Brand Positioning Consultant: Is 'Different' Overrated?

In a UK survey of computer users, 77% of Apple users did not see the brand as unique, according to a chart the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute republishes from the work of Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp and Andrew Ehrenberg. Apple. The brand every positioning workshop holds up as the model of difference. That is an awkward number for anyone who sells a brand positioning consultant’s work as the art of finding what makes you unlike everyone else.

It is also a useful one, because it forces a better question: what should you actually be paying a brand positioning consultant to leave behind?

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What the evidence says about being “different”

The Ehrenberg-Bass argument is that perceived differentiation plays a smaller role in how brands compete than the orthodox literature assumes. One study behind it, by Romaniuk and Elise Gaillard, looked at 94 brands across eight categories. As Rob Meyerson summarises it, unique associations carried no more weight in consumer choice than shared ones.

Meyerson, writing for WARC in 2021, is not convinced the case is closed. He questions how “unique” was defined and what respondents were asked, and he points out that distinctive and differentiating can overlap in practice. His verdict is that the reports of differentiation’s death may be exaggerated.

I think both readings are useful. If the strongest evidence says buyers rarely perceive big differences between the brands they use, then a positioning that depends on a “unique” claim is fragile. If the critics are right that the evidence is narrower than the slogan, then dropping difference altogether is just as lazy. The sensible brief is: make the brand easy to place, and give people something worth remembering once they have placed it.

Recognisable is necessary, not sufficient

Andrew Tindall of System1 makes this point sharply in The Drum (July 2026). He argues that the industry has stretched a finding, that brands need to be distinctive to be chosen, into the claim that distinctiveness is how brands grow. Drawing on The Creative Dividend, System1’s study with Effie covering 1,265 campaigns and more than 200,000 consumer responses, his summary is that “distinctiveness turns media spend into revenue; emotion turns revenue into profit.”

That squares with the older, classic evidence. In their meta-analysis of 996 campaigns in the IPA Effectiveness Databank, Les Binet and Peter Field found that emotional messaging builds a brand’s strength over repeated exposure, while rational messaging lifts short-term sales without changing brand perceptions. They also report that campaigns built for fame were far more efficient than the rest, 1.4 against 0.3 on their efficiency measure.

My take: a positioning that stops at a logo, a colour and a tagline has done half the job. The other half is an idea, and writing, that makes people feel something about the brand once they have recognised it. That second half is a creative problem, not a slide.

Most brands are less distinctive than they believe

The scale of the gap is striking. In a study by Ipsos and Jones Knowles Ritchie, covering more than 5,000 brand assets and more than 26,000 consumers, only 15% of assets were “truly distinctive”, as reported by Marketing Week. Some 65% fell into the weakest, bronze tier. Only 19% of logos, 6% of slogans and 4% of brand colours reached gold. Products did better, at 31%.

Why don’t brands see this themselves? A study by Ruby Brus, Nicole Hartnett, Margaret Faulkner and Carl Driesener, all of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, tested more than 400 brand elements against consumer perceptions. Marketing Week reports that marketers’ own judgements were rarely accurate: they tended to overestimate how famous an asset was and underestimate how unique it was, which the authors put down to over-familiarity.

I read that as the strongest practical argument for an outside view. The people nearest a brand are the worst placed to judge it. A good consultant brings an outside eye and tests it against how real people respond.

What a brand positioning consultant should leave behind

Put the evidence together and the deliverable looks different from the usual deck. Three things, in my opinion:

A decision about who the brand is for and what it will be known for. Narrower than most clients expect, and written so it can be said aloud.

The language that carries it. The line, the voice, the way the brand explains itself. Emotion is what turns recognition into profit, and emotion is written, not templated.

An honest read of the assets. Which codes are actually recognised, which are not, judged on consumer evidence rather than internal conviction.

That mix of judgement and craft is rare in one person, which is why we are wary of the search-and-shortlist approach to finding it. At Copywriter Collective, a premium creative talent agency in Amsterdam, the model runs the other way: brief us, and we recommend the right senior strategist or writer from a personally vetted roster, matched to your brief. Not a database to browse. One recommendation.

The research does not say positioning is pointless. It says the easy version, a sentence about how special you are, is the part that does least. The hard part is being recognisable, and then being worth remembering.