Why are brands starting to look, sound, and act the same?

There is a great homogenisation taking place, and it’s making me feel a bit insane.

A new olive oil in a squeezy bottle with Mediterranean inspired illustrations, a neon-coloured probiotic soda with a bubble font, a laundry detergent product that looks like it was designed by Jony Ive.

On TikTok: “I quit my 9-5 in corporate to start a vegan protein bar”. On instagram: unboxing with ASMR of fingernails tapping a box. On LinkedIn: a ‘formal apology’ from the brand stating they apologise for making their product too tasty.

Even the biggest players in the FMCG space have suddenly adopted the tone of an internet-native Gen Zer

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But why?

Putting AI aside for now (I’ll get to that), analytics and outsourcing are destroying personality and nuance at a devastating pace.

The Expert Trap

Outsourcing is a when a company hires a third-party expert to handle an area they can’t do themselves, so founders can focus on the most “important” things.

It is by far the quickest way to build a business today. Call a freelance expert and get them to bring your idea to life. Outsourcing is not exactly a new thing, but what is new, is just how quickly founders move to outsourcing. It used to be reserved for areas like accounting and legal, now it’s about outsourcing the soul of the company before it even has one.

The founders haven’t spent years learning who their brand is and what they want to do differently. They’ve just had an idea and gone straight to outsourcing. Which makes them extremely malleable.

Gut feeling and new ideas no longer contend with efficiency. “Hire the best people and you will win” is the kind of advice they bang on about on productivity podcasts. Which obviously, is true to an extent. But the by-product of that advice, is that you stop trusting yourself altogether. You bring in an expert.

How you do that, is typically through a freelancer or an agency.

The expert then shows you the data. They run the analytics, see what’s working and then repeat it for your brand. “I think we need a 25-30 year old woman unboxing your product in a sterile kitchen pretending she hasn’t been paid to act pleasantly surprised after tasting your product”.

But it’s not just your brand they’re doing it for, they’re running the same process for every brand they work with.

The experts trust the analytics, and the founders trust the experts. Nobody in the process is trusting themselves. And as a result, nobody is trying anything new.

The funny thing about this, is that normally the original idea that works well, only works well because it’s original. By the time your brand repeats this original idea, it’s no longer original and therefore doesn’t get the response you wanted.

Analytics is working off data from the past. It cannot predict the future. All that analytics can tell you is what’s happened in the past. Yet founders and experts alike are using analytics as a compass.

But then it gets worse. Now even the experts are getting shafted. Before even outsourcing the work, there has become a free and more knowledgeable expert.

The Algorithmic Average

AI has become ‘the expert’. And we are slowly outsourcing our creativity, personality and instinct to the robots. They know best, so why put myself out there by proposing an idea that might not work. But we need to remember that AI is still just a prediction of the average. And what that shows, is that people are more comfortable being average than different.

There’s a brilliant clip of Ash Sarkar on Question Time speaking on how AI exploits our insecurities. She says that students are using AI from a sense of “if I do this myself, I’m not going to do it that well, so I’m gonna turn to AI, which makes it easier”. It’s almost as though we are bypassing potential judgment of our efforts because it wasn’t us who did the work. In the same way that a founder can avoid blame by hiring an expert.

And the good news, if there is any, is that this system isn’t working.

Suddenly everyone has the same access to “expert” knowledge. It’s getting to a point where there is close to no friction in building a brand. And what it’s resulting in, is copious amounts of the same.

This sea of same means that it’s becoming easier to spot true originality. I can’t say for certain how long it will last, but I have a growing amount of opt

imism that human originality will always come out on top. We are wired to notice what’s different. When everything is polished by AI and experts, the unpolished human element becomes the highest luxury.