Episode 22: Most Brands Are Costumes — Why Your Industry Visual Language Might Be Working Against You

I'm Jason Haeger, and this is Marketing Notes for Entrepreneurs, where impact-driven leaders

use trust, clarity, and strategy to turn good work into sustainable growth.

Last episode, we established something foundational.

A brand is the actual thing.

The organization, the product, the person at its core.

The mark is just an expression that represents it.

When the mark and the thing are aligned, trust accumulates without effort.

When they're not, customers sense the gap before they can name it.

Today, we're going to look at what happens when an entire industry reaches for the same

essential mark, and what it costs the businesses who are actually doing something worth pointing

at.

You've been here before.

The chairs are arranged along the walls.

Some of them have armrests, some don't, and the ones that do are slightly too narrow to

be comfortable for long.

There's a low table in the center, littered with magazines from three months ago and perfectly

positioned to be less useful than it was designed to be.

The lighting is a particular shade of fluorescent that makes everyone look slightly unwell.

There's a television mounted high on the wall, tuned to a cable news channel at low volume

with closed captions running a few seconds behind the audio.

And everyone is filling out paperwork or looking at their phone.

You signed in at the front desk 15 minutes ago.

The person behind the glass was perfectly pleasant.

She handed you a clipboard with four pages of forms, most of which asked for information

you've provided at this same office before.

You filled them out anyway, returned the clipboard, and took a seat in one of the uninviting chairs.

You're not here because you're sick.

Nothing is wrong, exactly.

You're just here for something routine, like a checkup, a follow-up, or a referral.

But the room doesn't know that, and doesn't care.

The room is just there.

It treats everyone the same.

On the wall across from you there's a logo.

It might be a stylized cross, or an abstract shape suggesting forward movement, or two

hands cupped together.

The colors are probably blue and green, or blue and white, or teal and gray.

Beneath it, clean sans-serif type.

There is a tagline.

Something about care.

Something about you.

Probably also about partnership or trust, or being there when it matters.

You read it when you glanced around the room as you sat down.

You haven't thought about it since.

At some point a door opens.

A medical assistant calls a less familiar name, and someone across the room stands up

and disappears through the door.

It closes behind them.

You look back at your phone.

You don't feel angry.

You're not having a bad experience exactly.

You just feel, in a way you couldn't quite articulate if someone asked you to, like a

number.

Like your presence here is a transaction to be processed, rather than the person that

you are.

The logo on the wall seemed to promise something different.

The room never got the message.

That gap between what the mark promises and what the experience produces is the thesis

of this episode.

This is episode 22.

Most brands are costumes.

Let's talk about how they get that way, and what it looks like when a brand takes the

costume off.

Let's start with how the costume gets made.

Nobody sits down and decides to build a generic brand.

That's almost never how it happens.

What happens is usually more gradual and more understandable than that.

You're starting a business, or you're rebranding one.

You need a logo, a color palette, a name, something to put on a website and a business

card and a sign above the door.

You look at what the successful organizations in your space are doing.

You notice patterns, a certain kind of color, a certain kind of shape, a certain kind of

language.

You're not copying anyone specifically.

You're absorbing what the category looks like when it's done well.

And then, reasonably, you reach for something in that territory.

Because those signals are doing real work.

They're not arbitrary.

The commonality of blue in financial services isn't blue by accident.

It signals stability, reliability, and trustworthiness.

The cupped hands in healthcare aren't there by accident either.

They signal care, warmth, and human connection.

The scales and pillars in legal also aren't there by accident.

They signal strength, fairness, and authority.

These are legitimate emotional associations.

They're reaching for something real.

And for a business finding its footing, borrowing those signals from the category is a reasonable

thing to do.

It tells the market you belong here.

And importantly, it works well enough until you figure out what actually makes you different.

The costume isn't the mistake.

It's a placeholder.

The mistake is forgetting you're wearing one.

Because the longer you wear it, the more invisible it becomes.

To you, not to the customer.

You stop seeing the costume.

Then you start defending it.

You start mistaking familiarity for identity.

And when that happens, the mark stops being a placeholder and starts being a ceiling.

A limit on how distinct your business can become because the signals you're sending

are indistinguishable from everyone around you.

Or you disassociate from it entirely, widening the distance between the mark and your brand.

If you remember the last episode, you know that this is quite possibly worse.

Either way, you end up with a similar problem.

The customer is standing in front of two organizations.

Both of them are wearing the same costume.

Neither one has given them a reason to choose them.

Now that's important because the costume isn't inherently bad.

It's what you wear until you've earned your own clothes.

Categories exist for a reason.

They help customers orient themselves.

They give people a rough idea of what they're looking at before they know anything else.

The mistake isn't wearing the costume.

The mistake is never becoming anything more than it.

The category gives you a place to start.

The thing gives you something worth being known for.

Now let's talk about what the costume costs.

Think back to the waiting room from the beginning of this episode.

That wasn't a bad business.

Nothing was wrong exactly.

The staff was pleasant.

The process was functional.

The care, when you eventually received it, was probably adequate.

But the logo on the wall made a promise the room hadn't kept.

It said care.

It said partnership.

It said you matter here as a person, not just as a patient.

And the experience.

The forms, the chairs, the television, the name called from behind a door, said something

closer to "we process a lot of people, and you are one of them."

That's not cruelty, that's volume.

