I opened my feed yesterday and started writing down ideas. Here is what I did: I covered the logos on ten posts from ten different brands.
I could barely tell any of them apart.
Same blue-white-grey palette. Same three-column grid. Same "we believe in a better future" tone. Same stock photos of someone smiling in front of a laptop.
Ten brands. One face.
This is not a coincidence of trend. It is what happens when communication becomes the execution of a reference, without passing through any filter of who the brand actually is.
The brief arrived with the competitor's moodboard. The agency delivered what was asked. The manager approved it because "it looked good". And there you have it: another brand that looks like it came from the same mother as all the others.
I call this copying without an accent. You take the structure of whoever is working, but abandon the one asset nobody can replicate: the voice that comes from inside the company.
Accent is the way your brand speaks when nobody is looking at the identity manual. It is what leaks through in customer service replies, in the choice of a word in a CTA, in what you decide NOT to show in a campaign. It is built over years. And it is exactly what disappears when whoever decides outsources the language decision along with a package of posts.
The agency delivers execution. Accent is the responsibility of whoever is on the inside.
When you lose the accent, the brand still sells for a while. Price, distribution and media spend hold it up. But differentiation goes away quietly, and nobody notices until the competitor is charging less for the same product that looks identical to yours.
Before approving your next campaign, one concrete question: if I remove the logo, would anyone recognise this as my brand?
If the answer hesitates, the problem is not the agency.
Comment below if you have noticed this too. How is it where you work?