Open five SaaS websites in your category. They all have the same hero section with the same stock photography of diverse professionals smiling at laptops. They all promise to "streamline your workflow" or "boost productivity." They all have the same three-column feature section. The same pastel color schemes. The same vague benefit statements that could apply to literally any product.
Now look at B2B consulting firms. Every single one claims to be "strategic partners" who "deliver measurable results" through "innovative solutions." Their case studies are formatted identically. Their service pages could be copied and pasted between competitors with minimal editing.
Check out ecommerce brands in fashion or beauty. Same Instagram aesthetic. Same influencer partnerships. Same "empowerment" messaging. Same product photography style. Same email campaigns. You could swap logos and nobody would notice.
This isn't a coincidence. It's the inevitable result of an entire industry reading the same marketing blogs, following the same "best practices," hiring from the same talent pool, and optimizing for the same metrics. Everyone's trying to reduce risk by copying what seems to work for others, which creates a sea of sameness where nobody stands out.
And here's the uncomfortable truth: if you can't differentiate your marketing, you compete on price. If you compete on price in a commoditized market, you lose to whoever can afford the smallest margins. This is a race to the bottom that you don't want to run.
Let's talk about how to actually stand out in markets where everyone looks identical. Not through tactics or tricks, but through fundamental strategic choices that force you to be different in ways that matter.
Why "Best Practices" Create Commodity Marketing
The marketing industry loves best practices. They're safe. They're defensible. When your boss asks why you chose a particular approach, "it's best practice" sounds way better than "I'm experimenting with something weird."
But best practices, by definition, are what everyone else is doing. They're the average of what has worked historically across many companies. They're optimized for not failing, not for breaking through.
When everyone follows best practices, everyone converges on similar strategies. SaaS companies all end up with the same freemium model, same PLG motions, same content marketing approach. B2B service firms all chase the same enterprise clients with the same thought leadership tactics. DTC brands all use the same Facebook ad funnels and influencer playbooks.
Best practices don't create competitive advantages. They create competitive parity. You need competitive advantages to win.
Here's my controversial opinion: you should deliberately violate best practices in strategic ways. Not randomly. Not stupidly. But purposefully, in areas where being different creates value that matters to your specific audience.
The companies that break through in crowded markets are almost always the ones doing something that conventional wisdom says you shouldn't do.
Industry-Specific Sameness and How to Break It
Different industries have different flavors of sameness. Let's look at specific markets and what it takes to actually differentiate.
SaaS and Software
The sameness trap: Every SaaS company positions around productivity, efficiency, and ease of use. Every demo shows the same happy path. Every case study focuses on time saved and ROI. Every pricing page has three tiers with the middle one highlighted. Every free trial is 14 days.
Most SaaS marketing teams think they're differentiated because their product has different features than competitors. But customers don't buy features—they buy outcomes. And if everyone promises the same outcomes, features don't matter enough.
How to actually stand out:
- Pick a specific enemy. Basecamp doesn't just say they're project management software. They're explicitly against the complexity and enterprise bloat of tools like Jira and Asana. Their entire marketing message is "we're the alternative for people who hate those tools." This immediately resonates with a segment while repelling others—which is the point.
- Serve a narrow niche obsessively. Instead of being "project management for everyone," be "project management specifically for architectural firms." Build features only architects need. Use language architects use. Show case studies only from architecture. You'll lose the other 98% of the market, but you'll own the 2% you're targeting.
- Take a controversial stance on how work should happen. 37signals (Basecamp's parent company) constantly publishes opinions about remote work, meeting culture, and work-life balance that many companies disagree with. This filters for customers who share their values and creates fierce loyalty.
- Show the messy reality, not the happy path. Every competitor shows perfect demos. Show what happens when things go wrong. Show the migration process. Show the learning curve. Transparency differentiates when everyone else is polishing their image.
B2B Professional Services
The sameness trap: Consulting firms, agencies, and professional services all claim decades of experience, proven methodologies, and results-driven approaches. Their websites feature the same corporate stock photos. Their proposals look identical. Their differentiation comes down to "we care more" or "our people are better," which every competitor also claims.
The problem is trust. In services, you're selling expertise and capability that buyers can't easily evaluate upfront. So everyone defaults to credibility signals—big client logos, awards, thought leadership—that everyone else also has.
How to actually stand out:
- Specialize so narrowly it seems stupid. Don't be a "digital marketing agency." Be "the paid search agency for DTC supplement brands doing $5M-$50M annually." Yes, you've eliminated 99% of potential clients. But the 1% you're targeting will see you as the only obvious choice because you speak their language and understand their specific challenges.
- Take a stand against industry norms. If everyone charges hourly, charge flat rates or value-based pricing. If everyone does year-long contracts, offer month-to-month. If everyone requires big retainers, work on commission. Being structurally different forces different conversations with prospects.
- Productize your service. Most consultants sell custom everything. Create a specific productized offering with a fixed scope, fixed price, and fixed timeline. "We do a two-week SEO technical audit for $15,000, and here's exactly what you get." Productization creates clarity that custom quotes can't match.
