The “Unique” Trap — What It Is and How to Avoid It

Here’s what an agency owner said to me when I asked about where she was struggling the most to develop new business:

"It's hard to maintain a vision of what makes my agency unique to the prospects I'm trying to reach."

"Unique" is a word I try to avoid when it comes to agency positioning. Also its cousin "different," as in "what makes our agency different…"

Good brand marketing has been built on the discipline of discovering the unique selling proposition or differentiators of a product or service from its competitors. The idea has become pretty embedded in what we do, so it feels only natural to apply it to ourselves.

But here's the thing: you're not all that different from each other.

And investing a boatload of time and intellectual energy trying to find that kernel of uniqueness is a bad use of the precious little time you have to generate new business.

That's because more often than not, you go ultra-specific and end up with a differentiator that doesn't matter to the customer. Or you land back on the same old tired pitch. Because, after all, that tired pitch is true. 

Your agency does develop creative ideas backed by data! 

You genuinely do have a people-first approach! 

This may sound like I'm telling you to go out there and be like everyone else. We all know that's not a useful new business strategy, so no, that's not what I'm suggesting. But maybe the point isn't to be different but to be distinctive?

Avoiding the "unique" trap

In the early days of my consultancy, I grew frustrated after working with a handful of agencies on their positioning. I was never able to move the needle for them quite as much as I wanted to. Like I said, we'd land on the same old tired pitch because the tired pitch is true and that's where the agency felt comfortable.

I decided I had to find another way to approach this, and I realized we humans offered this good analogy:

Each one of us is built from the same four chemical building blocks. The ingredients list is identical. What makes you you isn't a secret ingredient nobody else has; it's the precise sequence in which those building blocks are arranged. Change the sequence, and you get an entirely different person. Same raw material, completely different result.

Agency positioning works the same way. Most agencies share the same core attributes: strategic thinking, creative craft, collaborative culture, category expertise, strong leadership. 

The ones who struggle with positioning go looking for something nobody else has. The ones who get it right stop searching for the missing ingredient and start paying attention to how those building blocks are arranged. That's what creates a profile that's distinctive.

Distinction versus differentiation

More recently, as I was developing modules for my Build Win Scale Accelerator program, I wanted to ground this in something beyond practitioner observation. I found useful support in the work of Byron Sharp, research scientist and author of How Brands Grow, who said:

"Rather than striving for meaningful differentiation, seek meaningless distinctiveness."

In this context, "meaningless" doesn't mean pointless or irrelevant; it means not necessarily tied to a functional or emotional benefit. In other words, brand assets like logos, colors, taglines and packaging may not say anything about what a product or service does, but they are highly recognizable, uniquely associated with the brand, and consistently repeated across touchpoints.

Think of Geico's gecko or Nike's swoosh. "Meaningless" in terms of product features, but extremely effective memory shortcuts.

Sharp developed this idea for large-scale consumer brands, but the underlying principles apply directly to professional services, especially in how agency buyers actually make decisions.

Stand out in a low-engagement, high-choice environment

Sharp has a whole multi-point framework to illustrate the shift from differentiation to distinction. I focus on a few that are particularly relevant for agencies:

Positioning → Salience 

Rather than positioning yourself in a narrow, unique territory ("We are the only X that does Y for Z"), focus on being thought of first when a need arises by consistently showing up in the contexts where your ideal clients look for solutions.

Message Comprehension → Emotional Response 

What matters more than getting a buyer to fully understand your value is creating an emotional impression. In a crowded marketplace, looking familiar to your audience can matter more than looking different because it builds trust.

Rational Involved Buyers → Emotional Distracted Buyers 

Whether it's a consumer product or a complex B2B service, buyers are human and more emotionally driven than rational. Think about your current clients. How many of them are under pressure, under-informed, and over-committed? Does it seem likely that they're making careful, rational decisions by weighing pros and cons?

In reality, we make decisions based on shortcuts, emotions and memory cues.

Which brings us back to the point of this post, avoiding the unique trap. 

Let go of the search for the one thing nobody else has. Instead, ground your positioning in your agency’s distinctive profile and then build a marketing plan that gets you showing up consistently with that message. It will grow familiarity and build trust among your prospects and you’re likely to be remembered at the right moment when they’re searching for a partner like you.