Is Marketing Becoming Too Predictable?
We have more creative tools, more data, and more ways to reach people than ever before. Yet much of today's marketing feels strangely familiar. Have we become so good at following the rules that we've forgotten how to be original?
Spend a little time browsing company websites and you'll begin to notice something peculiar. Different businesses, different industries, and different audiences, yet the messaging often feels remarkably familiar. Everyone is passionate about what they do, committed to excellence, and dedicated to delivering exceptional customer experiences. The photographs are polished, the layouts are clean, and the calls to action are carefully positioned. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of it, except that after visiting half a dozen websites, remembering which company said what becomes surprisingly difficult.
It's not limited to websites either. The same patterns appear in social media campaigns, corporate presentations, advertising, and even brand identities. We've become exceptionally good at producing professional-looking marketing, but perhaps we've started confusing professional presentation with effective communication.
It's an interesting contradiction. The marketing industry has never had access to more sophisticated tools, creative resources, or customer information. We can develop campaigns faster, target audiences more precisely, and measure performance in ways that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. Yet with all these advantages, originality can sometimes feel like an afterthought.
When playing it safe becomes the strategy
Marketing has always borrowed from successful ideas. When a particular campaign, design style, or advertising approach performs well, others naturally take notice. There's nothing inherently wrong with learning from success. The difficulty begins when imitation becomes the starting point rather than a source of inspiration.
Consider how many businesses approach a website redesign. They research competitors, identify popular design trends, examine industry benchmarks, and collect examples of websites they admire. By the time the creative brief reaches the designer, there's often a fairly detailed picture of what the finished website should look like. Unfortunately, that picture may have been assembled almost entirely from what everyone else is already doing.
The result can be a perfectly respectable website that gives prospective customers very little reason to remember the company behind it.
There's also a commercial reason this happens. Original ideas introduce uncertainty, and uncertainty can be difficult to justify when budgets are tight and results are expected quickly. It's much easier to defend a familiar approach by pointing to competitors who have already adopted it. Nobody gets questioned for following an established trend quite as intensely as they might for proposing something unconventional.
Over time, however, this kind of thinking can create an industry where everyone is watching everyone else, waiting to see what works before making their next move.
What happens when a brand stops following the category?
Some of the most recognizable brands have built their identities by questioning conventions that others in their industry take for granted. Two particularly interesting examples are Oatly and Liquid Death. Neither reinvented the product it sells, but both reconsidered how that product could be presented and talked about.
Consider Oatly, the Swedish oat milk company.
In a market where packaging typically emphasized nutrition, natural ingredients and healthy living, Oatly took a different approach. Its cartons featured bold typography, unexpected messages and copy that often sounded more like a conversation than conventional product advertising. The packaging became part of the brand's personality, giving consumers something to notice, read and occasionally smile about. That same informal, slightly irreverent voice carried through to its advertising, making Oatly recognizable well beyond the supermarket shelf.
That same approach carried through to its advertising, creating a recognizable voice that helped Oatly distinguish itself in an increasingly competitive market.
Liquid Death
Liquid Death approached the bottled water market from an entirely different direction. Instead of the familiar imagery of mountains, springs, and pristine landscapes, it borrowed from heavy metal culture, entertainment, and irreverent humour. Its tall aluminium cans could easily be mistaken for energy drinks or beer, while its advertising made an otherwise ordinary product feel like part of a much larger cultural identity.
At first glance, the two brands have little in common. One sells oat drinks through conversational packaging and unconventional copywriting. The other sells water using an exaggerated personality that would seem completely out of place in most beverage advertising. Yet both demonstrate what can happen when a business questions the assumptions surrounding its category rather than accepting them as creative instructions.
What's interesting isn't simply that these companies look different. It's that their creative decisions appear to follow a consistent internal logic. Their packaging, advertising, language, and presentation reinforce a recognizable identity, even when individual campaigns change. The personality doesn't depend on a single clever advertisement.
That distinction is important because originality is often misunderstood as a demand to do something outrageous. Most businesses have neither the need nor the appetite for Liquid Death's humour, and copying Oatly's conversational style would accomplish very little. In fact, imitating either brand would simply recreate the problem we're discussing.
The more useful lesson is that competitors can help us understand the expectations of a market, but they shouldn't automatically determine how we communicate within it. A brand becomes recognizable through a series of deliberate choices about what it believes, how it behaves, and what it wants people to remember.
For marketing teams, that raises a worthwhile question. When we look at our latest campaign, how many creative decisions were made because they genuinely reflect our business, and how many were made because they resemble something we've seen elsewhere?
Has technology made us more creative or simply more efficient?
Artificial intelligence has added another dimension to this conversation. In a relatively short period, AI-powered tools have changed how businesses develop marketing copy, generate images, research audiences, and produce campaign materials. For smaller organizations in particular, these capabilities have made professional-looking communication considerably more accessible.
That's a positive development. Businesses that previously struggled to afford creative resources can now explore ideas and produce materials that would once have required considerably more time and money.
But accessibility introduces another challenge. When thousands of organizations rely on similar tools, prompts, templates, and reference materials, there's a risk that the resulting work begins to share the same characteristics.
You can sometimes recognize it in the writing. Certain expressions appear repeatedly, sentences follow predictable patterns, and every brand seems determined to elevate, empower, transform, or redefine something. The words sound impressive individually, but collectively they communicate very little.
