You know it when you see it.
The website could belong to any of six competitors if you swapped out the logo. The LinkedIn ad with a stock photo, an oversized headline, and a familiar call to action. The email opens with a problem you supposedly have, followed by three paragraphs explaining why the company sending it is uniquely qualified to solve it.
Nothing is necessarily wrong with any of it. The design may be fine. The copy may be clean. The offer may be legitimate. The company may be excellent at what it does.
But it just feels like marketing.
And once it does, we know what happens next. People put up their defenses. They skim, scroll, delete, and tune out. Often, they don’t consciously decide to ignore us at all. They just do.
There is actual research behind that behavior. Nielsen Norman Group has studied what it calls “banner blindness links to nngroup.com and their article. opens in a new tab.” for decades. Its eye-tracking research has found that people learn to ignore not only ads, but also content that resembles advertising, sits near advertising, or appears where advertising is normally found. It’s an example of selective attention: we have limited attention to give, so we get very good at deciding what deserves it.
That should be a little unsettling to marketers. We’re spending enormous amounts of time and money on marketing while the people we’re trying to reach are becoming increasingly adept at recognizing and ignoring it.
The natural response is often to make more. More content, more emails, more ads, more posts, more impressions. We don’t think volume is usually the problem. After decades of doing this work, we’ve come to believe that a lot of what companies call marketing problems aren’t really tactics problems at all. They’re understanding problems.
Looking like you belong can make you disappear
When a company decides it needs to improve its marketing, one of the first things people do is look at the competition. It makes sense. What are they saying? What does their website look like? What are they posting? Where are they advertising? What kinds of offers are they making?
Then we widen the circle. We look at the biggest company in the category, the company we admire, or the brand that seems to have its act together. We call it competitive research, benchmarking, or inspiration, and all of it can be useful.
The trouble starts when observation quietly becomes imitation.
We see the finished product without seeing the thinking that produced it. We see an ad with a headline, an image, some copy, and a call to action, so we produce an ad with a headline, an image, some copy, and a call to action, too. A competitor’s website leads with a certain kind of message, so ours begins to sound similar. Everybody in the category is talking about solutions, expertise, partnership, innovation, and results, so those words start creeping into our marketing, too.
We’ve encountered words like these so many times that our eyes pass right over them. Since they take up space without adding much meaning, we started calling them “invisible words” years ago.
The irony is that companies doing this usually aren’t trying to be generic. Quite the opposite. They’re trying to look credible and professional. They’re trying to signal that they belong in the category.
But belonging and disappearing can look remarkably similar.
We once worked with a company whose brand had evolved so closely alongside its largest competitor that the two looked as though they belonged to the same brand family. Their logos were remarkably similar. So were the typography and colors.
These weren’t sister companies. They were direct competitors, and customers routinely compared and confused them. The similarities dated back decades, and we never got a definitive answer about how they happened. By the time we became involved, it didn’t really matter. One of our jobs was to help our client finally look like itself.
There is research behind that idea, too. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s work on distinctive brand assets links to marketingscience.info article. opens in a new tab. looks at elements such as colors, fonts, logos, characters, and other brand cues. Its framework evaluates those assets in part by uniqueness—whether an element evokes your brand rather than your competitors. In fact, Ehrenberg-Bass considers uniqueness more important than fame when assessing whether a brand element is truly distinctive.
That’s a pretty high bar when your brand looks like it came from the same family as the company you’re trying to beat.
There’s another trap in looking sideways: we tend to assume successful companies must be doing successful marketing. A large competitor may have an exceptional sales team, decades of relationships, a superior distribution network, a dominant installed base, more capital, a better product, or a founder who seems to know everyone in the industry. Its marketing may be terrific. Or the company may be succeeding despite marketing that isn’t particularly good.
Something looking polished doesn’t make it right, and something being done by the category leader doesn’t make it a best practice.
So yes, study the competition. You’d be foolish not to. Just don’t confuse knowing what competitors are doing with knowing what you should do.
That’s why we say marketing that feels like marketing starts with the competition. Marketing that doesn’t starts with the customer.
You can copy the marketing, but you can’t copy the thinking behind it
The danger in imitation is that when we see great marketing, we’re seeing the output. We don’t see the customer interviews, sales conversations, false starts, positioning decisions, or the dozens of things the company decided not to say. We don’t know what its customers already believe, what problem matters most to them, what alternatives they considered, or why a particular message hits a nerve.
