Brand Differentiation: The Real Cost of Being Everything to Everyone

The cost of being everything to everyone shows up in three places: buyers can’t recall your brand at the moment of decision, the sale defaults to price because there’s no other basis for comparison, and the brand hits a ceiling it can’t charge past. That pattern holds whether you’re selling software, running a university, or trying to hire a diesel technician, the mechanism is the same, only the buyer changes.

The University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine had the researchers, the faculty and the outcomes to be a top-10 program. It wasn’t one. From the outside, it read the same as every other vet school in the country: a place that trains “pet doctors.” That single generic perception, not a lack of substance, was the ceiling. When Frankel dug into the research, we found UF vets were doing work far outside that stereotype — protecting the national food supply, developing treatments in animals that translate directly to human medicine. Instead of describing everything the college did, we narrowed the whole brand to one ownable idea: Challenge Accepted. The college climbed the U.S. News & World Report rankings, the campaign earned international award recognition and an Emmy nomination, and per former dean James Lloyd, it “instilled pride in the college.” That’s the case for the rest of this piece: not a hypothetical, a result.

What does it cost a brand that won’t choose a position?

The cost shows up in three places. First, lost recall. When positioning is broad enough to fit any buyer, no one remembers it at the moment of decision. Second, price competition. When buyers can’t tell options apart, the decision defaults to whatever’s cheapest. Third, a ceiling on premium pricing. Without a clear point of difference, a brand can’t justify charging more, no matter how good the work actually is.

Why Can’t Buyers Tell Undifferentiated Brands Apart?

Over-broad positioning doesn’t fail because it says the wrong thing, it fails because it says nothing memorable at all. When a brand tries to be relevant to every buyer, every industry, and every use case at once, it ends up sounding like every competitor trying to do the same thing, and the audience can no longer tell the difference.

That’s not a hypothetical risk. Gartner research found that 64% of B2B customers cannot distinguish one brand’s digital experience from another’s. This is a gap that pushes undifferentiated companies straight into price competition, because price is the only variable left to compare. The same dynamic plays out on campus. Frankel’s own brand health work in higher ed has surfaced the exact pattern: a university that believes its “close-knit community” is a differentiator finds the market actually reads it as “small and underfunded,” or a school with strong alumni pride is losing relevance with prospective students who see it as indistinguishable from three other regional options. Peer institutions blur together in a prospective student’s mind for the same reason competing SaaS vendors blur together in a buyer’s mind, nobody said anything specific enough to remember.

Optimizely’s most recent UK marketing survey backs this up from the inside: 31% of marketers now rank brand differentiation as their single biggest challenge, ahead of budget cuts, proving ROI, or even keeping pace with AI. Enrollment and advancement teams live the same tension. They can list the specific things that make their institution different; ask a prospective student to repeat any of it back, and most can’t.

Why Does Broad Positioning Matter So Much?

A brand that positions itself for “everyone” is, functionally, positioned for no one. Buyers don’t evaluate options in a vacuum — they compare. When messaging reads the same across every option on the list, the comparison collapses to the one attribute that’s easy to measure: cost.

This shows up directly in research on messaging quality. In a survey of 100 B2B SaaS marketing leaders at $50M+ companies, 94% admitted their brand messaging barely stands out from competitors, and only 6% considered their brand truly distinctive. UF CVM was living the same statistics before the rebrand, a program with elite research and faculty that, from the outside, was indistinguishable from any other veterinary school. Nearly all of those SaaS leaders recognized the problem. Almost none had fixed it, because the fix requires narrowing the message, and narrowing feels like giving something up.

The downstream cost isn’t abstract. CEB’s “From Promotion to Emotion” study, based on a survey of 3,000 B2B buyers across 36 brands, found that only about 14% of buyers perceived enough meaningful difference in business value between vendors to justify paying a premium for it. The other 86% saw the options as close enough to interchangeable that price, not value, decided the outcome.

The same dynamic shows up in labor markets, not just sales pipelines. Fullbay’s 2022 State of the Heavy-Duty Repair Industry Report found more than half of fleet and independent shops named hiring technicians their top challenge, and 65% called it outright difficult. Part of that shortage is structural with an aging workforce and a training pipeline that hasn’t kept up. But part of it is a positioning problem: when every shop’s recruiting ad says “competitive pay, great benefits, join our team,” a technician has no way to tell one employer from another. It’s why, when Frankel built Nextran Truck Centers’ recruitment marketing — the top-selling Mack Trucks dealer in the world, with 25 locations across seven states — the work went beyond a careers page to a distinct culture and recruitment presence a technician could actually recognize against a market full of identical listings.

A brand that sounds like everyone else has already lost the argument before the sales conversation, the admissions tour, or the interview even starts.

Why Is Differentiation Necessary Even Though It Feels Risky?

Differentiation is uncomfortable because it requires a brand to say, explicitly, who it is not for. That runs against the instinct of most growth-stage leadership teams who see a narrower message as a narrower pipeline.

But the research on buyer and audience behavior points the other way. When messaging is broad enough to avoid excluding anyone, it also becomes too generic to be remembered by anyone. Claims like “great service,” “high quality,” or “innovative solutions” don’t function as differentiators because a competitor can say the exact same sentence with a straight face. If a claim is copyable, it isn’t a position, it’s a placeholder. It’s the same trap Frankel has written about with AI-generated content, when everyone uses the same tools to say the same things, sameness compounds, and a distinct point of view becomes the only real advantage left.

