When the world zigs, zag
If you grew up in the UK in the nineties, you probably remember Zig and Zag, two unbearable puppets who turned up alongside Chris Evans on The Big Breakfast. I'm bringing them up because zigging and zagging is one of those phrases everyone throws around in branding without explaining where it actually comes from, or what it really means in practice.
Back in 2007 I sat in a university lecture given by John Hegarty, a partner at the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. In 1982, BBH ran a campaign for Levi's to launch a pair of black jeans, which doesn't sound remarkable now, but at the time denim was always blue. The ad showed a hundred white sheep facing one way and a single black sheep bucking the trend. The tagline: when the world zigs, zag.
That campaign is still referenced decades later because it captured something true. Most brands follow industry convention by default, not by decision. The ones that break convention deliberately are the ones people remember. If you differentiate properly, you give yourself the best chance of being noticed and loved. If you don't, you're just one more white sheep in the flock.
Why most brands default to sameness
Here's the uncomfortable truth: deep down, most business owners know they're the same as everyone else in their category. I've had the thought myself. You see a competitor do something well, a campaign, a tone, a visual style, and your first instinct is "damn, that's a great way to show that. Maybe I should do something similar."
That instinct is normal. It's also exactly how every industry ends up looking the same.
The problem isn't noticing what a competitor does well. The problem is skipping the next step, pressure-testing that idea against your own vision before you act on it. If something looks good purely because it worked for someone else, that's not a strategy, it's borrowed confidence. The question that actually matters isn't "could we do that too?" It's "does that genuinely serve what we're trying to build, or does it just feel safe because someone else already proved it works?"
Most brands never ask that second question. They copy the parts of competitors that look successful and call it inspiration. That's how an entire industry quietly ends up wearing the same outfit.
Start with who you're not for
The simplest, most reliable way to differentiate is to narrow your target market. Not "parents." Not "small business owners." Those audiences are too broad to build anything distinctive around, because almost any message can technically apply to almost anyone inside them.
I've written about this in more detail in The Art of Repelling Customers and how to create customer personas that go deeper than any template, but the short version is this: once you know who you're genuinely not for, you stop trying to please everyone, and your message gets sharp enough to actually land with the people who matter.
You have roughly 2.7 seconds to capture someone's attention. That's not enough time to be all things to all people. It's enough time to be unmistakably one thing to the right person.
Study the competition, then forget them
There's a fair question that comes up often: why bother looking at competitors at all if the goal is to avoid copying them?
I do this with every client at the start of a project. Not to find inspiration, to find the gaps. What does everyone in this industry conventionally do? How is the product or service usually delivered? What do customers fear or get frustrated by in the existing options? Those questions point you toward the openings nobody else has taken, the same ones that get missed when you're too close to your own business to see them clearly.
I'll be honest about where this goes wrong. I've sat with clients staring at a competitor's website for twenty minutes, picking apart fonts and colours, and not one of those minutes told them anything useful about their own positioning. A SWOT analysis applied to yourself and your competitors gets you there faster, and the real value sits in the weaknesses, opportunities and threats columns, not the strengths. A competitor's weakness is often exactly where your opportunity is hiding, which is the same thinking behind a proper brand audit, just turned outward at the market instead of inward at your own brand.
Once you've done that thinking properly, stop watching. This is the part most businesses get wrong, they treat competitor research as an ongoing job instead of a single, sharp exercise. If you're checking what competitors are doing every week, you've stopped building your own brand and started running theirs by proxy. Look once, learn what you need, then put the energy into becoming the business they end up reacting to.
Give your brand a villain
Every strong story has a villain, and your brand is allowed to have one too. Not a specific competitor, naming a rival by name is petty, not strategic, but what that kind of business represents.
Snapper Studio's villain is the large agency that treats clients like an account number. The kind of place where you're handed off to whoever's free that week, where genuine strategic thinking gets replaced with templated deliverables, and where nobody actually cares whether the work moves your business forward, only whether the invoice goes out on time.
That villain isn't a slight against any specific agency. It's a description of an entire approach to client work that prioritises scale over care. Naming it clearly does something useful: it tells the right clients exactly what they're getting away from, and it tells me exactly what I refuse to become as the business grows.
Who's your villain? Not a competitor's name, but the version of your industry that does things the way you refuse to. Once you can describe it specifically, your own positioning gets a lot easier to state, because you're no longer trying to explain what makes you good in the abstract, you're explaining what you're standing against.
Differentiation is a strategy decision, not a design decision
Here's what I want you to take away from all of this: not one example in this piece started with design. Not the black sheep. Not the narrowed audience. Not the villain. Every one of them was a decision made before anyone opened a design tool.
That's the trap most businesses fall into. They feel like they're blending in, so they reach for a rebrand, a new logo, a punchier tagline, hoping the surface fix solves a problem that's actually sitting underneath it. Before you go that far, it's worth reading when a rebrand is actually warranted, because most of the time, it isn't the right move yet.
If you're not sure whether what makes you different is real or just something you assume about your own business, that's exactly the gap a brand audit exists to close. It tells you, honestly, where you actually stand against the market, before you spend a cent on the part that only matters once the thinking's done.
Design can make a clear strategy look unmistakable. It has never once invented the strategy itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I make my brand stand out?
Stop trying to be everything to everyone. Narrow your target market, identify what makes you genuinely different, and build an experience your competitors cannot replicate. Differentiation comes from strategy first, then design and marketing.
What makes a brand unique?
A combination of clear positioning, an authentic personality, consistent execution, and a real understanding of your audience. It's the total experience a customer has with you, not just the visual identity.
How do I differentiate my business from competitors?
Study your competitors once, properly, to find the gaps in the market, then stop watching them. Find what you genuinely do differently and build your positioning around that difference, using emotional connection to reach your audience on a level your competitors aren't reaching.
