Open ten brand websites in your industry. Read only the hero line on each one. Now cover the logos and try to work out which sentence belongs to which company. If you cannot do it — and you almost certainly cannot — you have just run the cheapest brand audit in existence, and your own site probably failed it too.
This is the great brand homogenisation crisis. Not a shortage of budget, or talent, or tools. A shortage of nerve.
The Sameness Test: five questions, ninety seconds
Before you rewrite anything, find out how bad it is. Take your homepage hero copy, your About page opening paragraph, and your most recent LinkedIn post. Score one point for every “yes”.
- Could a direct competitor publish this sentence tomorrow with no edits?
- Does it contain a word you would never say out loud to a friend? (“Leverage”, “solutions”, “seamless”, “bespoke”, “innovative”.)
- Does it describe a feeling rather than a thing? (“Empowering”, “inspiring”, “transforming” — with nothing after the verb you can actually picture.)
- Would anyone in your category publicly disagree with it? If nobody could argue, you have not said anything.
- Was it written to avoid being wrong rather than to be right? You know the answer to this one.
0–1: you have a voice. Protect it from the next round of feedback.
2–3: you have a house style. Not the same thing.
4–5: your copy is a beige template that happens to have your logo on it.
Cause one: the brief is the problem
Bad brand copy almost never starts in the copy. It starts in the brief. When you ask a creative team to “position us as leaders in the space”, you have asked them to write a sentence that ten thousand companies have already written. They will deliver it. It will be on strategy. It will be invisible.
The brief has to start somewhere more uncomfortable: what is the one true thing about our category that everyone knows and nobody says out loud?
The best brands say the thing. The gym that admits training is not fun, it is just worth it. The bank that admits most financial products are confusing on purpose. The software company that admits migration will hurt for six weeks. Say the thing and people lean in, because you have just proved you are a human organisation rather than a content machine. If your briefs never get anywhere near this, the problem is upstream of your writers — see The Death of the Mood Board.
Cause two: every approval round sands off an edge
The second reason everything sounds the same is arithmetic. A line goes to legal, then to the founder, then to the person who “just has one small thought”. None of them are trying to make it worse. Each is optimising for not getting it wrong. Not-getting-it-wrong is a filter that removes specificity first, because specificity is the only part of a sentence that can be challenged.
Run six rounds of that filter and you arrive, inevitably, at “Your trusted partner for growth”. Nobody chose it. It is simply what is left when everything that could be objected to has been removed.
The fix is procedural, not creative: decide before the round who is the decision-maker on voice, and make everyone else an adviser. Feedback that cannot be overruled is not feedback, it is co-authorship by committee.
The discomfort list
Here is the exercise we actually run. Take twenty minutes and write down ten things about your industry that are genuinely annoying, broken, overpriced or quietly dishonest. Not competitor-bashing — structural truths. The things clients complain about to each other in the taxi afterwards.
Then mark each one: can we say this publicly and survive? Usually three or four survive. Those three or four are your differentiation territory. Your brand voice lives exactly at the intersection of what is true about your category and what only you have the nerve to say about it.
Everything above that line is bravado. Everything below it is beige.
Swap table: what to write instead
Our own list of the phrases we see most often, and the question that replaces each one. The replacement is never a better adjective. It is always a fact.
| Instead of this | Answer this question |
|---|---|
| We help businesses grow | Grow what, from what, in how long? |
| Your trusted partner | Trusted by whom, and what happens when it goes wrong? |
| Innovative solutions | What did you build that did not exist before? |
| Passionate about our craft | What do you refuse to do, even for money? |
| Bespoke, tailored approach | What is the first thing you change for every client? |
| End-to-end service | Where does your work actually start and stop? |
| Data-driven decisions | Which number do you look at first on a Monday? |
| Award-winning team | Which piece of work are you still proud of two years later? |
| We put customers first | Name a time you lost money to keep a promise. |
| Seamless experience | Which step used to be painful, and what did you remove? |
| Empowering brands to succeed | What can a client do after working with you that they could not before? |
| Leaders in the industry | What do you do that the other three would not risk? |
None of the right-hand answers will sound like a competitor, because facts are not interchangeable and adjectives are.
How to know it worked
Three signals, in order of reliability. First: someone internally is slightly nervous about the line. Mild fear is the correct physiological response to a real position. Second: a competitor could not lift it. Third — and this is the one that matters commercially — the wrong prospects start disqualifying themselves earlier, because a voice that says something also says who it is not for.
If your new copy makes everyone comfortable and nobody self-selects out, you have not fixed the problem. You have rewritten it in a nicer font. On which note, our related reading: how to write copy that sounds like a human wrote it, what “authentic” actually means, and why most rebrands fail.
Frequently asked
Is a distinctive voice risky for a B2B brand with a long sales cycle?
Less risky than being unmemorable across a nine-month cycle. In long cycles the buyer meets your copy many times; sameness is what makes those repeat exposures worthless.
Do we need a full rebrand to fix this?
Usually not. Voice is a writing and governance problem far more often than an identity problem. Fix the brief and the approval chain first; if it still sounds like everyone else after that, then look at the wider identity.
What if legal removes everything interesting?
Bring legal the discomfort list before the copy, not after. Objections to a claim are negotiable at the idea stage and non-negotiable once it is a headline in a design.
Can AI writing tools solve this?
They will happily produce fluent category-average copy, which is precisely the disease. A model trained on everything written so far is structurally biased toward the middle. The uncomfortable truth about your category is not in the training data — it is in your discomfort list.
Your brand voice already exists. It sits somewhere between what you actually think about your industry and what you have so far been afraid to publish. The work is not inventing it. The work is not deleting it.