Put another way, we see the swing, but we don’t see the mechanics behind it.
That’s why borrowing someone else’s marketing format rarely produces the same result. We can copy what an effective ad looks like. We can’t copy the customer understanding that made it effective in the first place.
Years ago, we were hired by a company that had already invested six figures in research. This wasn’t a company winging it. They spent real money trying to understand their market and find a position that would set them apart from their competitors.
The recommendation that emerged from that work was a tagline: “Experience the Difference.” The rationale made sense. The company really did operate differently from its competitors, and some of those differences mattered. The problem was the language.
“Experience the Difference” became something of an inside joke at our company because once we started noticing it, we saw it everywhere. Used-car dealerships. Pizza restaurants. LASIK centers. Professional services. Businesses with virtually nothing else in common were all inviting customers to experience their particular difference.
A phrase intended to communicate differentiation was ironically a marketing cliché.
The research wasn’t worthless. Far from it. It was quite good. The more interesting answer was actually sitting inside it. We were able to go back through the findings, interpret them differently, and identify territory the company could credibly own—something more provocative, more relevant, and better positioned to separate them from the pack.
That experience reinforced something we’ve said since day one at Outmark: good positioning needs to be unique and meaningful. If it’s unique but customers don’t care about it, you’ve found novelty, not positioning. If it’s meaningful but everyone says it, you’re just adding to the echo chamber.
In this particular category, trust mattered enormously. In fact, it was fundamental to why customers hired companies in the category at all. Not surprisingly, when we looked at the leading competitors, some version of “trust” appeared prominently above the fold on every website. Trust was meaningful, but it just wasn’t unique.
The opportunity was to find the intersection: something customers genuinely valued that this company could also credibly own. And that’s the part that competitive imitation simply cannot provide.
Before you get the word out, you need to know what the word is
This was one of the ideas behind Outsource Marketing from the beginning. Within our first few engagements, we noticed marketing activity started too far downstream. Money was being spent, and things were being produced, but there often wasn’t enough customer understanding or strategic thinking underneath the work. It was a pattern that became impossible to miss.
A company would come to us asking for a brochure, an ad, some copy, a new design, or a website. They had a tactical need and wanted somebody to execute it. Perfectly reasonable.
Then we’d start asking the questions necessary to do the work well. Who exactly are we trying to reach? What matters most to them? Why do they choose you? What do they misunderstand about you? What are we trying to change in their thinking or behavior? And ultimately, what should we say?
For years, we’ve heard some version of the same directive: “We just need to get the word out.” Our response has always been some version of, “What’s the word?”
We’re not trying to be difficult when we ask. Quite the opposite. If clients hire us to help them separate from the pack, figuring out what is worth saying—and why anyone should care—is part of the job.
If we don’t know the answer, buying more media won’t solve the problem. Posting more frequently won’t solve it. A prettier brochure won’t solve it. A new website may simply give us a more attractive place to say something that doesn’t matter very much to the customer.
Amplifying something that doesn’t matter won’t eventually make it matter. It will just consume more budget.
Why the mid-market is especially vulnerable
This problem gets harder in the mid-market because the people doing the work are often stretched across too many disciplines. Marketing today includes strategy, research, brand, positioning, writing, design, web, SEO, paid media, social, video, email, analytics, marketing technology, AI, events, sales enablement, and project management—and that’s not an exhaustive list.
Yet many companies still expect “the marketing person” to somehow be good at most of it. That’s a little like recruiting an excellent shortstop and being disappointed that he isn’t also your best pitcher, catcher, and peanut salesperson.
Good marketers do what good people usually do in that situation: they compensate. They learn new skills. They work harder. They bring in freelancers and agencies. The founder helps. Sales gets involved. Somebody knows a web developer. Someone else has someone who can do video.
A surprising amount of work can get produced that way. And that’s part of the problem: the activity itself can create the appearance that the marketing function is working. But somebody still has to connect it.
Without enough ownership of the whole picture, activity can outrun understanding. A writer gets a copy assignment without enough customer context. A designer receives a creative brief built around assumptions. A digital specialist is asked to generate leads before anyone has really nailed the offer. A web team is told to update the homepage while the leadership team hasn’t agreed on what belongs above the fold.
