Every few months someone declares that all B2B software looks the same. Same landing pages, same feature grids, same blue gradients. The diagnosis has a catchy name—the “sea of sameness”—and it usually leads to the same prescription: spend more on brand.
The problem with that diagnosis is that it mistakes a symptom for the disease.
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The sea of sameness is a skills gap, not a market condition
As Dave Kellogg argues, the sea of sameness is largely mythical. Crowded markets with overlapping feature sets have existed for decades—business intelligence in the 2000s, CRM in the 2010s, and now seemingly every AI-powered tool in the 2020s. Yet in each era, some companies still manage to differentiate clearly while others default to bland, interchangeable messaging.
The difference is not the market. The difference is the team.
Kellogg points out that many modern CMOs come from demand generation backgrounds. They know how to build pipeline but lack deep product marketing experience. When faced with a differentiation challenge, they reach for the tools they know—brand campaigns, visual refreshes, new taglines—instead of doing the harder work of identifying and articulating genuine product differences.
This is not a criticism. Demand gen skills are valuable. But when the differentiation muscle is underdeveloped, every competitor starts to look the same because no one on the team knows how to pull the differences apart and make them matter to buyers.
Why brand alone does not fix differentiation
When companies accept the sea of sameness as fact, brand spending becomes the default response. The logic goes: if products are indistinguishable, the only lever left is how you make people feel.
There are two problems with this reasoning:
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It assumes differentiation is impossible. Most products are not actually identical. They make different architecture choices, serve different segments better, and have different limitations. The differences exist—they just have not been found, articulated, and emphasised.
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It skips the foundational work. Brand built on top of weak positioning is expensive wallpaper. It might look good, but it peels off the moment a buyer runs a serious evaluation. Strong brand amplifies strong positioning. It cannot replace it.
This does not mean brand investment is wasted. It means brand investment without solid positioning underneath is wasted.
The distinction matters because when positioning is strong, awareness spend compounds. Early Stage Growth reported that performance-focused advertisers who shifted 5-10% of budget to upper-funnel awareness scaled spend 2-5x while CPAs improved — because they had something differentiated to say to the 95% of buyers not yet in market. Brand amplified positioning. It did not substitute for it. The order of operations is the point: do the positioning work first, then invest in brand to scale it.
A practical framework for differentiation
Kellogg offers a three-step approach that maps well to the positioning work growth marketers already need to do:
1. Distil your genuine differences
Start by separating what is actually different from what you wish were different. Kellogg describes four categories of claims:
- Actual differences — things your product does that competitors genuinely do not
- Wishful thinking — differences that exist only in your internal narrative
- Outdated claims — distinctions that were true two years ago but have since been matched
- Grey areas — differences that are real but hard to prove or explain simply
The honest work is in this first step. Most teams skip it because it is uncomfortable. You might discover that several of your cherished differentiators no longer hold up.
2. Emphasise what matters to buyers
Once you have a validated list of genuine differences, the question becomes: which ones do buyers actually care about? Not every technical distinction translates into a purchasing decision.
Build your messaging around the differences that move deals. Create evaluation criteria and buyer guides that frame the decision around your strengths. This is classic positioning work—defining competitive alternatives, identifying unique value, and connecting that value to specific customer segments.
3. Sell benefits and consequences
The final step is to articulate not just what buyers gain from your differentiators, but what they lose by choosing a product without them. Benefits tell one side of the story. Consequences tell the other. Together, they create urgency and clarity in a way that feature lists never can.
What this means for growth marketers
If your company is stuck in the sea of sameness, the fix is not a rebrand. It is a disciplined positioning exercise combined with the right people to execute it.
A few practical starting points:
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Audit your current differentiators ruthlessly. Talk to recent customers who evaluated competitors. Ask what tipped their decision. You might be surprised at what actually matters versus what your sales deck emphasises.
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Invest in product marketing skill. If your marketing team is entirely demand gen, you have a blind spot. Product marketing is the function that turns product capabilities into competitive advantage. It deserves investment and a seat at the leadership table.
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Revisit positioning before messaging. Messaging is the expression of positioning, not a substitute for it. If your positioning is weak, no amount of copywriting will fix the sameness problem. Work through the fundamentals—competitive alternatives, unique value, target segments—before writing a single headline.
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Use evaluation guides strategically. Help buyers evaluate the category using criteria that favour your genuine strengths. This is not manipulation—it is helping buyers make better decisions by knowing what to look for.
Short-term pressure makes sameness worse
There is a structural reason the sea of sameness persists: short-term incentives. Quarterly targets and monthly reporting cycles reward activity that shows up in this period’s dashboard — more ads, more outbound, more promotions. The longer-term work of identifying and articulating genuine differences gets deprioritised because its payoff is harder to measure and slower to arrive.
This creates a predictable pattern. Teams under short-term pressure default to the same playbook as everyone else — the same channels, the same messaging templates, the same “best practices” — because those feel safe and produce visible activity. Differentiation requires the opposite: the willingness to do something different, which carries short-term risk even when it reduces long-term risk.
The way out is not to ignore short-term results but to connect long-term differentiation work to short-term language. Strong positioning shortens sales cycles. Clear differentiation improves win rates. These are metrics any quarterly review can absorb. For more on balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation, see The Long and the Short of It.
The sea of sameness is optional
Markets are competitive. Products overlap. But that does not mean differentiation is impossible—it means differentiation requires skill and effort. The companies that escape the sea of sameness are not the ones with the biggest brand budgets. They are the ones with the clearest understanding of what makes them different and the product marketing capability to communicate it.
The sea of sameness is not something you navigate. It is something you opt out of by doing the positioning work that most teams skip.