No one starts a business with the intention of blending in.
I’d bet that 9 out of 10 founders reading this would likely agree with me. But take a scroll down LinkedIn Lane on any given day and you’ll find a sea of suspiciously similar-looking posts framed as unique perspectives. So what in the Lara Croft Tomb Raider is going on out there?
Every founder starts with something distinct: an idea, an obsession, an argument they’d happily get involved in at the pub on a Friday night. It’s usually the whole reason the business exists.
Then (often) investment hits, a board is formed, growth targets land, or someone from a Series A firm starts sitting in on calls, and if you’ve really made it, you start getting blind sales emails where you’re the target. It’s usually at this moment that something predictable happens:
The founder starts optimising for ‘not being wrong’, instead of doing all they can to stay memorable, personal, going out on a limb. Pitch decks get safer, more expected. LinkedIn posts get blander. The unique perspective that started it all gets polished time and time again, until it loses the very thing that made it unique to begin with.
Blending in
I call it ‘category camouflage’: the moment a brand becomes indistinguishable from its competitors. And too often, it happens because the founder has, consciously or subconsciously, decided that staying safe is smarter than standing out.
It’s a real, measurable phenomenon, but it’s nothing new.
System1’s Cost of Dull research found neutrality – feeling nothing at all – is the most common response to advertising. Pretty painful. In B2B, it’s even worse: 60% of UK B2B ads generate no emotional response whatsoever.
Adam Morgan at eatbigfish has a name for what’s driving it: the Four Horsemen of the Dullocalypse.
In his words, these are described as:
- Performance marketing that optimises for short-term metrics rather than memory
- Averaging, where everyone copies what’s working for everyone else until nothing looks bad (but nothing stands out either)
- Over-optimisation of brand systems so they work on every screen and touchpoint, which is why so many logos have become the same monotone sans-serif
- And procurement, which often leads to budgets and timelines getting cut, leaving less room to take a campaign from good to great, and more chance of the ‘safe’ version getting shipped instead.
Run a business through all four of those and a founder’s original perspective is lost well before the Series B.
Why is this happening?
I think what we’re seeing here is a crisis of confidence. And a tone-of-voice document, no matter how well intentioned, won’t single-handedly change the mind of a founder who’s already decided that having a perspective is a risk they can’t afford.
The problem is, that decision has a real cost for the business in the long term.
Georgie Leslie, CMO at Future Group, told me on The Brand Hunch podcast about her time running brand at realestate.com.au, market leader against Domain in a category most people assume has a clear winner. Her honest assessment might shock you.
She said, “Is there much difference between Domain and realestate.com.au? Not really. Like functionally, they do the same things.” Customers agreed, in their own way.
They’d tell her, “you’re the red one, I just used the red one,” or “I used the green one,” and couldn’t really say why.
That’s category camouflage operating at its best: two products indistinguishable enough that loyalty comes down to which one appears first on the results page.
Two ways to stand out
Here’s the reassuring part. The nerve required to fix this is usually the same nerve that made someone start a business in the first place.
I’ve had conversations with two very different founders recently that have proven this in their own ways.
Raquel Bouris built WHO IS ELIJAH? into a fragrance house doing eight figures with no traditional ad budget, largely by putting her voice and her audacity front and centre. She shared with me the story of how she once flew to Los Angeles to hand-deliver a bottle of perfume to Sofia Richie Grainge, because she’d noticed Sofia making a purchase and thought, why wait.
That’s a founder deciding her own instincts were a growth channel worth betting on.
In a not-yet-released episode of The Brand Hunch (coming to you this month), Jaimee Vilela explains how she did close to the opposite at Cooki Haircare, scaling from $179,000 to $3 million on the discipline of just two channels: Meta and email.
Her mantra is, “strategy is what you say no to.” For two years she deliberately kept herself out of Cooki’s ads, resisting the pressure to become the face of the brand. Then she tested it.
“Once I did it, it did work,” she said, and Cooki now leans on her story where it makes sense. But she’s clear-eyed about the limit: “The founder can be a pillar, but it shouldn’t be the whole thing.”
What’s telling is where they’ve both ended up. Raquel has started pulling herself back from being the whole of WHO IS ELIJAH?’s story, treating her personal brand as one lever among several rather than the entire engine.
Conversely, Jaimee has been testing herself in Cooki’s ads, and watching it pay off in terms of performance. Two founders, starting from opposite ends, arriving at the same conclusion. Personal brand isn’t a religion, but it isn’t optional extra credit either. It’s a lever. You pull it when it feels like the right decision, and you let go when it doesn’t.
That’s also, not coincidentally, how boards should be thinking about brand generally: brand belongs on the balance sheet, not buried in the marketing budget as a discretionary cost.
Coca-Cola’s polar bear and Nike’s swoosh are distinctive assets that competitors can’t copy, built by founders and marketers who were willing to be memorable when memorable felt risky. Distinctiveness compounds. Camouflage does not.
So here’s the test, borrowed loosely from eatbigfish’s own Anti-Dull Dial:
Before your next pitch deck, ad, or LinkedIn post goes out, ask yourself — Would a competitor be comfortable publishing this under their own logo? If the answer is yes, you might have found yourself dressed head to toe in camouflage. And camouflage, by definition, is designed to be walked straight past.
Being brave enough to be seen is not a personality trait some founders have and others don’t. It’s usually already there. It’s the same instinct that convinced you the idea was worth starting in the first place. The only question is whether you’re willing to let it back out from behind the shrubbery.
- Lindsay Rogers is the managing director of Chello.