Everyone involved can be competent and still produce marketing that doesn’t connect or help the company move forward. The problem isn’t necessarily talent. It may be structure, strategy, or customer understanding—and asking everyone to make more stuff won’t fix any of those.
More reps don’t fix a bad swing
We like the baseball analogy because it keeps this from becoming an argument against execution. Practice matters. Repetition matters. Nobody becomes a great hitter by sitting in a conference room discussing the theory of hitting.
But if the mechanics are wrong, another thousand swings will simply make you more consistent at doing the wrong thing.
Marketing can work the same way. If the positioning is fuzzy, more content spreads the fuzziness. If the offer isn’t compelling, more advertising exposes more people to an uncompelling offer. If we don’t understand why customers buy, increasing email frequency gives us more opportunities to demonstrate that.
Then something even more damaging can happen: we blame the tactic. We tried paid search. It didn’t work. We tried content. We tried email. LinkedIn wasn’t worth it. Maybe those conclusions are right. But maybe we paid tuition without learning the lesson.
We’re not arguing that companies should disappear into a conference room for six months and refuse to do any marketing until every foundational question has been answered. That’s not how business works, and it’s not how learning works. Sometimes the right thing to do is run the ad, put the offer in front of people, test the message, and see what happens. Execution can teach us things that strategy alone cannot.
In a perfect world, customer understanding informs strategy, and strategy informs tactics. In the real world, information flows back the other direction, too. A campaign teaches us something about the message. Sales feedback changes our understanding of the customer. A failed offer exposes an assumption we didn’t realize we’d made. Good marketing isn’t a straight line; strategy and execution make each other smarter, provided we’re willing to learn from what happens.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has spent decades studying how organizations learn from failure. In her Harvard Business Review work on the subject links to the article on hbr.org. opens in a new tab., she makes an important distinction: some failures are preventable, some are unavoidable in complex environments, and some are “intelligent failures”—small experiments in new territory that generate valuable new information. She also points out that organizations are surprisingly bad at learning from failure, even when they genuinely intend to. Postmortems and reviews don’t accomplish much if the organization doesn’t understand what happened and change what it does next.
That matters for marketing. If we spend $5,000 testing an assumption and discover something important about the market, the $5,000 may have been tuition. If we spend $5,000, get disappointing results, announce that “advertising doesn’t work,” and jump to the next tactic without understanding what happened, we’ve paid the tuition without getting much of an education.
Experimentation isn’t the problem. Confusing activity with understanding—and then failing to learn from the activity—is.
Your customers are supposed to ignore you
Marketers sometimes talk about attention as though customers are being uncooperative. They aren’t opening our emails. They’re scrolling past our posts. They’re not clicking the ads. They’re leaving the website. Of course they are.
We’re customers, too, and we do exactly the same thing. We have work to do, meetings to attend, customers of our own, employees, families, email, texts, news, social feeds, search results, salespeople, vendors, and notifications competing for our attention. Ignoring most of what arrives isn’t a character flaw. It’s how we function.
For decades, we’ve heard statistics claiming that consumers are exposed to thousands of marketing messages every day but remember very few of them. We’ve repeated some of those numbers ourselves over the years. The problem is that many of the figures circulating in marketing presentations are surprisingly difficult to trace to credible original research. But we don’t need them to make the point.
Consider the Super Bowl instead, where advertisers spend enormous sums to put some of the world’s best creative talent in front of one of the largest concentrated audiences available. Even there, researchers distinguish between remembering an advertisement and correctly remembering the brand behind it. Nielsen, for example, has specifically measured both ad recall and brand linkage in its Super Bowl research, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School includes Linkage as one of six criteria links to article on kellogg.northwestern.edu. opens in a new tab. in its academic framework for evaluating Super Bowl advertising.
In other words, getting someone’s attention isn’t even the whole job. A person can remember the funny commercial and forget who paid millions of dollars to show it to them.
The Nielsen Norman research on banner blindness makes the filtering problem even more direct. People learn the visual and contextual cues associated with advertising and use those cues to skip things they don’t believe will help them accomplish what they’re trying to do.
That creates a much tougher standard than simply producing professional-looking marketing. The real challenge is being relevant enough to interrupt the filtering process, and relevance is hard to manufacture from category conventions and competitor websites.