The risk calculation leaders should actually be running isn’t “how many people will this message exclude.” It’s “how many people will this message actually be remembered by.” A specific, ownable position that resonates deeply with a defined audience outperforms a broad one that resonates faintly with everyone, because buying decisions and enrollment decisions, and career decisions are made from memory, not from a feature list reviewed at the moment of need. It’s the same principle behind why attracting fewer, better-fit leads outperforms chasing volume: focus produces better outcomes than reach, whether the variable is audience size or message breadth.

Where Can Brands Focus Their Marketing Positioning Without Alienating Their Audience?

Focus is often confused with restriction, but the two aren’t the same. A brand can narrow its positioning, the specific problem it’s known for solving, the specific buyer it speaks to first, the specific proof it leads with, without narrowing who is technically allowed to buy from it, apply to it, or work for it.

Lead with a category entry point, not a category description

Instead of describing everything the organization does, identify the one moment a buyer is in when your brand should be the first name that comes to mind, and build messaging around that moment. UF CVM’s veterinarians were doing work far outside the “pet doctor” stereotype by protecting the national food supply, developing treatments that translate into human medicine. Rather than listing every capability, Frankel narrowed the entire brand to one ownable idea: Challenge Accepted. That single position, not a broader claim, is what gave the college something distinctive to be known for.

Choose the audience you want to be famous with, not the audience you’re afraid to lose

Serving a defined segment exceptionally well builds the case studies, language, and credibility that eventually pull in adjacent buyers anyway. When Frankel worked with Portico, a group of financial advisors with no name or brand yet, the research showed competitors weren’t leaning into first-time investors at all. Rather than positioning Portico as an advisor for everyone, we built the brand specifically for people who’d never worked with a financial advisor before, to be a place that’s jargon-free, approachable, safe to ask questions. That specificity, not broader appeal, became the brand’s edge, and it’s the same starting point behind our financial services process: research first, positioning second.

Differentiate on something a competitor can’t casually claim

Real differentiators are provable, specific, and hard to copy, like a proprietary process, a body of research, a track record in one vertical. When Frankel rebranded CPPI, a construction partner competing in a crowded field where every firm claims to be “reliable” and “experienced,” research with employees and partners surfaced a real, ownable truth: direct communication, radical transparency, and relentless follow-through. That became “Horsepower and Heart,” a position built on evidence a competitor couldn’t just borrow by writing a similar tagline.

Let secondary audiences self-select in

A message sharpened for a primary audience doesn’t repel adjacent audiences, it signals competence to them, because expertise reads as expertise regardless of who it was written for first. For the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, Frankel built one strengthened core position, then created audience-specific proof points on top of it: messaging for prospective students around rigor and reward, messaging for researchers around funding and innovation, messaging for the community around trust and care. None of those audiences got a diluted version of the brand and they each got a sharper reason to believe the same position. UGA CVM jumped from #10 to #7 in U.S. News & World Report rankings in the first year of that engagement.

Who Should Own the Process of Brand Differentiation?

Differentiation isn’t a copywriting exercise, it’s a resourcing decision, and it has to be made by leadership, not delegated to whoever writes the next campaign. Every meaningful position requires giving something up: a segment the brand won’t chase, a feature it won’t lead with, a tone that won’t please every stakeholder in the room.

That trade-off is uncomfortable in the short term and compounding in the long term. Brands that treat positioning as a leadership decision, not a marketing afterthought, are the ones able to hold a line under internal pressure to “just add one more audience” to the messaging. Every time that pressure wins, the position erodes a little further, until the brand is back where it started: legible to no one, competing on price, indistinguishable from the field. This is closely tied to what Frankel has seen around institutional voice holding steady through leadership transitions — the brands that hold their position are the ones where leadership treats it as non-negotiable, not just convenient.

The organizations pulling ahead right now aren’t the ones with the broadest appeal. They’re the ones whose leadership was willing to choose, publicly and repeatedly, who they’re for.

How Do You Build a Position That Actually Sticks?

Being known for one thing well beats being vaguely acceptable to everyone but that position has to come from somewhere real, not a brainstorm. It’s why every Frankel engagement starts the same way UF CVM’s did: primary research first, before a single word of messaging gets written. We talk to your students, your customers, your technicians, your donors, your competitors’ customers, whoever actually determines whether your brand is remembered or forgotten and we let what we find dictate the position, not the other way around. From there, the process moves from brand strategy into a strategic narrative and identity built to hold up under the “just add one more audience” pressure that erodes most positioning within a year.

That’s how a college that read as generic became a top-10 program with an Emmy nomination. It’s how a construction firm competing on adjectives found a provable, ownable truth in “Horsepower and Heart.” It’s how a group of first-time-investor advisors and a Mack Trucks dealer trying to hire technicians both found a way to be remembered instead of interchangeable.

If your brand is ready to choose its ground, let’s talk. If you’re in higher ed, see how Frankel: Higher Ed turns research into rankings and enrollment for 150+ institutions. If you run a financial services firm, look at how our process works from positioning through launch.