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Dare to Stand Out: Navigating Differentiation in the Age of “Blanding”

Posted on: April 5, 2024
Posted by: Takt
Read time: 13 minutes
Tags: Brand Messaging
Brand Strategy
Strategy
Visual Identity

Doesn’t it seem that despite being surrounded by ‘good design,’ creativity has hit a curious plateau? That, with each corporate rebrand, organizations seem to be trading in their individuality and differentiation for what they think constitutes ‘good design’?

Make no mistake, we’re genuinely happy to be done with busy website backgrounds, tiny text, web 2.0 gradients and borders — especially borders. And, there’s no question that we all benefit from intuitive, accessible platforms and beautifully crafted products. That said, this rising tide hasn’t come without its setbacks: The downside of an entire generation of designers drinking from the same hose of inspiration is ubiquity. So here we are: well into what some are calling the age of Blanding.

What’s wrong with a beautiful — if unoriginal — brand, you might ask? In short, an indistinguishable brand — no matter how foxy — is a vulnerable brand. When your strongest advantage is only skin deep, it ultimately doesn’t take much to have it scratched away. In the words of Warren Buffet (someone who knows a thing or two about spotting genuine differentiators at the corporate level), “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.” And in case you haven’t noticed, the economic tide is receding, revealing the vulnerabilities of brands that chose conformity and beauty over courage and substance.

If you’re reading this thinking “well, shit… that’s me,” you’re not alone. A study sponsored by JKR found that just 15% of branded assets tested were truly distinctive—a frightening notion when combined with the reality of a looming recession—and the inevitable race towards commoditization that comes with it.

So what can be done to strengthen your brand from Blanding’s receding tides? Let’s take a look at two possible scenarios:

If you’re considering a large corporate rebrand or starting something new entirely

Fight the low-hanging temptation to rest your brand’s laurels on being the “best” in a given category. “Better” is graded on a curve that has an endpoint. And as we know, “better” delivers diminishing returns. Ultimately, if it’s easy to do it becomes table stakes and will be competed away.

Conversely, brands that aim to genuinely differentiate prove far more resilient during economic downturns and find new avenues to create real value where others are left competing for scraps. It’s important to note that “differentiation” isn’t merely a question of visual identity. As we know, the strongest brands consistently resonate across every touchpoint and interaction, from how they look, to their internal culture, client relationships, product strategies, and everything in-between.

But what about heavily regulated industries like finance, pharma, real estate, law, etc? Even in industries where some level of ubiquity and conformity is inescapable, opportunities for differentiation exist, if you’re curious enough to look for them (see Michael Porter’s Five Forces).

And — this one is important — because branding requires courage, leadership, vision, it demands deliberate C-Suite involvement. It’s remarkable how often the branding process gets imprudently delegated to an internal designer or “someone in marketing.” A rebrand of genuine substance requires inputs and perspectives that encapsulate the entirety of an organization – from the “top” down.

What are some ways to differentiate that extend beyond a full rebrand?

We get it — there are any number of reasons your organization may feel some trepidation at the notion of a full rebrand project. Fortunately, there are still functional strategies you can utilize to further differentiate yourself from the competition and help foster organizational resilience. Let’s explore two of our favourites:

The Branded Feature. A branded feature is when you take a feature of your product or offering and—instead if merely describing it—you brand it. One example for those of us old enough to remember is that of Chrysler and Corinthian Leather. In 1974, when automotive giant Chrysler aimed to differentiate itself as a luxury automaker, its then-advertising agency, Bozell, coined the term “Corinthian Leather” to describe the otherwise quite common leather upholstery used in certain luxury vehicles. The resulting advertising campaign has since gone down in the history as one of the smartest ad spots of all time.

A more recent example is Apple’s Magsafe technology. But, a branded feature can also be a repeated and distinguishable design element that becomes intrinsically connected to your brand, such as McDonald’s golden arches, Starbucks’ green and Tiffany Jewlery’s iconic baby blue jewelry box. None of the examples we just went over are remarkably beautiful or necessarily aesthetic, but they became ubiquitous with the brands themselves, and the thoughts, feelings, and associations they intended to create

Branded Moments. No business can do everything well. Instead, a smarter strategy is to excel at a few things that are memorable—i.e. “Branded moments”. As the Heath’s explain in the “The Power of Moments”, every brand experience has transition, peaks, and pits. Those defining moments can become powerful signature or branded experiences.

