TL;DR version:

That nagging sense that everyone else in your industry has their marketing together? It’s an illusion — and a remarkably well-maintained one. What you’re seeing is the polished surface of someone else’s strategy, with all the context, arguments, failed experiments, and lucky timing carefully removed. Copying it doesn’t get you what they have. It gets you a slightly worse version of something that was designed for someone else’s problems. This piece is about what’s actually going on when you feel that anxiety, and what to do with it instead.

You almost certainly know the feeling.

Someone sends you a link. Or you’re scrolling LinkedIn on a Tuesday afternoon, minding your own business, and there it is: a competitor’s new website. Or their rebrand. Or their shiny product launch. Or a campaign that seems to be getting genuine traction. And something happens in your chest that isn’t quite dread and isn’t quite envy* but is somewhere in the uncomfortable vicinity of both.

They look like they’ve Got It Together.

The design is sharp. The messaging is clear. The whole thing has a coherence that your own marketing, if you’re being honest with yourself**, does not currently have.

How did they do that? And, quietly: why haven’t we?

This is one of the most common feelings in marketing. It’s also, almost every time, based on a misreading of the situation.

_{*And you’ve ruled out indigestion.}

_{**Which you aren’t}

What you’re actually looking at

Marketing output is a finished product. By the time you see it it’s like Eton after dinnertime: all the mess has gone.

You’re not seeing the eighteen months of strategic groundwork. You’re not seeing the workshopping that went in circles for a day and a half before someone said the thing that made it all click. You’re not seeing the three campaigns that didn’t work, the messaging that tested badly, the creative direction that got binned after the second round of client feedback. You’re not seeing the budget, the team, the agency relationship, the timing, or the serendipitous moment in the market that made this specific approach land the way it did.

You’re seeing the brochure*.

This is the cargo cult problem in its most seductive form. (If you haven’t read our piece on marketing cargo cults, the short version is: copying what successful marketing looks like, without understanding what makes it work, is how you end up building a bamboo aeroplane and wondering why it won’t fly.) The output looks like the whole thing because it’s all you can see. It isn’t.

The company whose marketing you’re looking at almost certainly looked, at some point, exactly like you do now. They just did the less visible work before you saw the visible bit.

_{*This is also, incidentally, how award-winning campaigns work. By the time a campaign wins a BSA**, it has been through strategy, research, production, media planning, and a post-rationalised write-up that makes it look like the whole thing was obvious from the beginning. The entry form does not mention creatives crying under their desk after something gets scrapped in week seven.}

_{**Big Shiny Award}

Why this is worse in B2B

B2B markets have a specific quality that makes competitive anxiety more acute than it tends to be in consumer marketing: they’re small enough to be legible.

You know who your competitors are. You probably know some of the people. You may even have worked with them at some point. You’re on the same conference circuit, reading the same trade press, bumping into each other at the same events. There’s no anonymity. When someone in your sector does something visible, you notice. And because the market is small enough that you can see the whole chessboard, it’s tempting to think you understand what every move means.

You usually don’t.

A competitor’s flashy new campaign might be the culmination of a two-year repositioning effort. Or it might be a reactive panic spend because they lost a major client and needed to look busy. Or it might be the work of a new marketing hire who had three months to make an impression. You can’t tell from the output. The output looks the same in all three cases.

The closer and more visible your competitive landscape, the easier it is to mistake activity for strategy, surface for substance, and someone else’s finished product for evidence about your own shortcomings.

The thing the anxiety usually produces

Here is what tends to happen when a business acts on this feeling without examining it first.

A new website gets commissioned. Or a rebrand*. Or a sudden enthusiasm for a content format that the competitor seems to be doing well with: a podcast, a newsletter, a video series. The logic, stated plainly, is: they’re doing that and they look good, so if we do that we’ll look good too

This is the bamboo aeroplane. The form without the function. The ritual without the understanding of what the ritual is actually for.

The rebrand costs several bags of gold, takes six months and produces something that is — hopefully — genuinely nicer-looking than what came before. And then nothing moves. Because the market didn’t know the old logo and doesn’t especially care about the new one. The underlying problem — unclear positioning, the wrong message, the wrong audience — is still there, now wearing a fancy new tie and pocket square.

Tactical imitation without strategic foundation doesn’t close the gap. It just gives you something to point at when someone asks what you’ve been doing about marketing.

_{*A new logo is, almost without exception, the thing a company reaches for when it knows something is wrong but can’t identify what. The logo is not the problem. It is rarely even adjacent to the problem or even passed through the problem’s postcode while on the way to somewhere else. This doesn’t stop it feeling like A Solution, which is why logo redesigns remain extremely good business for design agencies.}

The more useful question

The anxious response asks: how do we look more like them?

The more useful question is: what is this competitor actually doing that’s working, and why does it work for them?

Not what does it look like. What problem does it solve, for whom, and why does their audience respond to it? Because the answer to that question is almost never directly replicable — it’s context-dependent in ways that aren’t visible from the outside. Their audience, their positioning, their existing relationships, their reputation in the market, their timing: none of those are yours. A tactic that works brilliantly in their context can land with a dull thud in yours, not because you executed it badly, but because the conditions that made it work for them don’t apply.

There’s a second question that’s even more useful, and almost nobody asks it in the moment.

“Why does seeing this make us uncomfortable?”

Because that discomfort is usually pointing at something real. Not something about your competitor — something about you. A gap in your positioning that you’ve been aware of and not addressed. A channel you’ve been meaning to do something with and haven’t. A message that’s been in place so long it’s stopped meaning anything. Something that was probably true before you saw their website and will still be true once the feeling fades.

The anxiety, irritating as it is, is often the most accurate diagnosis available.

What to do instead

The companies whose marketing you most admire — the ones that seem to have that coherence, that clarity, that sense of knowing exactly what they are and who they’re for — are almost universally the ones that stopped looking sideways and started looking inward. Not navel-gazing. Not ignoring the market. But building from what they actually know about their own business, their own customers, and what they genuinely offer that others don’t.

That’s harder than commissioning a rebrand. It involves some conversations that feel uncomfortably like Admitting Things. It usually produces something that looks less impressive in the short term and works considerably better over time.

It also, incidentally, produces marketing that your competitors can’t easily copy — because it’s built on things that are specific to you.

The next time you feel that particular Tuesday-afternoon pang of competitive anxiety, try sitting with the discomfort for a moment before reaching for a solution*. Ask what it’s pointing at. Then address that, in your own way, for your own audience.

It’s slower. It’s less satisfying in the immediate term. And it’s the only version that actually works.

If you’re not sure where to start with that inward look — what you actually stand for, who you’re really for, what makes you genuinely different — that’s a conversation worth having. It’s what we do.

_{*Or Gaviscon}