- Show your actual process, not vague methodology. Everyone has a "proven process." Show yours in detail. Not just high-level steps, but the actual templates, frameworks, and tools you use. Give away the recipe. The clients worth having understand that knowing the recipe doesn't mean they can or want to cook it themselves.
Ecommerce and DTC Brands
The sameness trap: Every DTC brand has the same origin story (founder couldn't find X, so they made their own). Same Instagram aesthetic. Same "we're disrupting a stale industry" positioning. Same influencer partnerships. Same Facebook ad funnels. Same Shopify template designs.
The DTC playbook worked incredibly well from 2014-2020. Then everyone copied it, and now the playbook is table stakes. Warby Parker, Casper, Away, Glossier, Allbirds—they all ran variations of the same strategy. The new brands trying to copy that playbook are discovering it doesn't work anymore.
How to actually stand out:
- Be opinionated about who your product is NOT for. Most brands try to appeal to everyone. Liquid Death canned water explicitly markets to people who think traditional wellness branding is boring. They use metal band aesthetics and irreverent humor that alienates huge segments while attracting their specific audience intensely.
- Build community, not just audience. Stop thinking about followers and start thinking about members. Peloton isn't selling exercise bikes—they're selling membership in a fitness community. Your ecommerce brand can do similar things at smaller scale through Discord servers, in-person meetups, or exclusive member experiences.
- Create content that's actually entertaining, not just educational. Every brand creates "educational content" that's thinly veiled product marketing. Create content people genuinely want to consume even if they never buy. Patagonia's environmental activism content. Cards Against Humanity's ridiculous stunts. These create brand affinity that product content never will.
- Use channels your competitors ignore. If everyone in your space is all-in on Instagram and Facebook, what about TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, direct mail, guerrilla marketing, or retail pop-ups? Being where competitors aren't gives you undivided attention.
B2C Services (Real Estate, Insurance, Financial Planning)
The sameness trap: These industries might have the worst sameness problem of all. Every real estate agent promises "white glove service." Every insurance broker promises to "find you the best rates." Every financial planner promises "personalized advice." The websites are interchangeable. The marketing is generic platitudes.
These industries are often heavily regulated, which creates real constraints on what you can say and do. But constraints breed creativity if you're willing to think differently.
How to actually stand out:
- Niche by psychographics, not just demographics. Don't be "financial planning for doctors." Be "financial planning for doctors who are sick of the traditional wealth management industry and want straight talk without the condescension." The specificity of the psychographic targeting attracts people who identify strongly while repelling those who don't.
- Create educational content that's genuinely useful even if people don't hire you. Most service providers create "educational" content that's really just lead generation wrapped in info. Create genuinely helpful content with no strings attached. Teach people how to do what you do. The clients worth having will hire you anyway because they don't want to do it themselves, and everyone else wouldn't have hired you regardless.
- Compete on transparency, not just trust. If everyone in your industry is opaque about pricing, processes, and tradeoffs, radical transparency becomes your differentiator. Show your profit margins. Explain exactly how you make money. Discuss the downsides of your recommendations. Transparency builds trust better than claims of trustworthiness.
- Build a personal brand, not just a company brand. In service industries, people hire people. Most individuals hide behind company brands. Do the opposite—put yourself forward as the face of your business. Share your actual opinions, experiences, and personality. This won't scale like a depersonalized brand, but in local service markets, it creates much stronger connections.
The Strategic Choices That Force Differentiation
Beyond industry-specific tactics, there are fundamental strategic decisions that force you to differentiate whether you want to or not.
Choice #1: Who You Refuse to Serve
Most companies define their target market by who they want to serve. Better companies define it by who they refuse to serve.
When you explicitly say "we're not for X type of customer," you force clarity. You stop diluting your message trying to appeal to everyone. You give your ideal customers a clear signal that you're built for them specifically.
Basecamp famously doesn't serve enterprise customers. They could make way more money if they built enterprise features and sold big contracts. But they refuse, because serving enterprise would require becoming the kind of company they don't want to be.
This is a strategic choice that forces differentiation. When you refuse profitable customer segments, you can go all-in on serving the segments you do target in ways that companies trying to serve everyone can't match.
Choice #2: What You Won't Compromise On
Every company faces pressure to compromise. Customers want features you think are bad ideas. Sales wants pricing flexibility. Partners want special treatment. Investors want faster growth.
The companies that stand out make clear decisions about what they won't compromise on, even when it costs them deals.
Everlane won't manufacture anywhere they can't guarantee ethical labor practices, even though it makes their products more expensive and limits their production capacity. This isn't a marketing message—it's a strategic constraint that forces their business to operate differently.
Identify what you won't compromise on, even if it means losing business. That constraint becomes a filter that shapes every decision and makes you fundamentally different from competitors who compromise on those things.
Choice #3: The Timeline You Optimize For
Most companies optimize for quarterly results because that's what boards and investors demand. Some companies choose different timelines, which forces different strategies.
