Marketing differentiation is a balance

AI hasn’t made content better. It has made it easier to create bad content.

AI hasn’t made content better. It has made it easier to create bad content.
Think of AI as a photocopier. If the original is blurry, every copy is trash.

AI lowered the barriers to create product AND content.
- With Lovable, everyone can create products.
- With Claude, everyone can create content.

So there's SO much more content and competition.

This makes up for:
- Higher potential for sameness
- More noise and overall scarcer attention across channels
- Much harder chances to stand out, even with a differentiated messaging

Because:
- In a world of lot of lookalikes, it's harder to pinpoint outliers
- When channels are noisy, it's harder to identify signal
- When everyone follows the herd, it's harder to read the message behind the channel

Because of this bandwagon effect, differentiation in marketing is becoming harder and harder.

But the hard part is not to be just unique.

The hard part is to strike a balance between being trendy and differentiated.

You need:
→ To focus on a relatively narrow audience
→ Develop a contrarian point of view to go against the grain
→ And balance trendy formats and story arches to match some of the algo rules

Look at Linear's marketing:
→ They speak only to engineers and product teams
→ While others chase scale and volumes, they focus on quality and craft
→ They still do some "trendy" stuff: funding announcements, AI agents products, case studies, office hours, etc.

But they do these things "their own way".

And they cared to define their own way very well.

In a world of mediocrity, your own way of doing the best practices is what stands out.
- Not just fitting into the trend
- And neither over-indexing on being an outsider

Balancing differentiation and trendiness is the key.

How are you doing it?

Let me know in the comments.