The other day I spent a good few minutes scrolling my feed and had a strange feeling: it was all the same brand. Different sectors, different companies, and there was the same colour, the same clever tone, the same catchphrase, the same photo I could swear I had already seen on five other accounts. If I swapped the logos around, nobody would notice. It took me twenty years in marketing to understand that this scene, which looks harmless, is one of the most expensive bills a company pays without noticing.
Copying your competitor is, on the surface, the safest decision there is. The big player does it a certain way, it is working for them, so I do the same and take no risk. It is comfortable. The problem is that comfort, in marketing, is usually the pretty name for a loss. When you copy, you are not saving on risk. You are outsourcing your identity to your competitor, and paying for it further down the line.
Look at what happens when an entire sector decides to play safe in the same way. Companies become pale versions of one another, and when nobody can tell them apart, there is only one argument left to close the sale: price. You end up fighting over pennies in a market you helped turn into a shelf of generics. The margin evaporates, and the curious thing is that almost nobody blames the copying. They blame the economy, the market, the customer who "only wants a discount".
I see marketing in a stubborn way, and it fits into one question: at the end of the month, does the person remember you and choose you for a reason other than the lowest price? If the answer is no, you do not have a brand, you have a product with a brand accent. And that is exactly what copying steals. It takes away your chance of being remembered, because memory does not stick to what looks like everything else. It takes away your own narrative, the one that makes a customer pay more without complaining and still recommend you to a friend. Without that story, the brand stops being an asset and becomes just another cost line on the spreadsheet.
There is a trap alongside this. Most operations measure what is easy to measure: likes, reach, engagement. Those are numbers that fill a slide and end the meeting with everyone feeling good. What happens is that copying your competitor optimises precisely those easy numbers and leaves untouched the question that pays the bill: did any of that turn into people buying? You can be the best in your sector at vanity and be slowly going under, in the dark.
Then comes the part nobody likes to hear. The way out is not "being more creative", that lazy answer that fits everything and solves nothing. Creativity without focus is just more noise in the feed. The way out is more uncomfortable, because it asks you to give things up. Strategy has far more to do with what you decide to stop doing than with what you do. Differentiating is not stacking more campaigns on top of more channels. It is having the courage to cut whatever every competitor does, precisely because every competitor does it.
The conversation I would open with any team is uncomfortable on purpose. What on our list can we eliminate without the customer missing it? And what is the one thing we sustain that the competitor cannot copy by tomorrow morning? It could be a way of serving people, a thesis about the customer's pain that only you will back, a point of view that bothers people a little. What it cannot be is the average. The average is the most crowded and poorest spot in the market, where brands elbow each other, all alike, fighting over the same penny.
In the end, the ruler I use for everything stays the same: if it does not turn into revenue, it is decoration. And copying your competitor, however safe the advice sounds in a meeting, is the most expensive and slowest way to decorate your own irrelevance.
One last piece of honesty about where this text came from, beyond what I recently wrote on LinkedIn about brands looking alike. The irritation is mine, and it is old, but it got a name in a class of my MBA in AI for Business at FIAP, with professor Charles Bonani. Organisational mimicry, the technical term for this habit of copying until profit touches zero. He gave me the academic ruler for something I had already been fighting in practice. That is what this space on my site is for: what I study and genuinely understand, I write down. Preferably with my own face on it.