That's what happens when an operation scales without asking whether the thing behind the

mark has scaled with it.

The mark kept saying care.

The system quietly optimized for throughput.

And the patient, the customer, felt it.

Not as an accusation, not as a conscious critique, just as a low-grade sense of disconnection.

That the place they experienced didn't quite match the place they'd been promised.

This is what the costume costs.

Trust consistently eroded in a series of small moments.

The feeling of being processed rather than seen, accumulated over enough visits, becomes

the reason someone starts looking for an alternative when one appears.

The costume kept the promise the category made.

It didn't keep the promise the organization made.

Those are two different promises.

And most businesses are only tracking one of them.

Here's what escaping the costume looks like.

There's a surgery center in Oklahoma that has been posting its prices on its website

since 2009.

Not ranges, not estimates subject to insurance adjustments.

Prices.

The actual number.

What the procedure costs.

Before you schedule.

Before you decide.

Before you've committed to anything.

In an industry where pricing is famously opaque, where the same procedure can cost significantly

more at one facility than another, where patients routinely receive bills months after treatment

for amounts they couldn't have predicted, this is a radical act.

The name is Surgery Center of Oklahoma.

It does not suggest that kind of innovation.

It does not evoke warmth or forward movement or cupped hands.

It tells you where it is and what it does.

The mark is almost aggressively plain.

And it doesn't matter.

Because the thing behind the mark is doing real work that no logo could replicate.

Predictability in a system defined by opacity.

Predictability in a system defined by surprise.

Respect for the patient's ability to make an informed choice in a system that routinely

withholds the information required to make one.

That's not a marketing strategy.

That's a value made operational.

The mark points at it.

But the mark isn't why it works.

A pediatric clinic doing something similar.

A membership model.

No financial surprises.

Care for patients from birth through young adulthood is making the same kind of bet.

The tagline says every patient deserves to be seen and heard.

The model is designed to make that true.

Not to say it.

To make it structurally, operationally, actually true.

The mark in both cases is almost secondary.

What the patient experiences is an organization that is being what it says it is.

That alignment is so rare in this industry that it makes the underlying difference impossible

to ignore.

Not because the branding is clever.

But because the thing behind it is genuinely different.

The costume in both cases has been taken off.

Not by redesigning the logo.

But by building something the logo doesn't have to cover for.

So how do you know if you're wearing one?

Take your logo, your tagline, your color palette, your about page, everything that constitutes

your mark.

And ask, could this belong to another business in your industry without anyone noticing?

Not because it shares a color or because it uses a familiar typeface.

But because nothing about the whole expression tells you who this business is.

If the answer is yes, you're probably wearing the costume.

It's not a crisis.

The costume is telling you that the mark hasn't caught up to the thing yet.

Or that the thing hasn't differentiated far enough from the category for the mark to have

anything specific to communicate.

Both of those can be solved, but they require different work.

If the mark is generic because the thing is still developing, if you're early, if you're

still finding your footing, or if the differentiator is real but not yet fully built, then the

costume is doing its job.

It's buying you time.

Keep it.

Focus on the thing.

The mark will have something to say when the thing is ready.

If the mark is generic because you stopped asking the question.

If the thing has differentiated but the mark is still wearing the category's signals out

of habit, or inertia, or to avoid the discomfort of standing out, that's a different problem.

The thing is already there.

The mark simply hasn't caught up yet.

And if the mark was recently changed but the thing didn't change with it, then neither

the old mark nor the new one is doing the work that it's expected to.

The mark was changed.

The thing hasn't.

The customer will notice before you do.

You cannot redesign your way out of a reality problem.

If the thing hasn't changed, changing the mark only changes the costume.

The costume is only a problem when you've forgotten you're wearing it, or when you change

it without asking what it was supposed to be pointing at in the first place.

The question isn't whether your mark looks like your competitors.

The question is whether your mark is pointing accurately at something uniquely valuable.

One question before you close this out.

Think about the waiting room again.

You're sitting there looking at the logo on the wall, reading the tagline about care.

Now imagine someone sitting in the waiting room, lobby, or reception area of your business.

They see your mark.

They read your words.

Then they experience the thing behind them.

Do those two things point to the same reality?

Not perfectly and not in every detail, but in the way that matters, in the feeling they'd

leave with, and whether the mark and the thing are pointed at the same place.

That alignment is the work.

Not the logo, not the rebrand, not a new tagline.

The slower, consistent work of making sure the thing behind the mark is actually what

the mark promised.

The costume is easy to put on.

It's easy to keep wearing.

The businesses that take it off and build something specific enough to stand without

it, are the ones that don't need the category's signals anymore, because they have their own.

If you want an outside perspective on whether your mark is pointing accurately at your thing,

or whether you've been wearing the costume long enough that you've stopped seeing it,

I do a deep dive diagnostic into your brand and give you an honest read along with clear

next steps.

Go to greyleafmedia.com/diagnostic.

If this episode resonated with you, I'd appreciate you sharing it with someone who is working

to build, or rebuild, their own business.

A review wherever you listen helps the show more than you realize.

It also helps the people it's made for find it sooner.

Next episode, we talk about building a brand from nothing.

What it means to start with the thing before you have a mark, and the specific pitfalls

that come with making those first bets.

Until then, ask yourself what the costume is covering.

Then ask yourself whether the thing underneath it is worth pointing to.

The answer is where the work starts.

[BLANK_AUDIO]