What If You Don’t Need To Standout In Your Marketing?
You are unoriginal.
Can I say that when I support visionaries, going against the grain, challenging the status quo and rewriting the industry standard in their marketing?
It feels wrong to, I know that much.
It feels like I should be writing to tell you to find your competitive edge, hone in on your USP and find the missing piece that makes you unlike anything else out there. That is what I have always been told to do in marketing. It is what I have told others in the past, too.
But a few months ago, I was on a writing retreat with 14 other creatives and I witnessed my originality vanish into thin air every time someone opened their mouth to share something.
I saw my story, my struggles, my mission, my beliefs all wrapped up in 14 other people's expressions until I felt so painstakingly unordinary. Something the marketing world would encourage me to see as a threat to the very existence of my work.
But it didn't feel like that at all. It felt like the greatest liberation there could possibly be.
There I was, feeling isolated in my own story, overwhelmed by the weight of my work and plagued by struggles that felt especially reserved for me. And it turns out, I didn't need to worry at all. Sat in front of those women, it felt like an honour not to feel different. To feel ordinary in front of some of the most incredible people I have ever met felt like the greatest privilege I could ask for.
And I think this ties into a bigger theme that many of us are exhausted by in our marketing.
This pull to stand out, assess competitors like we are hunting prey, weigh ourselves up against the words of others to ensure they never sound the same, pull out threads of such uniqueness that our stories shock anyone who reads them. It all feels so unnatural. Because it is.
The funny thing is, when I was led down the path of standout strategies, I felt more lost in a sea of sameness than ever before. Not because they were bad strategies, but because everyone was being told to use them. Everyone was trying to differentiate themselves in the exact same way and ended up sounding identical. If those strategies had never been implemented and people had simply followed what they had to say, how they wanted to say it, there would never have been a problem. People's unique frequency would have shone through just fine. The magnetism from that would have been felt, without force.
Honestly, I think marketing has been made to feel so much harder than it needs to be. Because hard means people will invest in a solution to a problem. But what if that problem never actually existed? What if it was simple all along and we have just been caught in overcomplicating it for the sake of consumption?
The standout paradox in marketing
The marketing industry is, as I have said many times, obsessed with standing out. There is an entire language built around it. Your USP. Your unique selling point. Your competitive edge. Your differentiator. And underneath all of it sits this persistent message that who you are as you are is not quite enough. That you need to be sharpened, positioned and packaged in a way that makes you rise above the noise.
I know this framework inside out. I have taught it. And for a long time, I believed in it in the way you believe in something that has never been properly questioned.
What I did not see until recently is the way this framework eats itself. When every business owner is handed the same advice to stand out, they reach for the same tools. The hot take. The controversial opinion. The bold claim. The niche so narrow it could fit through a keyhole. And in the process of everyone aggressively differentiating themselves, they all start to sound the same. The pursuit of originality becomes its own kind of sameness.
This is the standout paradox. And I have watched it play out in my own work, in my clients' work and in almost every corner of the online space I inhabit.
What the retreat taught me
I came back from that writing retreat with a notebook full of thoughts I did not fully understand yet. I was writing in the way I love most, without agenda, without a content plan, without any attempt to make it into something. Just following the thread of what was alive in me.
And what was alive in me was this strange, warm, deeply unexpected feeling of ordinariness.
These 14 women had shared their stories. The ways they grew up feeling like the black sheep. The conventional paths they had followed before their lives cracked open. The passions that had found them, the missions that had taken hold of them, the struggles they had carried largely in private. And I sat there thinking, I know this. I have lived this. This is mine.
Except it was not only mine. It belonged to all of us.
In the past, I think that realisation would have sent me straight to the drawing board. If my story is not unique, what do I have to offer? If 14 other people could say what I have been saying, why would anyone choose me? These are the questions the marketing world has trained us to ask. They are questions built on the premise that similarity is a threat and difference is survival.
Sat around that table, I could feel in my body how untrue that was.
The similarity was the point. The shared experience was the thing that made the room feel alive. The fact that someone else had felt what I had felt did not diminish my experience; it illuminated it. It gave the company it craved. It turned something I had carried alone into something I could carry collectively.
I didn’t need to stand out to be seen.
Had those strategies to stand out and be seen not been implemented and people just followed what they had to say, and how they wanted to say it, there would never have been a problem. People’s unique frequency would have shone through just fine and the magnetism from that would have been felt, without force.
Honestly, I think marketing has been made to feel so much harder than it needs to be.
Because hard means people will invest in a solution to solve a problem. But what if that problem never actually existed? What if it was simple all along and we’ve just been caught in the crossfire of overcomplicating for the sake of capitalism?
That’s what I’m exploring in this week’s episode…
