Why Your Brand is Just Samesies

Let me guess. You hired an agency. Smart people. Good coffee. They workshopped your brand for a few weeks and handed you a document that said something like: "We are a passionate, innovative company committed to delivering world-class solutions that empower our customers."

You nodded. You paid the invoice. You put it on your website. And now you sound exactly like every other company in your industry.

That's not the agency's fault, by the way. It's the question's fault. Because almost every brand story starts with the same question — what does the market want? — and that question will always, without fail, lead you to the same answer as everyone else who asked it.

The market doesn't want you. It wants what it already recognizes. So when you start there, you're not designing a story. You're building a mirror.

The Mirror Problem

Here's the pattern I see in almost every brand engagement we take on at storylab. A company looks at its competitors. It looks at the market landscape. It identifies what's working for others. Then it reverse-engineers a narrative from the outside in.

The thinking goes: if they're saying innovation, we should say innovation. If they lead with customer obsession, we should lead with customer obsession. It feels safe. It feels strategic. And it produces the most profoundly generic language you've ever seen on a slide deck.

The reason is deceptively simple. When you start with the market, you start with what already exists. You're reading the room instead of entering it. And every room-reader ends up standing in the same spot — the center — where all the averages collect.

Humans did not discover fire, we designed it. When we don't speak our fire we don't have a voice.

That's something I teach at Parsons, and it was born out of a much longer story about a girl named Echo, sopapillas, and the difference between reaction and creation. But the short version is this: a brand that has no voice is a brand that hasn't said what it actually loves. What it was built for. What it would do for free on a Thursday night. The stuff that can't be reverse-engineered from a competitor analysis.

That fire — the one we designed — isn't a metaphor. It's the oldest human act: shaping the world to match what we know is possible. Design isn't decoration. It's not a phase in the project plan. It's what we do when the current reality isn't enough. And a brand story is no different. You don't find it in the market data. You don't uncover it in a competitor audit. You design it — from the inside out.

Two Circles and the Space Between

There's a shape in sacred geometry called the Vesica Piscis. Two circles, overlapping. You've seen it — it shows up in the earliest Christian iconography, in Hindu mandalas, in the geometry of Gothic cathedral windows. It predates branding by about four thousand years, but it turns out to be the best brand strategy tool I've ever used.

Here's how it works. One circle is who you are — your origin, your founding wound, your particular flavor of obsession, the thing that made the founders start this company instead of getting a sensible job. The other circle is who you serve — not the demographic, not the ICP, but the actual human need your customer carries. The ache. The aspiration. The unspoken tension in their work or life.

Most brand stories live entirely in the right circle. They start and end with the customer. That sounds generous but it's actually cowardly because it means you never have to say who you are. You just become a shape that fits the hole. And some live entirely in the left — founders so in love with their own origin myth they forget anyone else exists.

Here's the thing that changes everything: you're not creating for the customer. And you're not creating for the company. You're designing the exchange in between. That's what the Vesica Piscis actually teaches. The mandorla — that almond-shaped space where the two circles overlap — isn't a Venn diagram compromise. It's an act of design. It's the space where your truth meets their need, and something new is made that didn't exist in either circle alone. It's the only territory on the map that belongs to you and no one else. Because no one else has your particular wound meeting their particular ache in that particular way.

A Diagnostic You Can Do Right Now

Pull up your brand messaging. Your website. Your pitch deck. Whatever document is doing the talking for you. Now run it through these three questions:

One. Could a competitor say this exact sentence and have it also be true? If yes, it's not a story. It's furniture. It fills a room but it doesn't change it.

Two. Does it reference your origin — the specific, weird, particular reason you exist? Not "we saw a gap in the market." That's everyone. I mean the real reason. The dinner table argument. The thing that broke. The person who said "enough."

Three. Does it name a tension your customer feels that they haven't yet been able to articulate themselves? Because the best brand stories don't confirm what people already know. They give language to something that's been sitting in the chest without words.

If you went 0-for-3, congratulations. You're normal. You're also invisible.

The Reframe

The fix isn't a rebrand. Please, for the love of all that is good, don't start another brand project. The fix is a conversation — probably an uncomfortable one — about two things.

First: what's the founding wound? Every company that matters was born from some kind of frustration, loss, or stubbornness. That wound is not a weakness. It's the emotional engine of your entire enterprise. When you can name it, you can stop pretending to be something you're not. And that is when voice appears. I teach my students that voice is the fire we design, the love we share through what we make in the world. Your brand is no different.

Second: what's the customer's unnamed tension? Not their pain point — that's the stuff they already Google. I'm talking about the thing underneath it. The thing they feel in the gut but can't articulate at a conference. When you can name that, you earn the right to be heard. Because you've just done what no competitor has done — you've given them a word for the wordless.

Where those two truths overlap? That's the exchange — or as the ancients called it, the mandorla. That's not a discovery — it's a design. The same way we didn't stumble upon fire, you don't stumble upon a brand story. You shape it. You build it from what's truest in you meeting what's most needed in them. And the sentence that lives in that exchange is the one no one else on the planet can say.

And here's what I've learned after years of teaching this: the Vesica Piscis doesn't care if you're building a brand, a marriage, or a life. The framework works wherever two truths need to meet. I've watched students use it to redesign their careers. I've seen founders use it to repair relationships with co-founders who'd stopped speaking. I've used it on myself more times than I'd care to admit. Because the question at the center is always the same — what's the exchange? Where does who I am meet what's needed? That intersection is where the fire gets designed. In a boardroom. At a kitchen table. On a walk where you finally say the thing out loud. These are not just business frameworks. They're life frameworks wearing a blazer.