The best marketing makes customers feel understood
Every once in a while, something gets through differently. We read it and think, “That’s exactly what’s happening here,” or, “We’ve been trying to explain that for six months.”
The reaction we’re looking for isn’t admiration for the marketer. It’s recognition: the sense that the company understands the situation well enough to say something true about it.
That understanding can come from formal research, but it doesn’t have to. It can come from sales conversations, customer service calls, lost-business interviews, win/loss analyses, analytics, frontline employees, and years of experience. Usually, the richest understanding comes from some combination of them.
We were once doing strategic planning for a hosting company serving some of the world’s best-known brands. We talked to customers, partners, employees, technical staff, and others around the business. Early in the process, one of the technical people mentioned something hanging on a wall inside a highly secure part of the facility.
The team had been saving messages from customers after support issues were resolved and posting them on the wall. We couldn’t go into that area ourselves, so someone took a photo for us.
Some of the messages were only a sentence or two. Others went on for paragraphs. Taken together, they told a remarkably consistent story. Customers weren’t simply thanking the company for fixing something. They were describing difficult situations, unusual requirements, frustrating problems, and how relieved they were that the team had figured them out.
The wall also told us something about the employees. They were proud of those messages. These were the problems they liked solving enough to save the thank-you notes and put them where the team could see them.
That didn’t replace the primary research. It helped inform it. What we saw gave us better questions to ask customers, and the research that followed reinforced the pattern. Ultimately, those insights helped us identify a positioning that the company had never articulated for itself.
Customer insight doesn’t always arrive in a research report. Sometimes it’s already hanging on the wall.
The important part is that someone has to turn all that information into insight, and the organization has to be willing to make choices based on what it learns.
Better marketing starts further upstream
None of this means companies should stop watching competitors, reject proven marketing practices, or try to make everything wildly original. Category conventions exist for a reason. Sometimes familiarity makes things easier for customers. Nobody needs a revolutionary new location for the “Buy” button just to prove the marketing team is creative.
The point is to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.
There’s a meaningful difference between “We saw someone else doing this” and “We know why our customer cares.” One is observation. The other is understanding. Strong marketing can use both, but understanding needs to be the priority.
So when marketing feels generic, reactive, or easy to ignore, we don’t think the first question should be, “What else should we make?”
We’d start further upstream. Talk to customers. Listen to sales calls. Ask why you won and why you lost. Find out what customers were trying to solve before they knew your company existed. Pay attention to the language they use when nobody from marketing is putting words in their mouths. Figure out which customers you’re especially good at helping and why. Decide what you want to be known for and what matters enough to keep saying.
And sometimes, understanding means making a choice about whom you’re going to understand really well.
We worked with one company that served 21 vertical markets. On paper, there was a perfectly reasonable argument for every one of them. Somewhere in each market was somebody who could use what the company sold, so its marketing effort was spread across all 21.
The individual tactics weren’t necessarily bad. The company was simply trying to matter to too many different people at once.
We narrowed the focus first to three verticals and ultimately to two. Instead of dividing time, attention, learning, creative energy, and budget across 21 markets, the company could put roughly ten times the focus behind each of the two that remained. That also gave the team a much better opportunity to understand those customers deeply, speak their language, demonstrate real expertise, and become known for solving the problems that mattered in those markets.
The fact that traction followed wasn’t particularly surprising.
That’s what strategy is supposed to do. It isn’t a 73-page document proving we’ve considered everything. It’s deciding what matters enough to concentrate on—and what doesn’t.
Then make the ad, write the email, build the website, and create the content. Then pay attention to what happens and apply the lessons learned.
Customer understanding isn’t something we complete and put in a binder. Markets change. Customers surprise us. Messages we love fall flat. Things we almost cut from a campaign turn out to resonate. That’s not evidence that the strategy failed. That’s new information, and the strategy should get smarter because of it.
The goal isn’t to eliminate experimentation. It’s to make experimentation useful. Too much marketing works the other way around. It begins with assumptions, category conventions, and whatever everybody else seems to be doing, then produces a steady stream of perfectly competent activity. It looks right, sounds right, and checks the marketing boxes.
And that’s exactly why it’s so easy to ignore.
Marketing that feels like marketing starts with the competition. Marketing that doesn’t starts with the customer.
