The Five Deadly Sins of Every Generic Brand

Most brands don’t fail loudly. They fade quietly over time, like sinking into quicksand as their leaders go on playing the same games and following the same patterns, until one day they realize they’re stuck and start struggling until they just disappear. R.I.P.

So sad, what did they do again?

And the business analysts and MBAs will all sit around debating what happened: “why couldn’t their balanced scorecard and KPIs save them?”

They didn’t have to lack talent, taste, or tools. They just didn’t have a distinct brand world, and so people stopped caring. Their employees stopped caring a long time ago, and then it was just a short fall for their customers to stop giving a shit as well.

When there’s no world, everything turns into noise because it lacks meaning and colour and shape.

These are the five sins that drain meaning from brands, until nothing remarkable remains.

Sin #1: Performative Branding

Saying the right things without meaning them (BOO!)

This is branding that knows the language but not the feeling. Big ideas. Big claims. Big words.

No, you don’t really.

No weight, nothing concrete to hold onto. Most companies’ internal brands are like this. “Here are our values” blah blah blah.

Performative branding looks like belief from a distance, but up close it feels hollow. When we’re confronted with performative branding, nothing changes because nothing is actually being lived.

We’ve been given partial information, and left to wonder if they mean it. They haven’t provided a world for us to step into; there’s no positive tension and they’ve taken no risks.

A world doesn’t really exist or mean anything if it doesn’t cost something to belong to it.

If your brand can say anything and still function the same, it doesn’t stand for anything and the words are meaningless.

Sin #2: Trend-Chasing

Borrowing relevance instead of building it

Trends feel safe. They come pre-approved. Pre-liked. Pre-validated.

Make a choice and stick to it long enough to make informed decisions

But when you chase trends, you’re always entering someone else’s world. Playing by their rules, in their game. Speaking in borrowed tongues. It’s the antithesis of strategy.

The result is constant pursuit, with no memorable legacy. You’re spinning around in circles looking for someone else to give you the answer rather than leaning into what makes you different.

This sin is truly becoming deadly in the era of AI and rapid copycats, slop and all. You and your company have less and less of a competitive advantage beyond your people, culture, and experience; lean into those things and yell them from the rooftops.

Worlds aren’t built by reacting. They’re built by choosing a strategic direction and committing long enough for gravity to form, making a magnetic pull towards you.

Trends pass but worlds stay.

Sin #3: Growth at All Costs

More, faster, louder, bigger! What do you mean… why?

This sin hides behind ambition, but it’s naïveté. Everyone wants everything right now, but it’s impossible. It’s foolish, and it’s confusing to your audience.

There’s a persistent myth that we should be doing more. More channels. More content. More features. More reach. Without clarity, this simply means more noise, more wasted time, more half-built crap, more burnout.

It takes much more than ads to build loyalty

When growth becomes the goal instead of the outcome, coherence is the first thing sacrificed. Seriously, strategy dies here and everyone gets lost. The fabric of your brand and your culture stretches until it tears and what once felt special becomes diluted. What once felt intentional becomes generic.

If you want to build a world worth obsessing over, you first have to earn trust. The trust and care of your fans can’t be scaled if it doesn’t yet exist.

Sin #4: Fragmented Experiences

A world that contradicts itself

Rather than a cohesive vibe, you’re creating uncertainty with competing signals.

The website feels like a lean startup, the product feels like an archaic tome, and the social presence feels like a creepy second cousin texting you.

Nothing is technically “wrong” but nothing adds up. Your customers feel duped by your website and have buyer’s remorse, and the customers that are attracted by your social are repelled by your website.

Wait, this isn’t the product from the video!

A world only works if its signals are consistent and reinforced. When the experience changes from moment to moment, belief collapses and trust erodes.

People don’t experience brands in pieces, they experience them as a continuous emotional reality. Ideally, it’s a fluid motion that pulls them into deeper and deeper levels of engagement and enrolment.

Fragmentation breaks trust, harmony builds it. Your reputation as a brand, product, or employer takes years to build and seconds to destroy.

Sin #5: Building for Robots, Not Humans

Optimized to be seen, not lived in

This is communication designed to survive the social media feed or “hack” SEO. It’s engineered for mass attention, not resonance.

Sometimes short-term “optimizing” is sub-optimal

It’s meaningless and intentionally designed to hijack your brain or game the system. It’s optimizing for quantifiable short-term performance at the expense of integrity and trust. It stops the scroll and may spark (usually negative) feelings, but it doesn’t create connection and it doesn’t invite enrolment and participation.

It’s not a world anybody wants to be part of.

Algorithms reward sameness.
Humans remember difference.

You can’t build an obsession-worthy world by optimizing for machines that don’t feel.

At what cost?!

Each of these sins pulls a brand further away from excellence. Added up, they produce the generic brand: something familiar, safe, and forgettable: “Just another brand”.

Seen, but not felt.
Active, but not alive.
Present, but not remembered.

Difference Is Excellence

Excellence requires direction and commitment. You get direction and commitment from properly designing experiences within an intentional brand world with differentiated positioning.

It means choosing worlds before words, rules over trends, and feeling over frequency.

Above all else, it means asking, before anything is made:

How should our world feel?

Because the brands people care about don’t try to say more, they communicate signals consistently that reinforce and amplify their world. This attracts new members and tells current members they belong. They do this over and over again.

When you build worlds worth living in, messaging and content naturally aligns and falls into place.