Start Sounding Like
Yourself.
Right now: go and skim three pieces of content from other companies in your industry. Not yours — theirs.
Three competitors, or near-competitors. Companies operating in the same general space.
Note the register. The vocabulary. The level of formality. Their relationship to the reader — whether it addresses them as a peer or a student or a customer. The willingness, or lack of it, to take a specific position.
Now grab the three most recent pieces of content from your company.
If we are being honest, they probably sound pretty similar.
Not identical — differences in emphasis, in topic selection. In how the logo looks at the top of the page. But the voice, the underlying orientation to reader and subject, occupies a similar range.
This is no accident. It results from a process I call competitive voice convergence. It is one of the most reliable ways to become invisible in your own category.
How This Happens
Nobody decides to sound like their competitors. It happens through accumulation.
Content teams read industry publications, which publications have a voice. They look at what competitors are doing that seems to be working, and they learn from it.
we hire writers who have been in the industry and bring with them their own conventions from the industry.
Senior stakeholders have a sense of what “professional” means, derived from their own years of exposure to industry content, which sense they apply in review. tHEY WANT PROVEN FORMULAS AND THIS IS THE PROVEN FORMULA.
Each of these inputs is individually reasonable.
Together, they produce a gravitational SLIPPAGE toward the center: the industry voice — the place where everyone is, because everyone has been influenced by these same inputs.
The result is a category of functionally interchangeable content. Swap the logos on most content in most B2B categories and a reader wouldn’t notice.
Same observations, same frameworks, same level of confidence.
Same relationship to the reader, who is assumed to be the same amount of slightly less informed than your brand is.
Why Is This a Problem?
On SERP or a social feed or an inbox, content that sounds like everything else does not get read. It gets evaluated as the category — “another post about content strategy,” “another newsletter from a fitness brand” — and dismissed.
Your reader has a limited supply of attention. They allocate it based entirely on a very rapid assessment of whether a given source is likely to tell them something they don’t already know, or in a way they haven’t already heard it.
Content that registers as generic fails this assessment before the first sentence is finished.
And here’s what’s interesting, if obvious upon reflection: This is increasingly true as content volume increases.
The more content that exists in any given category, and remember that that number is never going down, the more a distinctive voice becomes a competitive advantage, rather than a nice-to-have.
When there were ten content strategy blogs, adequacy was sufficient. Now there are thousands. Adequacy is invisible.
What Sounding
Like Yourself
Actually Requires:
knowing what is specifically, characteristically true about your organization — not your unique selling proposition, but how you actually think.
What does your company find interesting that other companies in your space don’t bother to notice? What are you willing to say that your competitors won’t? What do you think is wrong about the conventional wisdom in your category? What do your best people find funny, or frustrating, or worth arguing about?
These are not branding but character questions. And the answers to them are the raw material of a distinctive voice.
Most brands can answer these questions, if you ask the right people in the right way. The founder who built the company around a specific belief that contradicts industry consensus. The product team that thinks most others are solving the wrong problem. The customer experience team that knows about what customers actually want in ways the marketing team has not yet figured out how to say.
The voice is in these people. The challenge is getting it into the content.
The Permission Issue
There is a specific organizational dynamic that prevents brands from sounding like themselves, and it’s worth naming.
The people with the most distinctive perspectives — the ones who have genuine, specific opinions about the category and the courage to express them — are often not the people approving content.
The content is approved by people whose job is to reduce risk, and a distinctive voice feels risky. After all, it might be wrong or alienating or inconsistent with some long-forgotten past statement.
So the voice is softened. The specific claim becomes a general observation. The willingness to say the uncomfortable thing becomes a gesture toward it. The content now sounds like everything else. the people with real perspectives wonder why the content doesn’t sound like them. This is alienating and annoying, but it’s also bad for your brand.
The structural fix is the one I keep coming back to:
put someone with editorial courage in charge of the content, give them authority to maintain standards, and have the explicit conversation about what you are trying to achieve.
I keep saying this because it is the only exit door I have ever found that works 100% of the time.
Content that sounds like everyone else is not a safe outcome! It’s a different kind of failure!
Slower, less visible. Harder to attribute to any single decision.
And you’re vanishing.
This is why i do what I do: Your content, your comms, are the heart of your brand. We are what we pretend to be, what we hold ourselves out to be, and we are only the average of everyone’s perception of us.
A well-intentioned, invisible brand will die with those intentions intact and nothing to show for it.
Sounding like yourself is the only strategy that compounds. Everything else is treading water at best.
I write about content strategy, brand voice, and the editorial infrastructure that makes good content possible.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative