Bland is the brand: Forty-seven badges, one car

The motor industry has quietly become a real-world masterclass in something marketers have been doing to themselves for years. Every new car looks like every other new car, because every new car has been through the same wind tunnel, the same regulations, the same risk-averse focus groups. The marketing industry is doing exactly the same thing to brands. Different logo, same shape. The trouble is, we keep getting paid to look the other way.

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Try this next time you're in a car park. Stand still and squint at the rows of cars. Cover the badges with your thumb if you can be bothered. Then try to tell the Hyundai Tucson apart from the Kia Sportage, the Nissan Qashqai, the Vauxhall Grandland and whatever Peugeot is calling its mid-size SUV this month.

You can't. None of us can.

They are, give or take a few centimetres, the same car. The same height. The same width. The same blunt-nosed, slab-sided, LED-eyebrowed silhouette. Strip off the badges and you'd be hard-pushed to identify any of them from twenty feet away.

This isn't a coincidence and it isn't your eyes playing tricks. It's the predictable end result of every manufacturer designing for the same physics, the same regulations and broadly the same focus groups.

A midsize SUV from one brand now looks nearly indistinguishable from a competitor's because they are all using similar engineering requirements and trend-driven styling. The pursuit of ‘global appeal’ has created vehicles that offend no one but inspire no one.

So far, so motoring journalism. But the reason this matters isn't about cars.

Welcome to the wind tunnel

Automobiles converged on sameness for reasons that, on paper, are perfectly sensible. Aerodynamics. Pedestrian safety rules. Shared platforms. Global manufacturing efficiency. Crash test scores. Cost per unit. Every one of those pressures pushed designers towards the same blunt blob, and the industry obliged.

The bit nobody really says out loud is that brand marketing has been on exactly the same journey for years. We just dressed it up better.

Walk into any half-decent agency and you'll find the same Figma boards full of the same sans-serif logos, the same earth-tone palettes, the same wordmarks set in Inter, the same "manifesto" films cut to the same melancholic piano score.

The brand book template is the same. The tone of voice guidelines are the same. The challenger positioning is the same. Every D2C startup is bold and fearless. Every consultancy is human. Every fintech is on a mission. Every coffee chain is rooted in community.

It's the same wind tunnel. We just call it best practice.

How we got here

In fairness to the motor industry, they have an excuse. Physics doesn't care about brand identity. A drag coefficient is a drag coefficient and a pedestrian impact regulation is a regulation. Air does not care whether your badge says Ferrari, Volkswagen, Hyundai or Toyota. And the most aerodynamically efficient shape for a car resembles a rounded blob.

What's our excuse?

I'd say it boils down to three things, and none of them are particularly noble

The first is risk. Genuinely original work is hard to defend in a room of nervous stakeholders. Showing the client something that looks like seven other brands in the category is always the safer recommendation. Nobody got fired for landing on a brand identity that nods to the leader.

The second is research. We have replaced instinct with data, and data is brilliant at telling you what already works. It’s hopeless at telling you what hasn't been tried yet. So the customer focus groups vote for the version that feels familiar. The A/B test prefers the headline that sounds like the headlines that already perform. The whole pipeline quietly steers everything towards the average.

The third is the agency model itself. When you're working to a tight margin on a turnaround that was halved at the briefing stage, you reach for what you already have in the drawer. Templates. Decks. Frameworks. Bits of last year's work for a different client in a different sector. Nobody admits this - I mean duh, obviously - but it's why so much of the work looks the way it does.

The con we're all in on

While brand strategy and brand design have quietly converged into a beige consensus, the campaigns wrapped around them have got louder. The promises have got bigger. Every brand is now 'disruptive', 'category-defining' and 'different' in ways that, if pressed, nobody on the team could actually articulate.

We've built an entire industry that exists to manufacture difference in comms, because the underlying difference in the product or the proposition was never really there. We're the marketing equivalent of the motor industry's badge engineering, where the same chassis gets a different grille and a different name and a different launch event.

What would actually be different?

Here's a useful exercise for anyone with a brand project on their desk. Cover your client's logo. Replace it with three competitors' logos in turn. Could the rest of the work plausibly belong to any of them?

If the answer is yes, you haven't done your job. You've just delivered a Vauxhall Grandland with a different badge.

The genuinely useful conversation marketers could be having with clients right now isn't about brand refreshes, tone of voice updates or another round of customer personas. It's about whether the actual product, service or experience is materially different from the next three competitors on the list. Because if it isn't, no amount of marketing is going to fix that. We'll just spend more money each year trying to obscure it.

Final word

The car industry is starting, very slowly, to notice what it's done. Audi's design boss has gone on record saying it's time for a fresh new concept to inform all future cars, because the brand's current look is no longer unique. BMW's design chief has explicitly pledged to avoid the "same sausage, different length" strategy across its range. Whether they pull it off is another question. But at least they've admitted, out loud, that the problem exists.

Unfortunately, the marketing industry hasn't got there yet. We're still presenting the same chassis as forty-seven different brands and charging by the badge.

That, to me, is the more interesting story. Not that brands have got boring. That we, as an industry, have got very good at being paid to pretend they haven't.

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