates.
Facebook(now Meta) didn’t become worth $800 billion because of emotional storytelling. It became unavoidable.
The most successful brands in history aren’t the most loved—they’re the most familiar. They didn’t win hearts and minds; they won eyes and ears through relentless, systematic, boring repetition.
Your customers don’t want to fall in love with your brand. They want to remember it exists when they need what you sell.
The sooner you accept this uncomfortable truth, the sooner you can stop pretending to be a storyteller and start being a spreader.
Because in the end, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt—it breeds sales.
This is not etched in stone and hence worthy of revalidation- Nevertheless, a quick checklist on what could be going awry:-
To Brand Owners: You’re paying consultants to make you feel smart while your competitors make you irrelevant. Every dollar spent on brand strategy sessions is a dollar not spent on getting in front of customers.
To Brand Managers: Your KPIs are measuring everything except what matters. Brand awareness isn’t about brand love—it’s about brand recognition when it counts.
To Marketing Directors: Your sophisticated targeting is sophisticated failure. While you’re reaching the “right” 10,000 people, your competitors are reaching the “good enough” 10 million.
To CMOs: Your board doesn’t care about your brand purpose. They care about market share. Familiarity drives market share. Everything else is expensive therapy.
If the above has merit, then the below just might be a roadmap to address it:-
Audit your spend: How much goes to “brand building” vs. “brand spreading”? Flip the ratio.
Measure mental availability: Can people recall your brand when they need your category? If not, your differentiation strategy is academic masturbation.
Go broad before deep: Reach more people averagely before reaching fewer people brilliantly.
Embrace boring consistency: Your logo, your message, your presence—make them boringly familiar.
Accept the familiarity truth: You’re not building a beloved brand. You’re building a recognizable one.
In branding, concentration is constipation. Movement (of message) is everything.
Differentiation is a delusion in designer fonts. Today’s world doesn’t want mystery. It wants momentum. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. It breeds conversion. Why? Because in a world addicted to scrolls, swipes, and skips, you have 2.5 seconds to earn brain space. And the brain loves what it already knows, or at least what it sees everywhere.
It’s not about being different. It’s about being shared. And if your brand isn’t a conversation, it’s a cough in a hurricane.