Amazon famously optimizes for long-term value, even at the expense of short-term profits. This allows them to make strategic bets that competitors can't afford to make because those competitors need to show quarterly growth.
Patagonia optimizes for multi-generational environmental impact, not quarterly revenue. This allows them to do things like sue the presidential administration, tell customers not to buy their products on Black Friday, and invest in sustainable materials that cost more—all strategies that differentiate them but would be impossible if they optimized for short-term returns.
What's your optimization timeline? If it's the same as everyone else's, your strategies will look like everyone else's.
Choice #4: Your Distribution Strategy
Most companies use the same distribution channels as everyone in their industry. SaaS companies all use inbound marketing, product-led growth, and sales teams. DTC brands all use paid social and influencers. B2B services all use content marketing and conferences.
What if you deliberately chose different channels? Not as a supplement to the standard playbook, but as your primary strategy?
Morning Brew built their media company almost entirely through referral growth when everyone else was focused on social media and paid acquisition. This forced them to create content that people actively wanted to share, which is different from content optimized for algorithms.
Cards Against Humanity intentionally avoided major retailers for years, selling primarily direct and through small specialty shops. This controlled their distribution in ways that mass retail would have destroyed, even though it limited their growth.
Your choice of primary distribution channel forces certain strategic decisions and makes others impossible. Choose deliberately, not just by default.
The Courage to Be Disliked
Here's what nobody wants to hear: truly differentiated marketing means some people will dislike you. Not just ignore you—actively dislike you.
If everyone finds your marketing acceptable, you're bland. Bland marketing doesn't break through. Bland marketing gets ignored in favor of competitors who are equally bland but cheaper or more established.
The brands that break through in crowded markets are polarizing. They attract their audience intensely while repelling everyone else.
Liquid Death energy drink marketing offends huge segments of the traditional health and wellness audience. But the people who love it, really love it. That intense love from a smaller audience is worth more than mild acceptance from a larger audience.
Patagonia's environmental activism annoys people who just want to buy jackets without political messaging. But it creates fierce loyalty among people who share their values.
The Body Shop's anti-beauty-industry messaging alienated customers who like traditional luxury beauty. But it attracted customers who felt alienated by that industry.
You can't differentiate without excluding. The question is whether you're excluding deliberately and strategically, or accidentally by trying to appeal to everyone and ending up appealing to no one.
The Risk of Being Different vs. The Risk of Being the Same
Let's be honest about risks. Being different is risky. You might choose wrong. Your differentiation might not resonate. You might alienate too many people.
But being the same is also risky. When you look like everyone else, you compete primarily on price and distribution muscle. If you're not the biggest or cheapest, you lose.
Most companies fear the risk of being different more than the risk of being the same because the risk of being different is visible and immediate. You launch a campaign that's weird, and people notice and comment. The risk of being the same is invisible and gradual. You launch conventional campaigns that perform adequately but never break through, and you slowly become irrelevant without noticing.
I'd argue the risk of sameness is actually higher for most companies, especially smaller ones without massive advantages in pricing or distribution. You need differentiation more than established market leaders do.
Building a Strategy That Forces Differentiation
If you want to stand out in a crowded market, here's how to build strategy that forces differentiation rather than hoping for it:
Start with constraints, not opportunities. What won't you do? Who won't you serve? What won't you compromise on? These constraints shape everything else.
Choose one thing to be dramatically better at than anyone else. Not five things. One thing. Then organize your entire strategy around being genuinely exceptional at that one thing, even if it means being mediocre or bad at other things competitors prioritize.
Identify what you can uniquely deliver that competitors can't or won't. This isn't about what's theoretically possible. It's about what you specifically can do because of your team, your values, your position, or your constraints that competitors can't replicate even if they wanted to.
Build strategies around your actual differentiation, not aspirational differentiation. Most companies build strategies around how they want to be different, not how they actually are different. Figure out what's genuinely unique about you right now, then amplify it rather than trying to create differentiation from scratch.
Accept that you'll repel some people. Build this into your strategy intentionally. Know who you're excluding and why. Make peace with it.
The Bottom Line on Standing Out
Marketing strategy in competitive markets isn't about being better at the same things everyone else does. It's about doing different things that matter to specific people.
Best practices create average results. If you want above-average results in a crowded market, you need to deliberately break best practices in strategic ways.
This doesn't mean being randomly weird or different for the sake of difference. It means making strategic choices that force you to operate differently from competitors in ways that create genuine value for your target audience.
Choose who you won't serve. Decide what you won't compromise on. Pick a different timeline to optimize for. Use different distribution channels. Take controversial stances. Serve narrow niches obsessively.
Yes, this is riskier than following best practices. But in crowded markets where everyone looks the same, following best practices is the biggest risk of all. You'll blend into the background while someone bolder takes the market share you thought was yours.
Differentiation isn't a tactic. It's a strategic commitment to being genuinely different in ways that matter to people who care. Make that commitment, or accept that you'll compete on price with everyone else who looks exactly like you.
