New feature: Julia Payne in Street Fight on why the strongest brands don’t copy their competitors
Julia Payne has been featured in StreetFight, exploring why sustainable growth comes from building a distinctive position in the market rather than copying what successful competitors are already doing.
Watching competitors is sensible. Copying them is not.
When another company is growing quickly, launching new products or gaining attention, it is tempting to assume they have found the formula.
So businesses start adopting similar messaging, following the same trends and adding comparable features.
The problem is that keeping pace with competitors does not create competitive advantage.
It often does the opposite.
Looking like your competitors makes growth harder
Most businesses do not deliberately decide to become generic. It happens gradually.
One competitor changes its positioning. Others follow. Everyone starts talking about the same trends, using the same language and making broadly similar promises.
Eventually, buyers struggle to understand the difference.
When that happens, price, speed and convenience become increasingly important because the business has given customers little else on which to make their decision.
Real differentiation starts with a more difficult question:
What can customers get from us that they cannot easily get somewhere else?
The businesses that answer that clearly are not simply communicating differently.
They are usually making deliberate choices about who they serve, what problems they solve and which capabilities they build.
AI is making differentiation even more important
Standing apart has always mattered. AI-driven discovery is raising the stakes.
Buyers are increasingly using tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity alongside traditional search to research markets, compare providers and identify potential suppliers.
If five businesses describe themselves in almost identical terms, there is very little reason for either a buyer or an AI system to distinguish between them.
Generic claims about innovation, optimisation, customer focus or AI capabilities are unlikely to create meaningful separation when everybody is making them.
Distinctive expertise matters more.
So do measurable customer outcomes, original thinking, credible experience and a clear point of view.
In that environment, differentiation is no longer simply a branding exercise.
It becomes part of how your business gets discovered, understood and recommended.
Differentiation has to exist beyond the marketing
A new strapline will not fix an undifferentiated business.
Neither will a website redesign.
Sustainable differentiation has to run through what the organisation actually does.
Positioning, product development, operations, customer experience and service delivery all need to reinforce the same promise.
If marketing claims the company offers something meaningfully different but customers experience exactly the same thing they could get elsewhere, the positioning eventually collapses.
This becomes particularly important as founder-led businesses scale.
What originally made the company different may have lived largely in the founder’s instincts, experience and way of solving customer problems.
As the business grows, those strengths need to become repeatable organisational capabilities.
The objective is not to be different for the sake of being different.
It is to build advantages customers value and competitors find difficult to reproduce.
Read Julia’s full Street Fight article
In the full article, Julia explores why copying competitors weakens positioning, how AI is changing the economics of differentiation and why sustainable competitive advantage must be built into the business rather than added later through marketing.
Read: The Strongest Brands Don’t Copy Their Competitors in Street Fight.