“This feels…risky.”
A hushed silence falls. Up until now, there’s been an air of excitement in the room. A sense of possibility.
But this is a different conversation now. The mood has changed. The focus is no longer ‘what could we gain?’, but ‘what could we lose?’.
Call it the retreat to safety – the moment of peering over the precipice…only to take a sharp breath in, and a big step back.
It’s a moment we see play out time and again.
You can blame loss aversion (after all, we feel potential losses twice as intensely as we do potential gains). Or even the ‘lizard brain’ (that primal urge to avoid anything that would put our survival at risk).
But, in reality, these moments aren’t simply a case of someone hitting the brakes on change. They are about something quite specific: the fear of being different.
It’s the worry that taking a different path from the conventional one will result in failure – a very public and commercial sort of failure. And that is the real reason why most B2B brands end up sticking to the script.
It’s better to fail being the same than being different, right?
Moths vs fireflies
When it comes to positioning your brand – and capturing the value you deliver – there are broadly two strategies you can pursue:
The moth strategy
This is where leaders who focus on the risks of differentiation usually end up. They build a brand that:
- Follows the biggest light in the room (the market leader, “best practice”, etc)
- Behaves like other brands in the space
- Is hard to notice, and easy to ignore
This approach may not end in death – but it will probably result in a lot of flapping and circling for little reward.
The firefly strategy
This is where those who emphasise the gains of differentiation tend to gravitate towards. They build a brand that:
- Generates its own light (instead of being drawn to someone else’s)
- Follows a distinct path, gives off a unique signal
- Is easy to pick out from the crowd
It’s an approach that requires courage, for sure – but will also draw the eye and leave a lasting impression.
Why it costs to be a moth
The truth is the moth strategy is the path of least resistance. It’s always easier to imitate what your peers are doing than to do something different (and easier to justify that approach to the board, regardless of results).
But sameness comes with a price tag.
It may not show up on the P&L, but sooner or later being indistinguishable will impact the bottom line. Here are the biggest commercial costs of adopting the moth strategy:
1) An over-reliance on sales reps
When your brand is the same, it’s left to the sales reps (or charismatic founder) to tell the story of how you’re different – and why that matters. The risk? A house built on a few stilts that, should they leave, risk bringing the house down with them.
2) Excessive marketing spend
Brands that don’t get noticed end up spending more on their marketing. They compensate for low visibility and recall with high investment in SEO, PPC, digital advertising and other ‘pay-per-view’ channels. What’s worse, they tend to produce less distinctive advertising – which results in them spending 2.6x more than their more distinctive peers to get the same result.
3) Competing on price
When a buyer can’t distinguish between the options, they will fall back on the one criteria that is always clear and present: price. Interchangeable brands get compared on price, as opposed to building value away from the cost of the service.
Those are the headline costs, but in truth sameness acts as a drag at each stage of the customer journey. In the end, buyers who don’t see your difference may consider you – but are unlikely to choose you:
Why it pays to be a firefly
When it comes to differentiation, fortune really does favour the brave. In an in-depth study of over 10,000 global brands, Kantar identified difference as the single strongest predictor of brand growth, market share capture, and pricing power (ahead of other factors like awareness of size).
Across a global dataset of B2B brands, Kantar’s BrandZ study found:
- Perceived difference accounts for 48% of total pricing power – the biggest single factor
- Brands with high difference scores are 2x as likely to increase market share vs low difference peers
- Brands that are ‘meaningfully different’ achieve up to 5x higher market penetration compared with their generic competitors
This isn’t about being “more creative” or “less boring”. This isn’t some ‘squishy’ marketing theory. This is cold, hard, commercial fact.
It pays to be different.
No country for same brands
Now, it is undoubtedly true that many an expert firm has grown by adopting the moth strategy of brand-building. They have emphasised competence, and conveyed a sense of professionalism. It was enough to seperate them from those who couldn’t.
But AI has changed the game.
The production of quality outputs is no longer scarce or expensive. In fact, it has never been easier (or cheaper) to be clear and compelling. What used to be the hallmark of excellence is becoming the norm across websites, pitch decks and content pieces.
What’s worse, the tools we are using to keep pace are accelerating our drift into sameness. AI is a convergence machine, after all – built to find and reproduce the most acceptable response, the received wisdom, the safe middle ground. Left unchecked, it will offer the same answers and guide towards the same place – regardless of context.
And that makes sameness not just costly – but actively dangerous.
The riskiest move of all
In an AI world, sounding like your category might just be the riskiest move of all. Because the category norm is exactly what the machine produces. It’s the centre of gravity pulling everyone in.
The result is a landscape of brands that look competent, but not different. And in that environment, the riskiest play is toblend in with all the other competent moths.
Every business has some unique value at its heart. It has the potential to occupy a space in the market that hasn’t been claimed, to tell a story that hasn’t been told.
So, perhaps it’s time to fight that instinctive fear of being different – and replace it with something altogether more useful:
The fear of being the same.
