The Danger of Marketing That Sounds Like Everyone Else's
By Lesley Boyd, CEO, Parallel Marketing LLC
A few years ago I read through four pitch decks from competing firms in the same specialized field, back-to-back, in the same week. Strip the logos off and I couldn’t have told you which deck belonged to which company. Every one of them promised innovation, dedication, and a client-first approach, in almost the same order.
Individually, none of the four decks was poorly made. Each one was competent, professionally designed, and reasonably well argued. What was notable was that four companies, describing what were supposedly meaningfully different businesses, had independently converged on nearly identical language. If the underlying businesses were as different as each claimed, the descriptions should not have been interchangeable. Marketing differentiation depends on communicating those meaningful differences clearly. The fact that they were nearly identical said something about how that language had been produced, and it wasn’t flattering.
How a Category Converges on the Same Language
This kind of convergence isn’t random, and it isn’t a coincidence limited to one industry. It follows a predictable pattern in specialized fields, and understanding the mechanism matters more than simply noticing the symptom.
A new entrant to a field does reasonable, sensible research before writing its own materials, which typically means reading what established competitors already say. That’s a normal part of positioning work. The problem begins with what happens next. The new entrant borrows not just the general format of that language but its actual substance, softened just enough to avoid the appearance of direct copying. Repeat that process across enough new entrants over enough years, and an entire category’s marketing converges on the same handful of safe phrases almost without anyone intending it.
Once that convergence sets in, it becomes self reinforcing. A marketing team drafting new copy instinctively benchmarks against what competitors are already saying, treats that language as the established norm for the category, and produces something close enough to blend in. Nobody in the room ever decides to sound like the competition. Each individual decision, in isolation, looks like reasonable caution.
What This Actually Costs a Buyer, and the Company
The risk here isn’t that the language is inaccurate. The risk is that without marketing differentiation, buyers have no meaningful way to distinguish between credible options. Individually, none of it usually is. Innovation genuinely matters to these companies. Client relationships genuinely do, too. The risk is structural: when every credible option in a category describes itself in identical terms, a buyer loses any real basis for differentiating between them on the merits, and the decision shifts to variables the marketing never intended to compete on, price, an existing personal relationship, or simply whoever called first.
This is a worse outcome for the strongest company in the category than for anyone else. The gap between what a genuinely superior provider offers and what a mediocre competitor offers can be enormous, but if the language describing both reads identically, that gap becomes invisible to anyone evaluating from the outside. The best option in the room ends up competing on the same footing as the weakest one, purely because neither said anything a buyer could actually use to tell them apart.
Why Sameness Feels Safer Than the Alternative
Smart, capable teams fall into this pattern for a consistent reason. Sounding like everyone else carries less perceived risk than sounding distinctive, but it also makes marketing differentiation far more difficult. A specific point of view can be disagreed with. The generic version avoids both risks, at the cost of being forgettable to everyone who encounters it.
Internal review processes tend to reinforce this without anyone intending it to. A safe, familiar sentence moves through approval quickly because nobody can identify anything wrong with it. A specific, differentiated sentence draws questions, hesitation, and requests to soften it before it goes out. Across enough approval cycles and enough pieces of published content, an organization effectively trains itself to produce whatever survives internal review most easily, which is rarely the language that would actually differentiate it in the market.
A Working Test for Real Differentiation
The exercise worth running against any piece of positioning language is simple to describe and genuinely uncomfortable to apply. Take a sentence from the company’s current materials and ask whether a direct competitor could publish that exact sentence on its own site without anyone noticing the substitution. If the honest answer is “yes”, that sentence isn’t communicating anything distinctive yet, regardless of how polished it sounds.
Polish is a poor proxy for differentiation, which is precisely why this test matters. Plenty of interchangeable language is well written and professionally produced. The only question that actually determines whether it’s doing useful work is whether it could belong to any other credible option in the category. If it could, it’s decorative rather than functional.
The fix isn’t cleverness for its own sake. It’s specificity about what a company actually believes, actually does differently, or actually refuses to do that a competitor is willing to do. Sentences that meet that bar are the ones a competitor genuinely couldn’t publish, because they wouldn’t be true for them. Running this test across existing materials usually surfaces uncomfortable results. Most of a company’s current copy fails it. That isn’t cause for alarm so much as a starting point. The task isn’t rewriting everything at once. It’s identifying the handful of claims that are genuinely, provably true only for this company, and giving those the space to do the talking, instead of letting them get buried under the safer language surrounding them.
The four firms from that pitch deck week eventually did land on distinct positioning, though most of them took years longer to get there than they needed to. The one that got there first is, unsurprisingly, the one still winning the most competitive deals in that market today, a reminder that marketing differentiation can become a meaningful competitive advantage.
About the Author
Lesley Boyd is the CEO of Parallel Marketing LLC, a strategic marketing firm that helps aviation organizations and other regulated industries build brand authority through strategic partnerships, events, and thought leadership. She previously built and led the in-house marketing engine at Stratus Financial and now works with companies looking to grow through relationship driven marketing, industry positioning, and community building.
This article is part of a series exploring how marketing leadership is evolving in modern industries.
About Parallel Marketing
Parallel Marketing is a specialized marketing firm rooted in aviation and embedded within the flight training ecosystem. Founded by the team behind Stratus Financial’s marketing function and industry platforms, including AeroSummit and Ascend Flight Training Summit, the firm combines marketing expertise with deep industry relationships developed through sustained involvement in aviation.
Parallel operates as a strategic partner to executive teams, integrating brand, demand generation and community engagement into a cohesive business strategy. While aviation remains its foundation, the firm is structured to serve other regulated, relationship-driven industries where credibility, precision and execution are essential.
Media Contact
Lesley Boyd
CEO
Parallel Marketing
949-406-4930
Lesley@parallelmarketingcompany.com