Visual communication faces a similar problem. AI-generated photography can produce beautifully lit offices, immaculate workspaces, and impossibly enthusiastic employees. The images may look technically convincing, yet they often lack the imperfections and details that make a real business recognizable.
Of course, AI isn't solely responsible for this. Generic stock photography, corporate jargon, and repetitive advertising existed long before generative AI arrived. What has changed is the speed and scale at which familiar ideas can now be reproduced.
Interestingly, Oatly has taken a cautious approach to generative AI in its creative work. In a 2025 interview with AdExchanger, its North American creative director, Malia Killings, described the company's commitment to maintaining its distinctive voice, even within the restrictive formats of online grocery platforms. That means paying attention to seemingly insignificant product descriptions and other pieces of copy that many brands would treat as standardized content.
It's a useful reminder that technology can help produce marketing, but it doesn't automatically provide the judgment, experience, or personality that makes the communication worth reading.
Are we measuring the right things?
One of the more difficult questions facing marketers is whether our ability to measure performance has begun to influence the kind of creativity we're willing to pursue.
Digital marketing provides an extraordinary amount of feedback. We can monitor impressions, clicks, conversions, engagement rates, and dozens of other indicators. These measurements help businesses understand what is working and make more informed decisions about where to invest.
But not everything that matters to a brand is immediately measurable.
An advertisement might generate modest engagement while leaving a memorable impression on someone who isn't ready to buy. An unusual campaign might attract fewer clicks but establish a distinctive identity that people recognize months later. Conversely, a perfectly optimized advertisement might deliver plenty of traffic without creating any lasting association with the company responsible for it.
Research offers some support for taking a broader view of advertising effectiveness. The UK Data & Marketing Association's 2024 Value of Creativity report, developed with System1, examines how recognizable branding and emotional responses contribute to advertising performance. It highlights the importance of looking beyond immediate responses when evaluating creative work.
That doesn't mean marketers should ignore conversion rates or abandon performance measurement. Businesses need results, and creativity that consistently fails to support commercial objectives deserves scrutiny. The challenge is deciding how to balance short-term performance with long-term brand development.
When every creative decision is evaluated primarily through immediate results, there's a temptation to repeat whatever has worked before. Over time, this can favour familiar formats and messages while making experimentation seem unnecessarily risky.
Good measurement should help businesses make better creative decisions, including knowing when an unfamiliar idea deserves a chance.
The problem with trying to appeal to everyone
Another reason marketing becomes predictable is the reluctance to express a distinct opinion.
Businesses naturally want to attract as many customers as possible. As a result, their messaging often becomes increasingly cautious, particularly when multiple stakeholders are involved in approving it. Strong statements are softened, unusual ideas are reconsidered, and anything that might divide opinion is gradually removed.
Eventually, the message becomes so agreeable that nobody could reasonably object to it. Unfortunately, nobody has much reason to pay attention to it either.
Think about the businesses you personally remember. Chances are, they have something recognizable about the way they communicate. Perhaps they're unusually straightforward, have a distinctive sense of humour, or demonstrate a level of expertise that makes their opinions worth listening to. Their personality comes through because they're comfortable being themselves rather than trying to satisfy every possible audience.
That doesn't mean brands need to become controversial or deliberately provocative. There's a difference between having a point of view and manufacturing an argument for attention. A company can be professional, approachable, and commercially successful while still expressing opinions that distinguish it from its competitors.
In fact, knowing what you believe about your industry, and being able to explain why, may be one of the most useful foundations for a distinctive brand voice.
Making room for something different
None of this suggests that businesses should abandon established marketing principles or pursue originality at any cost. Consistency, clarity, and familiarity are important parts of building trust. Customers need to understand what a company offers, and creative experimentation should never make that unnecessarily difficult.
But consistency shouldn't mean predictability, and professionalism shouldn't require every company to sound the same.
Perhaps the more useful approach is to spend less time asking what competitors are doing and more time examining what makes our own businesses interesting. Every organization has experiences, opinions, people, and ways of working that are genuinely its own. Those details are often far more compelling than another carefully polished statement about quality, innovation, or customer satisfaction.
The challenge for marketing teams is to recognize those qualities and find ways to communicate them without filtering away everything that makes them distinctive.
As an industry, we've become exceptionally capable of producing marketing materials. We have sophisticated technology, remarkable access to information, and more opportunities to reach customers than any previous generation of marketers.
But I wonder whether we've become so preoccupied with the process of marketing that we're spending less time thinking about what we actually want to say.
There's certainly no shortage of content. What seems harder to find is a recognizable point of view, an original observation, or a business willing to communicate without sounding as though its words have been approved by every department in the building. Perhaps that's something worth reconsidering before we produce the next campaign.
A Challenge for Your Next Marketing Meeting
Before approving your next campaign or refreshing your website, try a simple experiment.
Place your company's latest marketing materials alongside those of three competitors. Cover the logos and company names, then ask a few people who weren't involved in creating them to identify which materials belong to your business.
Pay particular attention to how they explain their choices. Can they recognize your company through its language, imagery, ideas, or personality? Or are they relying almost entirely on familiar colours and visual elements?
If people struggle to tell the difference, the answer isn't necessarily a new logo or a more expensive advertising campaign. It may be time to reconsider what your business is saying and whether that message genuinely reflects what makes you different.
At Aliant Brands, we believe that effective branding begins with understanding what makes an organization distinctive. We help businesses translate that understanding into creative communication and meaningful brand experiences.
If you're questioning whether your marketing is making the right impression, we'd welcome the opportunity to explore some new ideas with you.
