What a Marketing Strategy Agency Fixes When Your Brand Sounds Generic
You publish a new page, put out your latest LinkedIn post, start a campaign you worked too hard on…and the response is polite silence.
That’s usually the moment founders start thinking they need “better copy”.
Sometimes they do. But more often, the quality of the copy alone is not the issue. The real problem is that the copy is created with no strategic direction, clear branding guidelines or a defined voice that fully represents the business AND powerfully connects with the audience.
A great brand, with a defined message, voice and brand personality ensures that you can stand out and be recognised in a crowded market. It helps a small business to reach out to the right prospects in a meaningful, emotional way, and it creates a baseline for every marketing activity.
So, to keep it simple - if your brand sounds generic, it can affect your positioning, your marketing, and eventually your sales.
How do we fix it?
That’s where a marketing strategy agency comes in! An agency will help you work on your messaging, your marketing positioning, value proposition, as well as brand personality to create a unique brand that’s strategic, impactful and spares you having to explain (for the millionth time) what you do or what you stand for and why a client should choose YOU, rather than a competitor.
The real problem with “generic”
As already shared above, “Generic” isn’t just a tone or voice issue. It’s a positioning issue that shows up in the language and messaging you use in your marketing or sales assets.
When brands feel interchangeable, it’s because the message could be true for a dozen other businesses with the same services, the same target market, and the same promises. You might be excellent and your customers may even say so – but excellence doesn’t translate automatically into a clear reason to choose you.
How To Know Your Branding Isn’t Working
There’s a few key telltale signs that your branding might not be working to your advantage. Some of these include:
Whenever you create a marketing asset, you (or your team) keep rewriting things over and over because it “doesn’t sound quite right”, but nobody can actually say what’s wrong with it
Enquiries come in, but the prospects aren’t the right ones, or they’re sometimes confused about what your offering is and/or are surprised by your price range
Each of your team members has a slightly different way of explaining the business, what you do and your USP
The list could go on, but in short, you might realise that while your business has value and some great customers, growth is currently a struggle because somehow you’re blending in and the brand cannot stand on its own without you - the founder - having to step in to represent it with your own personal brand.
Don’t get us wrong – a great personal brand for a founder or small business owner is definitely an asset, but you still want your business or agency to stand out and be recognised on its own, so you can keep growing the company and achieve your revenue goals.
Why small businesses specifically end up with generic messaging
Of course, small businesses don’t actively choose generic. Often, they just “land” there quite by chance.
Early on, you’re close to the work. You sell through relationships and referrals. You can personally explain what you do in a call, easily adapt to the person in front of you, and win deals because you’re credible, you have the authority (you’re the business owner after all!) and you know how to impactfully convey that message.
Then growth happens:
You add services
You hire new team members
You might even target a broader set of customers
Your marketing activities change (and let’s be honest - you have less time for marketing)
You hand marketing to your new marketing hire - usually someone who’s at junior level and who’s there to brilliantly execute but who has no actual strategic insights as to what needs to be done as you grow and scale
And so your message starts to flatten, becomes unclear, a little lost.
That’s why - as your business grows - you need to re-assess your marketing message (not necessarily go through an entire rebranding process), and put a strong marketing strategy in place – one that’s tailored to a small business and helps you not only market your services the right way, but that makes your brand unique and memorable.
What a Marketing Strategy Agency Actually Fixes (in what order and how)
When you work with an agency specialised in marketing strategy for small businesses, they will be able to guide you through a process that will help fix a generic brand.
The process features four steps, each with a specific purpose to give your brand more impact, refinement and strength. The goal isn’t to create a prettier version of the same vague statement or brand guidelines. The goal is to create a message and a positioning that can withstand comparison (because prospects are actively comparing you to your competitors, whether you like it or not), and can help you shorten and improve your marketing and sales cycles.
Here’s what that process looks like:
1) Brand positioning that can help you stand out
Let’s start with a quick recap of what brand positioning is. Brand positioning is the strategic choice of how a brand is perceived by a customer. It’s about “the place” it occupies in your target customers’ mind within your competitive space. This is about value proposition (which is foundational to positioning), offering, visual identity, and USPs.
So the first step is to look at your brand positioning and evaluate how strong it is and what needs to be refined or changed to give you (or solidify) a bigger market share.
How is this done? It starts with an in-depth market analysis, followed by a few key questions, including:
Who are we for (specifically)?
What high-stakes problem do we solve?
Who are our competitors? What’s the alternative solution to our service (and why is it worse)?
What functional and emotional benefits do we create for our clients?
What is our differentiator compared to others? What makes us unique?
What proof or credibility do we have to sustain our claims?
What positioning or claims are we rejecting? What do we refuse to stand for?
If we wanted clients to remember ONE THING about us, what would it be?
These are just a few of the questions a marketing professional poses when working with a client to fix - or establish - their brand positioning.
Once your brand positioning (and value proposition) have been aligned and clarified, then it’s time for the next step: your message.
2) Your Core Message: How You Express Your Brand Positioning
If brand positioning is all about defining what you want to stand for in your clients’ mind, a core message is all about how you express that positioning in a clear, compelling and consistent way.
A core message helps you to create a statement - not a slogan or tagline - that can communicate your strategic positioning in the language of your audience. There are several ways you can refine your core message. A good starting point is to:
Write a clear statement about what you do + who for + why you’re different (in line with your positioning)
Identify the ultimate benefit you bring your customers. This needs to be beyond the practical, it needs to speak to what they really want (emotionally), their ambitions, why it matters to them to them to achieve or overcome something through your services
Focus on the outcomes you’re creating for your clients
This is about creating a script. This is about clarity for you, your team and your prospects. It’s about creating the baseline for everything that will follow in your marketing including headlines, tagline, sales ads, pitches, product pages, marketing campaign and so much more.
If you need further guidance on how to create a great core message in a few steps, make sure to read our article, 5 Steps to Create a High-Converting Message for Your Business.
3) Brand identity and brand guidelines
The next step is to create an identity, with a distinct image, voice and tone for your brand. A professional marketing agency will help you collate all of this information into specific guidelines, which are meant to create consistency within your team and when outsourcing any marketing or sales campaigns.
A brand identity defines:
Your voice and tone when expressing the core message
The visuals e.g. brand logo, typography, colour palette, watermarks etc. and the rules to use them within your marketing
Your messaging do’s and don’ts
A brand identity doesn’t mean to be quirky at all costs or to try and come up with something “cool”, something your business isn’t or something that’s trendy. It’s not about being just visually appealing or clever about how to show up. It’s simply about being able to communicate meaningfully with your audience - even before they actually speak with you. It’s about being recognisable (with or without a logo) and standing out from your competitors.
4) Marketing Strategy and Marketing Plan
At Saia Creative, we believe in a strategy-first approach to marketing. Why? Because it’s the only way you can strategically establish how your brand will reach its target audience in a way that directly supports your (long- and short-term) business goals.
A great marketing strategy will cover:
Objectives and KPIs
A detailed marketing research + SWOT analysis
Target segments and priorities
Channels (digital, social, offline, etc.)
Marketing and sales funnels and how they interact
Specific campaigns and activities
…and so much more
And once the strategy has been created, the next step is all about shaping a plan for execution. This means looking at when the campaigns are taking place, what content or creative development is needed to support the strategy and its individual activities, where resources will be allocated, and so much more.
At this point you might be thinking,
“hold on, how does a strategy and a plan actually help to fix a generic brand?”
And here’s the answer – a brand usually sounds generic not just because the message is muddled or the brand positioning is off. These issues matter and that’s why they are part of the process of a professional agency, but if all of those things are not combined with a strong marketing strategy, as well as an execution plan, then those decisions will only live on paper. They will not be turned into consistent actions, into practical marketing choices, sales conversations or targeted activities that can move the needle for your results. Most importantly, a clear plan will stop you from being reactive and it will help reinforce the same message across the board.
