Are You Making Your Brand Invisible?

Professional but approachable. Innovative but trustworthy. Bold but reliable.

If you’ve ever seen a brand guide with one of those “this but not that” grids, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Pages and pages of carefully crafted contradictions that sound strategic but actually say nothing at all.

This is brand dilution, and it’s everywhere.

The Comfort of the Middle Ground

Here’s what happens: A company starts with good intentions. They want to appeal to their target audience, but they also don’t want to alienate anyone else. So they hedge. They soften their edges. They split the difference between having a point of view and playing it safe. The result? A brand that tries to be everything to everyone and ends up meaning nothing to anyone.

Those “professional but approachable” brands sound reasonable in a conference room, but they’re indistinguishable from hundreds of other companies saying the exact same thing. When every B2B software company is “innovative but trustworthy,” what does that phrase actually communicate? Nothing.

Why Playing It Safe Is the Riskiest Strategy

Brand dilution doesn’t (typically) happen overnight. It’s the accumulation of a thousand small compromises. Each decision feels rational in isolation, but together they create something generic and forgettable.

Companies dilute their brands when they:

• Use focus groups to sand off anything that might be polarizing*
• Let every department add their own spin to the brand message
• Chase competitors instead of defining their own path
• Confuse “broad appeal” with “clear positioning”
• Feel compelled to have an opinion on every trending topic or cultural moment (more on this in a sec)

The irony is that in trying to avoid risk, these companies create the biggest risk of all: invisibility. In a crowded market, being inoffensive is the same as being irrelevant.

*Please note: I am a big fan of focus groups for uncovering surprising ideas and opinions. But using focus groups to water down your work is about as valuable as kale chips.

The Always-On Opinion Problem

This dilution gets even worse when brands feel compelled to weigh in on every trending topic, holiday, or cultural moment. They treat their social media like a personal account, commenting on everything from the latest celebrity drama to National Pizza Day. Leveraging pop culture for a short-lived win is a modern plague. Wendy’s tweets got attention for being spicy and suddenly every marketer thought they needed to do the same.

When brands try to have an opinion on everything (or just insert themselves into everything), it’s usually because they haven’t defined what they actually care about. So they default to commentary instead of conviction. They mistake being active for being relevant.

This creates two problems: First, it trains audiences to expect constant chatter rather than meaningful value – they’ll scroll right past you. Second, it completely muffles the impact when the brand does have something genuinely important to say. The brand that comments on everything is the brand that stands for nothing.

Strong brands are selective about when they speak. They understand that not every moment requires their voice, and that strategic silence can be more powerful than constant noise. After all, have you ever heard a new piece of celebrity gossip and thought, “I wonder what my tax advisor thinks about this. They make such great memes!” I didn’t think so.

What Strong Brands Actually Do

The brands that break through aren’t trying to please everyone. They know who they're for and, just as importantly, who they're not for. They make choices that might turn some people off because they understand that passion is better than indifference. (I know, this is difficult in a people-pleasing culture in a people-pleasing industry that is full of professionals who grew up with the underlying message of: you exist to make others happy, so don’t be too loud or take up too much space and, oh, don’t forget to smile.)

Think about the brands you actually remember and respect. They have a point of view. They stand for something specific. They might even be willing to be wrong rather than be boring.

This doesn’t mean being controversial for the sake of it or going down the Ryan Reynolds/Maximum Effort route of only and always being irreverent and snarky.

It means being clear about what you believe, what you offer, and why it matters. It means making strategic trade-offs instead of trying to have it all.

And that question of “why it matters”? You personally don’t need to agree with the why or the how. It is not Marketer Molly’s business to infuse her personality and opinions into the brand. Rather, the brand must take precedence over any single individual or department’s stance. In other words, the brand must have its own opinions and those opinions are gospel.

The Real Work of Brand Strategy

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most companies don’t have a brand problem. They have a courage problem.

If you heard about Nutter Butter’s success and thought, “How can my brand be more unhinged and appealing to Gen Z and Gen Alpha?” then you’re asking the wrong question. The right question is, “How can I bring more courage to the brand I work for, answer to, and am responsible for doing right by?”

Nutter Butter is an example of courage but it is also an example of something else – how flat and unmemorable the majority of B2B brands are. I would love to use more B2B examples when writing these posts for a B2B audience. The reality is that so many B2B brands are so vanilla that I struggle to find Great Examples and Terrible Examples to demonstrate what to do and what not to do. 

Building a strong brand requires making difficult decisions. It means saying no to opportunities that don’t work with your positioning. It means accepting that some people won’t get it. It means committing to something specific instead of keeping your options open.

Many businesses have grown ten-fold simply because they kept their options open and they said yes to many things that didn’t make perfect sense. At some point, they look around them and realize they’re surrounded by a hodge podge of products and services and brands that aren’t really working well. It happens! You have two options: (1) go back to what was at the heart of everything at the beginning and let that old north star guide you or (2) decide what it is you want to be and let that new north star guide you. Most companies choose number 1 out of fear that they will lose what they have. Few have the courage to choose number 2.

This is why brand strategy is so much more than visual identity or messaging frameworks. It’s about making strategic choices that define who you are in the market – even if that means abandoning what you’ve done before. It’s about having the discipline to stay focused when everything around you is pulling you toward the middle.

Standing Out Requires Standing For Something

If your brand could be describing any of your competitors, you’re not done with the work. If your positioning makes everyone nod but no one lean forward, you’re playing it too safe.

The companies that wonder why they don’t stand out are usually the same ones that have systematically removed everything that could make them distinctive. They’ve optimized for acceptability instead of memorability.

Your brand isn’t supposed to be for everyone, it’s supposed to be exactly right for someone. And that someone should be able to tell the difference between you and everyone else in your space. The question isn’t whether your brand might alienate some people or if it’s a good motivator for your employees. The question is whether it connects deeply enough with the right people to matter.