The MAD HATTER CHRONICLES™
Deadwood at Sea: When Your Business Becomes Just Another Commodity
There is something unsettling about a ghost ship. The sails are still raised. The hull is still floating. From a distance, it may even look seaworthy. But there is nobody meaningfully steering it. The currents decide where it goes.
A surprising number of businesses operate the same way. They have websites, social media accounts, advertising campaigns, salespeople, email lists, products and customers. They are unquestionably in business. Yet they are slowly drifting into what I call the Sea of Sameness—a marketplace where competitors increasingly look, sound and behave like one another.
Same services.
Same promises.
Same marketing.
Same positioning.
Eventually the customer looks across the horizon and sees a fleet of nearly identical ships. So they choose the cheapest passage.
When Marketing Has Nothing to Say
When growth slows, the instinctive response is usually predictable:
Increase the marketing.
Run more ads.
Post more content.
Rebuild the website.
Hire an agency.
Try another campaign.
That response makes sense because marketing is visible and controllable. You can buy more traffic tomorrow. You can launch another campaign next week. Doing something creates the reassuring feeling that you are addressing the problem. But marketing answers a specific question:
How do we communicate our value?
It cannot answer the question that comes before it:
What value do we actually have to communicate?
If your customers cannot find a meaningful reason to choose you instead of the alternatives, increasing the volume of your marketing may simply make more people aware that you look like everyone else. The problem isn't necessarily your marketing. Your ship may have simply drifted too far into the Sea of Sameness.
The Difference Trap
There is a popular piece of business advice that tells entrepreneurs, “Don't be better. Be different.” It sounds clever. It is also incomplete. Entrepreneurs hear advice like this and start trying to manufacture uniqueness. They sit around conference tables brainstorming what they could do that nobody else does. They change their branding, invent unusual features or search for some clever positioning statement that will make the business appear innovative.
But different isn't the same thing as valuable. You can paint your ship purple. Put a cannon on the roof. Make the captain wear a flaming hat. You'll certainly be different. That doesn't mean anybody wants to sail with you. This is where I think we misunderstand innovation. During the years I built my first company, I wasn't sitting around asking how I could make the business different from my competitors. I was solving problems.
How I Escaped the Fleet
I started my first company with $30 and eventually built it into an eight-figure national franchise. At the time I franchised the business, there were roughly 3,000 companies in the United States offering a fundamentally similar service. Yet during approximately seventy years before I entered the industry, only two franchise systems had been created.
I didn't begin with some grand plan to disrupt that industry. I kept encountering lemons. Some were self-imposed: my own fears, weaknesses and lack of knowledge. Others came from the status quo—the assumptions about how businesses in our industry were supposed to operate. Success eventually created its own danger through complacency. And chaos periodically arrived without asking permission. Each problem forced me to solve something.
We improved the atmosphere. The customer experience. Communications. Events. Training. Technology. The transformation customers experienced. How people felt when they walked through our doors. Those solutions accumulated. Eventually, something interesting happened. We became remarkably different without spending our time trying to be different.
Innovation Doesn't Create Advantage. Value Does.
That distinction matters. An innovation has no inherent business value simply because nobody has done it before. It becomes valuable when it solves something customers care about. That's the missing step in much of the conversation about competitive advantage. The progression looks more like this:
Problems → Solutions → Innovation → Value → Preference → Choice
Your competitive edge emerges from the accumulation of meaningful reasons customers prefer you. That also means your competitors aren't necessarily who you think they are. My company didn't only compete with other companies in our industry. We competed for discretionary income, attention and emotional investment. A customer could spend money with us—or take a luxury vacation, buy a boat, attend an event or choose another experience that made life more interesting. Once I understood that, my competitive landscape became much larger. So did the possibilities.
Stop Asking How to Be Different
There is a better question:
What meaningful problem could we solve that would make customers more likely to choose us?
Then ask it again.
And again.
This creates a fundamentally different approach to innovation. Instead of inventing differentiation at the kitchen table, you develop it through continuous contact with reality. Listen to customer frustrations. Examine friction. Challenge assumptions everyone in your industry accepts. Look for outdated systems. Notice compromises customers have learned to tolerate. Study what happens before, during and after they buy from you. Then solve something meaningful.
One solution may be easy to copy. Twenty accumulated solutions are considerably harder. Over time, the ship develops capabilities, experiences, systems, reputation and value that the surrounding fleet doesn't possess. Now marketing finally has something interesting to talk about.
Get Out of the Sea of Sameness
The goal of competitive strategy isn't simply to be better. It isn't simply to be different. The goal is to become the clear choice. Customers are constantly choosing between competing uses of their money, attention, energy and time. Your job is to give them meaningful reasons to choose you.
Marketing can communicate those reasons. It cannot manufacture them. So before you approve another campaign, hire another agency or pour more money into advertising, look at your ship. Are you actually going somewhere? Or are you drifting alongside all the other deadwood?
The Gambit
Pull up the websites of your five closest competitors and remove the company names. Read the promises, services, claims and positioning. Then ask one uncomfortable question:
If customers couldn't see our logo, would they have any meaningful reason to know which one was us?
If the answer is no, don't start with more marketing.
Start looking for problems worth solving.
FAQ
What is the Sea of Sameness in business?
The Sea of Sameness is a marketplace where competing businesses increasingly offer similar services, make similar promises, and use similar marketing. When customers struggle to see meaningful differences in value, businesses become more like commodities and price often becomes a larger factor in the buying decision.
How can a business create a real competitive advantage?
Start by solving meaningful problems customers actually care about. Those solutions can improve the product, service, customer experience, systems, communication, convenience, transformation, or other sources of value. Over time, accumulated improvements create customer preference—and preference gives people a reason to choose your business.
Is being different enough to create a competitive advantage?
No. Being different only matters when the difference creates value customers care about. Instead of asking, “How can we be different?” ask, “What meaningful problem could we solve that would make customers more likely to choose us?” That shifts innovation from manufactured uniqueness toward meaningful value creation.
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