This One Silly Mistake Is Costing Brands Everything (And We See It All The Time!)
When Holly and I were in our twenties we worked for a stationery company. Not just any minor player, this was a start up that scaled hard, with us at the helm of the marketing. At one point it was the fastest growing stationery brand in the UK, was stocked in major stores like Harrods, was featured in vogue and harper’s bazaar, we’d even done interviews with asos where we talked about the key to our success. The formula for the first planner we made was unique, it was unlike anything out there and that accounted for the explosive sales. But it was short lived. The brand liquidated some years later. I left before it closed, but I saw where it was headed.
My biggest indicator that a brand is going to fail? Imitation.
What was once a beautiful and unique idea, a brand that had so much going for it and could’ve gone anywhere, became a shell of itself. In the marketing department (which was just me and Holly) it felt like we were constantly chasing our tails. Chasing competitors. Everything was scrapped at the last minute because some other brand didn’t do it like that. We spoke up but were silenced. We had to do it like Papier, like Nasty Gal, like any brand that seemed to be coming out on top. This meant we were always one step behind, one trend behind, and any innovative ideas got shot down because there was no proof it would work.
Recently, I read Francois Bazini’s experience of creating an activation for Schweppes and was inspired by his take on it. His agency created bar takeovers in venues across Spain with the tell-tale bright yellow splashed across lounge furniture and outfits for the mixologists. It was instagrammable, it was aesthetic, it was aspirational, and it was meant to shout SCHWEPPES to all who came into the bar. However, when the CFO asked if it could be scaled further than just Spain, that’s when the spell broke. They had initially been inspired by Roku, a gin brand with incredibly luxe and aspirational bar takeovers that served to make Roku look like THE drink. But applying that same strategy to Schweppes was a mistake. As Bazini says, “Great marketing. Wrong category.”
Schweppes didn’t have the profit margin to scale that campaign out. It cost too much, because a bottle of Schweppes literally generated pennies. It had a great impact, but it wasn’t sustainable. Lots of common marketing advice says that you should look at what others are doing, because if it works for those brands with a bigger budget, they’ve already done all the research behind it and you can just follow in their footsteps. That’s simply not true. It’s as much about cost as it is about brand perception. We’ve seen it time and time again, where founders are dazzled by other brands in their industry and want a quick and easy way to do what they’re doing.
It doesn’t work for big brands, either
When Morphe hit a rough patch, it did what many marketers and founders do, and started looking at what was currently working.
They made Morphe 2, fronted by Charli and Dixie D’Amelio. Morphe 2 was explicitly described as “Morphe’s answer to the no-makeup makeup look popularised by brands like Glossier.” They said the quiet part out loud in a press release. They looked at the market, saw Glossier winning, and built a copycat sub-brand. It failed to capture Gen Z, the parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2023, and the brand had to completely reinvent itself, moving away from influencer-led identity back to the product-first roots it had abandoned.
Even bigger brands struggle when they try to imitate. When the founder of Feyi flowers (Eni Awoyemi) made a Tiktok talking about her experience with Doughnut Time copying her brand identity to launch a similar flower company, Fond Flowers, it changed everything. Feyi flowers completely exploded, the David v Goliath story resonated with marketers, founders, and the public, and the orders rolled in. Eni noted that the Doughnut Time founder followed her, watched her stories, and ordered from her, before launching “Fond Flowers” just 10 days before it gained high engagement, with the new company registered at the same address as Doughnut Time. Feyi flowers grew from the ordeal, while Doughnut Time has had to change the name of their UK franchise.
Copying just shows you don’t yet know who you are
There’s a reason imitation feels so tempting when things get hard. When sales plateau or a competitor seems to be pulling ahead, looking outward feels like research. It feels productive. It feels safer than backing yourself on something unproven.
But imitation is almost always a confidence problem dressed up as a strategy problem.
Going back to the brand we worked for, it fell apart not because the team ran out of ideas, but because she stopped trusting the ones we had. Rather than developing new product categories that made sense for the brand, notebooks, pens, the kind of low-cost accompanying products that would have raised the AOV and kept customers in the ecosystem, she’d scrap the marketing plan on a whim on a Tuesday because she’d seen something on YouTube about how another brand advertised theirs.
The result was a brand that looked increasingly like everyone else and increasingly like no one in particular. By the time I left, the planners had shifted to muted tones and abstract shapes. It looked like Papier, but more expensive, and with none of Papier’s brand equity to justify the price. Consumers were confused, and confusion is the most expensive thing a brand can create, because confused people don’t buy, they just leave.
The final act was selling jewellery alongside the stationery. I remember watching from afar, thinking that there was no bridge between the two, no beautiful story crafted to explain it. Just a desperate attempt to find new revenue in a brand that had forgotten what it was selling and to whom. It didn’t work. It never does when it comes from that place.
How to gather inspiration without imitating
First, know your brand and your audience so well that any inspiration you gather has somewhere to land. The question to ask every time you save something isn’t “can we copy this?” but “how does this work for us specifically?” That means your margins, your customer’s world, your brand’s existing language. Schweppes could have taken the same instinct behind the Roku activation and built something entirely appropriate for their category, yellow drink carts on sunny commuter routes, small branded influencer moments, cost-effective activations that shouted the brand without requiring luxury margins to sustain them. Same inspiration. Completely different execution. Built for the brand they actually were, not the brand they wished they were.
The best creative directors have reference points from everywhere, fashion, architecture, restaurant branding, film, brands in completely unrelated industries. The breadth is the point. When your references are too narrow, too close to your own category, you end up where Morphe ended up, looking sideways at direct competitors and building a slightly worse version of what already exists.
Inspiration is everywhere and you should be collecting it obsessively, the restaurant with the perfect menus, the campaign from a completely unrelated industry that made you stop scrolling, the founder who seems to command a room without trying. But inspiration only works when it gets filtered through something. Your margins and your customer. Your backstory. YOU. In a world of AI generated product descriptions, consumers are developing ‘immune responses’ to everything that feels inauthentic. Run everything through the same question before anything goes near a brief: does this sound like us, or does this sound like someone we wish we were?