Stop Trying To Be Different With Your Marketing

(Updated March 2026)

Many businesses spend their entire strategic lives trying to be different. Campaigns, rebrands, product iterations, competitive audits, positioning workshops – the list goes on.

All of this stuff is aimed towards the same destination: standing out enough that buyers notice, so that they choose us over the next option in line. The problem with this approach, applied industry-wide, is that in practice it delivers the exact opposite result. When every business is trying to do slightly different things with the simple goal of looking different, the cumulative effect is a market where everything – and everyone – looks the same. Everyone’s racing toward differentiation but arriving at sameness.

The way most businesses define “being different” is relative. We look at what the competition’s doing and try to do a better version of it. Add a new feature here, rework the onboarding there, tweak the pricing, maybe rework the copy. We accept the existing problem definition as fixed and compete on our ability to solve it more elegantly.

You’d assume this would be a reasonable approach, right? Except that it means every serious player in a given market is ultimately working from the same blueprint. Even if the blueprints get better over time, but they’re still blueprints of the same building.

The question most businesses don’t ask

There’s a cognitive bias known as functional fixedness, well-documented in behavioral science, where people struggle to see an object or process as anything other than what it’s currently used for. It makes us efficient, because we don’t have to re-evaluate familiar things constantly. But it also makes us conservative in ways we rarely notice.

When we look at a competitor’s product and think about how to beat it, we’re accepting the competitor’s framing of what the product is supposed to do. We inherit their problem definition along with their solution architecture. The constraint isn’t our imagination or our budget. The constraint is that we started from the wrong place.

The alternative is to stop iterating on the solution and go back to examining the problem itself. What is the underlying frustration, unmet need, or friction that this category of product or service exists to address? We need to strip away the current solutions entirely, and ask whether those solutions are actually solving the problem well, or just solving the version of the problem that’s become conventional to address. Sometimes these are the same, but more often they’re very different.

This is a different cognitive operation from competitive analysis, which starts by accepting the existing category as the solution space and works forward from there. Problem reframing takes a step further back, to the question of whether the solution space itself is the right one. The second approach produces iteration less often, and the occasional possibility of changing what the category is even about far more often than the first.

Why iteration is more comfortable, and less useful, than it looks

The obvious reason why most businesses default to iteration is that it’s lower risk, at least in the short term. If we’re building on something that already exists and already has a market, we’re not guessing whether anyone actually wants it. We’re competing for an established pool of buyers with an established set of expectations, which obviously feels much safer than questioning the foundations. The downside is that competing for the same buyers with similar solutions in a mature category is inherently a war of attrition. Profit margins get compressed, the buyers most price-sensitive accumulate at the bottom, and everyone fights for them.

What we tend to underestimate is how much of that “safety” is illusory. Competing primarily on features or price attracts buyers whose loyalty is conditional on us maintaining superiority on those specific dimensions. The moment a competitor closes the gap or undercuts us, those buyers have no particular reason to stay. We’ve built a customer base on the premise that we’ll always be a bit better than the next option, which is an exhausting and unsustainable foundation for scalable business growth.

There’s also a less talked-about problem. When buyers are choosing between options that appear similar, they default to using ‘price’ as a proxy for ‘quality’. Research on how people make decisions under uncertainty shows that in the absence of meaningful differentiation, higher price signals higher value, not worse value. So a strategy of differentiation-through-iteration that also involves competitive pricing can actively undermine buyer confidence, signaling “we’re pretty much the same as everyone else, but cheaper,” which is not a particularly compelling thing to communicate about ourselves.

Creating difference is a different activity from being different

The distinction that matters is between trying to appear different within an existing frame, and doing something that changes the frame itself.

Ford’s model of personal transportation didn’t just offer a faster version of what already existed. It reconsidered the underlying problem of how people moved, and arrived at something that made the previous category largely irrelevant. Jobs and his team at Apple, after seeing what Xerox PARC had developed, grasped the implications of a graphical interface in a way Xerox itself hadn’t, partly because Xerox was still primarily thinking about copiers. Neither company invented their respective technologies from scratch. What they did was reinterpret what the technology was solving for, and build the experience around that reinterpretation. The product shifted from being a tool, to being an extension of how someone thought or moved through the world. That’s a fundamentally different value proposition, and one that’s nearly impossible to displace by iteration.

This is what “creating difference” looks like in practice. Features matter, but they’re not the mechanism. The mechanism is understanding what a buyer is actually trying to accomplish at a deeper level than the surface-level job the product appears to do. When we understand that, we stop competing on the same dimensions as everyone else, because we’re addressing a need that the existing solutions weren’t fully serving.

Relevance and the buyer’s actual problem

One of the more counterintuitive findings in behavioral science is that buyers rarely make purchase decisions purely based on a careful weighing of features and benefits. The mental effort required to do that accurately is enormous, so buyers use shortcuts – what psychologists call heuristics. They look for signals of trustworthiness, familiarity, and fit. They ask, often unconsciously, whether this thing seems made for someone like them, with a problem like theirs. When it does, the decision becomes much easier, and price sensitivity tends to drop. When it doesn’t, no amount of feature superiority compensates for the feeling that this wasn’t built with us in mind.

This matters because it reframes what “creating difference” is actually about. Being objectively ‘better’ on a measurable dimension is a fine thing, but it’s not what drives the decision. Buyers gravitate toward the option that feels built for someone in their situation, with their specific problem. That requires a degree of specificity that most businesses will find uncomfortable, because it means accepting that we won’t be the right solution for everyone.

We’ll be seen as less relevent to the broad middle of the market, and more legible to the specific buyers who actually need what we do best. That trade feels like a loss until we realize that the broad middle is where profit margins go to die, and that genuine relevance to a defined audience is a far more durable competitive position than generic superiority.

There’s also the downstream effect of buyers feeling that something was built with genuine understanding of their situation, so they attribute more value to it, and become more resistant to competitive alternatives. The psychological research on this is fairly consistent: people overvalue things they feel connected to, and undervalue things that feel interchangeable with other options. So relevance doesn’t just help us win the initial decision, but shapes how buyers perceive us over time, and how easily a competitor can dislodge us by being slightly cheaper or slightly better on a feature checklist.

The harder but more interesting question

Instead of fixating about “how do we differentiate?” we look at the harder question of “What problem are we actually in the business of solving, and are we solving the version of it that matters most to the people who need it solved?” To get to the answer requires looking outward with a level of honesty that we probably won’t want to do, because the answer is often different from what we assumed when we started. We’ve been filtering reality through our own assumptions about what our product does, which isn’t necessarily the same as what buyers experience it doing.

The businesses that tend to create enduring positions in their categories, the ones that don’t have to spend perpetually on acquisition just to stay still, usually got there by taking that question seriously at a foundational level. They stopped treating their market category as being a fixed constraint, instead looking at it as a jumping-off point for a different kind of thinking. It means holding the current state of the category at arm’s length long enough to ask whether the underlying problem could be approached differently, and whether doing so would serve buyers in a way the existing options don’t.

Businesses that never ask that question tend to stay on the iteration treadmill. They get better at being the same as everyone else, while wondering why it gets harder every year to make a case for buyers to choose them over competitors. Trying to be different within the existing positioning framework turns out to be the least effective way to actually stand out. Creating something that matters to a specific set of people is considerably more difficult, and considerably less crowded.

Want to think through how this applies to your category? Explore more on the KEXINO blog, or start with why anyone should choose you at all.