From Branding to Blanding: Why So Many Businesses Look and Sound the Same

Open five service businesses' websites side by side and try to tell them apart. The same template with a different accent colour. The same stock photo of a smiling team around a laptop. Tailored solutions. Passionate about results. Your trusted partner. Swap the logos around and nobody would notice.

The design world already has a word for this: blanding. It's been used for years to describe the wave of start-ups that all landed on the same clean sans-serif, the same soft palette and the same friendly lowercase logo. It looked modern. It also looked like everyone else.

AI has given blanding a second wind. This time it's hitting everything at once: the images, the layouts, the words and the thinking behind them.

Everyone has the same intern now

AI is now standard kit in business. Stanford's 2026 AI Index found 88% of organisations used AI in 2025, up from 78% the year before. In marketing it's close to universal: Canva's 2026 State of Marketing and AI report found 97% of marketing leaders use it in their daily creative work.

This isn't an anti-AI post. It's quick, it doesn't get tired and it's handy for a first draft. The catch is that everyone is using similar tools, trained on the same internet, given roughly the same brief. Ask for "a warm, professional About page for a Brisbane accounting firm" and you'll get a perfectly decent page. So will the firm down the road.

There's research on this. In a 2024 study published in Science Advances, researchers from UCL and the University of Exeter asked people to write short stories, some with AI-generated ideas and some without. Readers rated the AI-assisted stories as more creative and better written. They were also more similar to each other.

Each writer got better. The group as a whole got more samey. That's blanding in a nutshell: every piece looks a bit more polished, and the market looks a lot flatter.

And it looks the same too

The sameness isn't limited to words. Plenty of businesses already share a website template, a palette that could belong to anyone and the same handful of stock photos. AI image tools are pushing that further.

In a study published in Patterns late last year, researchers at Dalarna University in Sweden had AI models play a game of pass-the-message. One model made an image from a prompt, another described it, and the first remade it from that description, a hundred times over. Whatever the starting prompt, the images drifted towards just 12 stock motifs, from stormy lighthouses to gothic cathedrals. The lead researcher described the results as bland and generic.

The biggest names aren't immune either. In 2018, Burberry swapped its equestrian knight for a clean sans-serif wordmark, landing on a look several other luxury houses had also adopted. By 2023 it had brought the knight back, with a serif logo drawn from its archive. When a brand that size walks back a modernisation, it's worth asking what the clean look was costing it.

Consumers can feel it coming. In Canva's research, 69% said they expect advertising to end up looking and feeling like the same AI-generated slop.

Correct isn't the same as compelling

Blanded copy is rarely wrong. The grammar's tidy, the tone's pleasant and the structure follows best practice. It just doesn't belong to anyone.

People pick up on it. In Canva's research, 70% of consumers said they can usually spot an AI-generated ad because it feels like it's missing its soul, and 74% said they're more likely to buy from an ad made entirely by humans. A separate Harris Poll study, presented at Cannes Lions in June, found 63% of consumers would be less likely to buy from a brand that uses AI-generated ads.

Surveys aren't behaviour, and plenty of AI-assisted work goes unnoticed. But the direction is clear. When something feels generic, people assume nobody cared enough to make it otherwise, and brand is built on that care.

Amazon offers a neat example from well before the current AI boom. Its former head of personalisation, David Selinger, told Fast Company that when Amazon started explaining why it was recommending a product in its emails, conversion rose 60%. Same products, same algorithm. A few words that felt written for a person made the difference.

Blanding starts before anyone opens the tool

It's tempting to blame the software, but AI only fills the space you leave it. If a business hasn't decided what it stands for, how it looks, how it sounds and what it would never say, the tool will decide for it. And it'll pick the safest, most average option, because average is what it's built from.

Brands that hold their shape do the thinking first:

• A clear point of view. What do you believe about your industry that your competitors don't, or won't say out loud?
• A voice with edges. "Friendly and professional" isn't a voice. Real guidelines list the words you use, the words you avoid, and examples of both.
• A look that's yours. A typeface, palette and photography style someone could recognise with the logo covered up. Templates and stock libraries are fine as a starting point, never as the finish line.
• Human authors where it counts. Proposals, your About page and anything carrying an opinion should come from a person, even if AI helps tidy it up.
• Someone who can say "that's not us". Usually a founder or marketing lead. If nobody owns the voice, the tools end up owning it.

Get those right and AI becomes genuinely useful. It drafts inside your boundaries instead of drawing them for you.

Five ways to tell if you're blanding

Pull up your homepage and your last LinkedIn post and run them past these:

1. The swap test. Replace your business name with a competitor's. If it still works, it isn't saying anything about you.
2. The squint test. Line your homepage up next to three competitors' and squint. If you can't pick yours from the shapes and colours alone, neither can your customers.
3. The barbecue test. Would you say this out loud to a client over a beer? If it sounds like a press release, it'll read like one.
4. The opinion test. Is there a single sentence someone could disagree with? Brands that never take a position are easy to forget.
5. The specifics test. Count the concrete details: names, numbers, places, examples. Generic copy runs on adjectives. Good copy runs on proof.

Fail two or more and it's worth a closer look. Your brand probably isn't bad. It's just interchangeable, and another round of edits won't fix that.

The upside of everyone sounding the same

Here's the good news. When most of your market is publishing polished, competent, forgettable content, a brand with a real point of view stands out more than ever. AI has raised the floor for "good enough". It hasn't moved the bar for memorable, and fewer businesses are clearing it.

Use AI for speed. Keep people in charge of meaning. Work out who you are before you ask a machine to describe you.

Branding is the work of making a business unmistakably itself. Blanding is what happens when you skip that work and let the defaults fill in. The tools will keep getting better at the defaults. Your job is to be the part they can't predict.

If your brand has started to look and sound a little beige, let's have a chat.

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