The brand you’re looking at isn’t the brand you think it is
There’s a conversation that happens on almost every brand project we work on. Usually a few weeks in. Someone (often the founder, sometimes the CEO) points to a brand they admire and says some version of: we want a bit of that.
I get it. When you haven’t been through a proper brand process before, looking outward feels like the sensible place to start. You’re trying to find a reference point for something that’s genuinely hard to articulate. And there are some brands out there that are clearly doing something right.
The problem is what you’re actually looking at.
Author: Alex Waite, Strategy Director
You’re only seeing the shop window
When a founder says they love what Wiz are doing — and they get referenced a lot in our world — they’re not seeing Wiz. They’re seeing its outer layers. The visual identity, a conference presence, maybe a campaign or two. What they’re not seeing is the thousands of decisions made behind the scenes that produced those outputs. The difficult internal conversations. The things that were tried and killed. The cultural choices baked into how that company hires, prices, and handles a customer when things go wrong.
What built Wiz isn’t visible from the outside. And it’s not replicable by pointing at it.
So when you use another brand as your primary reference point, you’re not actually borrowing a strategy. You’re borrowing an aesthetic. And that tends to produce something that looks like inspiration but functions like a category norm.
It collapses your thinking before you’ve started
There’s a compounding problem too. The brands that get referenced in these conversations tend to cluster. A handful of names come up again and again — companies in broadly similar spaces, with broadly similar proof points. You start looking at them, they start to feel like the frame, and before you’ve really dug into who you are, you’ve already decided who you should look like.
The irony is you end up with differentiation that isn’t. Lots of very similar companies all claiming to be different in almost identical ways.
You’re also chasing a moving target
The practical bit that doesn’t get said enough, is you have no visibility on what’s happening inside that company. They might be pivoting. They could be seeing problems in their customer base, or shifting their positioning because something quietly stopped working. What looks like confidence from the outside might be a business in the middle of figuring it out.
If you’re building toward something they’re already moving away from, you’ve lost time you can’t afford at this stage.
Why this matters more now
With agentic buyers doing more and more of the first pass of research before we ever get involved, the signals your brand puts out are being scraped, distilled, and compared across a much wider surface area than before. Review sites, press releases, employer review platforms — all of it feeds in.
If your brand is a close echo of someone else in your category, the attribution problem gets worse. People — and increasingly, bots — will remember the bigger brand. You end up building associations that land somewhere else.
Clarity is what protects you. A point of view specific enough that you can’t just swap a competitor’s logo in front of it and have it still make sense.
What to actually do with the founder conversation
If you’re a CMO or brand lead fielding this kind of pressure from your leadership team, the most useful thing isn’t to push back on the brands they’re referencing. It’s to get curious about why they love them. What do they think those brands have that you don’t? What do they think you’re currently missing?
Because in my experience, the answer is usually already inside the business. There are things that are genuinely distinctive about how your company was built, why it exists, what the founder actually believes — that just haven’t been properly surfaced or named yet. Our job most of the time isn’t to arrive with something new. It’s to find what’s already there and help people see it.
The brands worth admiring didn’t get there by watching other brands. They got there by committing, over a long time, to a point of view that was specifically and stubbornly theirs.
That’s what compounds. The commitment to a point of view, expressed visually and consistently over time. Get that right and the aesthetic doesn’t just look good, it starts to stick.
If you’d like to hear more of Alex’s thoughts on this topic, tune in to the ‘Build your own brand, not someone else’s‘ Changemakers podcast episode.