Plus, when strategy and planning guide you, your brand stops copying the language of the market or of the competitors “because that’s what working”, and it starts expressing a point of view rooted in how you actually work, your offerings and the problems you solve.
It’s that clarity that naturally produces more specific, confident messaging, which is what helps people understand your value and remember you.
What results can you expect from having a defined brand and a solid marketing strategy?
When your positioning and messaging are doing their job and they’re combined with a strategy, the business benefits are tangible:
Higher-quality leads because people self-select more accurately
Improved conversion rates because clients understand the value faster
More pricing power because you’re differentiated beyond “good service + nice people”
Shorter sales cycles because your marketing is doing part of the heavy-lifting before calls happen
Easier marketing execution because you and your team aren’t reinventing the story weekly
Best of all - these results compound over time, because you are not relying on short-time, quick-win tactics, but on strategies that look at both short- and long-term outcomes.
When to bring in a marketing strategy agency
Going through a re-alignment process requires lots of effort and most business owners get stuck in what they know and what they’ve been doing so far - meaning they can’t see the full picture and the issues holding them back or all the opportunities of the brand. Plus, running a business can keep you so busy already that it might be hard to find the right space to work on this.
That’s when a marketing strategy agency comes in handy! A good agency can provide fresh perspectives, it can objectively see what’s been working and what hasn’t and why. They can help look at the brand from a different angle and they can walk you through the process in a much faster and easier way.
When do you know it’s time to consider expert marketing help into your business to ensure your brand isn’t sounding generic? Here’s a few scenarios:
You’ve outgrown your original brand identity because of services or target audience evolving and you’re not sure how to communicate within this new segment
You don’t have a specific marketing strategy, but your marketing activity is high while results are still low and inconsistent
Your offers are strong but they tend to be hard for people to grasp and your sales team isn’t performing as it should
You are unsure about what your core message is or how to best communicate it
You feel like your brand is sounding like everyone else’s and you know you want a more strategic approach, but you don’t know where to start
You’re planning a new launch and want it to make an impact on your revenue
If your brand sounds generic, it won’t be fixed by rewriting the same sentences in a clever or cooler way. And no, it won’t be a new logo, rebranded service or flashy new website that will fix it either. It’s fixed by making strategic decisions about who you serve, what you stand for, and how you communicate it in everything you do, while following a well-crafted plan.
And once those decisions are made, the words will get easier. Not because you’ve found the perfect slogan, but because you’ve finally given your brand (and marketing) something specific to say.
FAQs
What is brand positioning and why does it affect how generic a business sounds?
Brand positioning is the strategic choice of how your business is perceived and remembered by the people you want to work with. When that choice hasn’t been made clearly, messaging tends to fall back on safe, familiar language that could apply to almost anyone. That’s usually when brands start to sound generic.
Clear positioning gives your marketing something solid to work from, so the message feels intentional rather than interchangeable.
Why don’t marketing campaigns work when brand positioning is unclear?
Marketing campaigns amplify a message, they don’t create one. When brand positioning is unclear, campaigns scale confusion rather than clarity.
The result is vague messaging, low engagement and the feeling that marketing “isn’t working”, when the real issue is the lack of strategic direction behind the activity.
What role do brand guidelines play in fixing generic messaging?
Brand guidelines help remove the guesswork. They give your team a shared understanding of how the brand should sound, what it should prioritise, and what it should avoid.
Without them, everyone fills in the gaps differently, which quickly leads to mixed messages and a diluted marketing output. With clear guidelines in place, teams can make confident choices, keep communication aligned and ensure your brand positioning is expressed clearly across every touchpoint.
How does marketing research support stronger brand positioning?
Marketing research helps you step outside of your own assumptions. It shows how customers actually talk about their problems, how competitors position themselves, and where there’s real opportunity to stand apart.
This insight allows brand positioning to be built on reality rather than guesswork, reducing the risk of sounding like everyone else and strengthening the credibility behind your messaging and strategy.