My favorite example is that of “The Magic Castle” in Los Angeles; an underdog hotel that struggled to compete with the city’s better-known commendations and instead of trying to be “best”, chose to be different. The hotel setup a pool-side popsicle hotline: A red phone guests could pick up to order a complementary popsicle, delivered on a silver tray.

Unlocking your brand’s edge

Finding your brand’s edge can happen in a number of different ways. But we promise – it doesn’t require inventing new products, designing a new logo, or building a new corporate website. You just have to be curious enough to look within. Strategic initiatives like Branded Features and Branded Moments are approaches worth exploring, because they’re designed to accentuate what already makes your brand remarkable, and take it to a whole new level.

Interested in exploring ways to differentiate your brand and further cement your strategic positioning? We’d love to talk.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about brand differentiation, answered from experience.

Where does the term white space come from?

White space entered strategy through W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, which described uncontested market space, and Mark W. Johnson’s Seizing the White Space, which applied the idea to business models. In branding, white space refers to narrative territory competitors have left unclaimed, underdeveloped, or cannot credibly hold.

How do you ensure a brand strategy reflects the organization's actual audiences, not just its internal assumptions about them?

Through external research designed to surface the decision criteria, trust signals, and information needs of audiences who don’t yet have a relationship with the organization, not just surveys of existing customers.

Internal assumptions are almost always partially wrong, especially about the audiences the organization is trying to reach in the next five years. We design research to understand how prospective audiences actually make decisions, what language they use, and what trust signals matter to them, then build the brand strategy around those findings rather than the organization’s self-image.

The most common gap we encounter is organizations that understand their historical audience well but have limited insight into adjacent or aspirational segments. Closing that gap is what makes a brand strategy forward-looking rather than retrospective. We’ve applied this audience-first approach across organizations like Kelowna Dental Centre, Worldwide Boat, and Evergreen MD Aesthetics.

What is the Corporate Brand Identity Matrix?

The Corporate Brand Identity Matrix is a framework for testing whether an organization can deliver what its brand claims. It maps nine elements across three layers (Internal, Bridge, and External) with the Brand Promise at the centre, and works less like a brand-building canvas and more like a lie detector for the gap between claims and reality.

Read Your Brand is not a Stack to learn more.

Does differentiation matter in university branding?

Yes, but not in the same way for every institution. Program availability, geography, tuition, scholarships, family proximity, and career outcomes often shape the first filter. Differentiation becomes most powerful once practical constraints have narrowed the set, and the student, parent, employer, donor, or faculty recruit is deciding what kind of institution they are willing to believe in.

How do professional services firms differentiate when competitors all sound the same?

The differentiation problem in professional services is rarely due to a lack of expertise. Most professional services firms are genuinely excellent at what they do. The problem is they all describe it in the same way: safe language, interchangeable positioning, and a website full of practice area pages that could belong to any competitor.

Differentiation starts with identifying what’s actually true and specific about the firm, then building a brand system that makes that specificity impossible to miss.

We do this through stakeholder interviews, competitive audits, and audience research to find the positioning gap between where the firm sits and how it presents itself. From there, we build messaging, visual identity, and site architecture that work together to make the firm’s point of view tangible.

We’ve done this across law firms like Boughton Law and Watson Goepel, financial services firms like Smythe LLP, and compliance firms like Cogency Global.

How do you build a financial services brand that can grow into new markets without losing coherence?

By investing in the structural layer of the brand before finalizing the visual identity. The brands that scale well in financial services are built on a clear institutional logic (a defensible answer to “what are we for and who do we serve best”) paired with a brand architecture flexible enough to accommodate new service lines, geographies, and audience segments without requiring reinvention every time.

That means defining the positioning, messaging hierarchy, and rules for how the brand flexes at the system level, not just at the launch-day level. A brand built around one service line that needs to accommodate three more will either constrain growth or fracture under the pressure of it.

For firms operating across regions, the system also needs to account for market-specific content needs, language requirements, and regulatory considerations. We’ve built these scalable systems for firms like Cogency Global and PaySpyre.