The cost of sounding like everyone

Read enough brand copy and you start to notice it is all the same. Everyone is passionate. Everyone is innovative. Everyone puts the customer at the heart of everything they do. The words are so common they have stopped carrying information — they are noise dressed as meaning.

Companies reach for these words because they are safe. Nobody was ever fired for calling their company innovative. But safe language has a cost that does not show up on any invoice: it makes you invisible. If you sound like everyone, you are asking to be remembered as no one.

The alternative is frightening, because it requires saying something specific enough that some people will disagree. A real voice has edges. It leaves things out. It commits to a way of seeing the world that not everyone will share, which is exactly what makes the people who do share it feel found.

We spend a lot of time deleting the words that could belong to anyone. What is left is usually smaller, plainer and far more yours.