Why Does Every Brand Sound Exactly the Same?

Wendy’s started it, or at least gets credit for starting it. The snarky fast food Twitter account. Brands dunking on each other. Corporate voices that sounded like a 24-year-old social media manager.

Then every brand tried to do it. And then, having all tried to do it, they all ended up in the same place: a performance of personality that has been so thoroughly studied, templated, and replicated that it is now its own form of corporate blandness.

The Template

You know the voice. It goes something like: lowercase letters, occasional self-deprecation, enthusiasm expressed in fragments, concern for social issues expressed in language that commits to nothing, humor that is safe enough to be unfunny, and the word ‘community’ used for the customer base of a company that sells you protein powder, weight loss supplements, or nootropics

This voice exists because it was A/B tested into existence. Brands discovered that conversational, relatable copy performed better in engagement metrics than formal corporate language. They hired people to produce it. Those people were trained on examples. The examples all started to look the same.

AI Made It Worse

The natural endpoint of this process is AI-generated brand content trained on the corpus of the existing brand voice template, producing copy that is indistinguishable from the template, at scale, at zero marginal cost.

This is already happening. A significant percentage of the brand emails in your inbox, the social media posts you scroll past, and the product descriptions you skim were generated by AI systems optimized for the metrics that the brand voice template was designed to hit.

The result is a communications environment that is more voluminous, more uniform, and less trustworthy than at any previous point. Everyone sounds the same because everyone is using the same tools to approximate the same target.

Why It Makes People Crazy

There’s a psychological cost to being communicated at by systems that perform authenticity. Humans are reasonably good at detecting inauthenticity. The uncanny valley applies to personality as much as to CGI faces. Brand voice at this point has crossed into a territory where it registers as performative even when it’s not trying to be.

The McDonald’s CEO burger video was such a spectacle precisely because it made visible what’s usually invisible: a person trying to perform ‘authenticity’ according to a study, but it screams inauthenticity.

The brands that actually break through right now are the ones that don’t use the template at all. That say something specific, in a specific voice, and accept that it will alienate some people.

That’s what differentiation looks like when everyone else has converged on the same performance or corporatocracy.

Stay Frustrated