A security company founder told me something I recognised immediately. His competitors send guards who sleep on the job. He knows it. His clients know it. The industry knows it. Nobody puts it in a proposal.
The market where everyone sounds the same
When a market commoditises, the language commoditises with it.
Every company settles on the same words. Reliable. Professional. SIA-licensed. Going the extra mile. Committed to excellence. The vocabulary converges until every proposal reads like it came from a template, every website has the same four bullet points, and every pitch covers the same ground in the same order.
This is not laziness. It's a rational response to fear.
Specificity feels risky. If you say something precise, you can be held to it. "Reliable" is safe — nobody can prove you wrong before they sign. But "our guards are always on-site, checked in hourly, and every client gets a live monitoring report" is a commitment. A future client can measure you against it.
So the safer move is to stay vague. Everyone else does. And every proposal ends up identical.
When proposals are identical, the only differentiator left is price. Buyers can't verify quality before they sign, so they buy the number they can actually see. The lower-quality provider wins. Not because they're better. Because they've differentiated on the one variable that was left.
The problem isn't that the market is unfair. The problem is playing the same game as everyone else, and being more expensive at it.
Why claiming quality doesn't work
The instinct, when you're losing tenders to inferior competitors, is to communicate your quality more loudly. More certifications on the cover page. Longer case studies. A more detailed breakdown of your training process.
This doesn't work.
Not because the quality isn't real. Because buyers have no reliable way to verify it before they sign. And because every other company is making exactly the same claim. Quality claims in commoditised markets have been inflated to the point where buyers discount them by default. They've been burned before by someone who promised exactly this.
So the harder you push, the more you sound like everyone else. You're adding more words to a conversation where words have already lost their weight.
The solution is not a better quality claim. It's a different conversation entirely.
The thing nobody says
In every industry, there's a version of guards sleeping on the job.
A specific, uncomfortable truth that practitioners know from experience. That clients have felt the consequences of. That gets discussed in private and never put in writing. An observation that, if anyone said it publicly, would change how buyers think about the whole market.
Nobody says it because it feels adversarial. Like you're attacking competitors rather than building something. So everyone stays quiet, the industry's reputation suffers collectively, and buyers go into procurement with no reliable way to tell the serious operators from the ones cutting corners.
Here's what actually happens when someone names the uncomfortable truth publicly.
They become the reference point. Buyers who've already experienced the problem recognise themselves immediately. Buyers who haven't experienced it yet file it away as a reason to ask harder questions next time. Both groups now have a new lens for every future procurement: is this company part of what I just read about, or are they different?
That's not an attack on competitors. That's a position.
Specificity creates trust in a way that generic quality claims never will. "We're better" is a claim anyone can make. "Here's what the market won't tell you, and here's what we do instead" is an argument. — on naming the thing
What it actually requires
This is not a marketing decision. It's a values decision.
Once you say the uncomfortable thing publicly, you're accountable to it. If you publish content that names poor standards in your industry, every client you sign will hold you to a higher bar. Your team will. You will. You can't write that piece and then send an unbriefed guard.
That's the point. The accountability is the differentiator. Not the words on the page. The operating standard those words commit you to.
Most founders resist this because it feels like exposure. It is exposure. You're staking the business on a real claim about the gap between you and your competitors. If that gap is real, it's the most powerful thing you can communicate. If it isn't real, you'll find out fast. Either way, you learn something useful.
Tooth Club, a dental chain in Essex, built their brand around being visibly different from the clinical sterility of every other practice. All bright pink. Deliberately fun. Unapologetically specific about who they were for and what they stood for. They didn't try to compete on "exceptional care." They decided to be the one thing nobody else in their market was willing to be.
And then they became impossible to confuse with anyone else.
The mechanism is the same in any commoditised market. The brand that wins is not usually the best-kept secret. It's the one that had the clarity and the courage to say the true thing out loud.
One thing to do this week
Write down the thing you know about your industry that you've never put in a proposal.
Not a platitude. The specific, uncomfortable observation. The thing a client would recognise immediately because they've experienced it. The thing you say to yourself privately when a cheaper competitor wins a contract you deserved.
Then ask: if you said that publicly, and a client held you to it, what would you need to be able to back it up?
That gap between what you know and what you're willing to say is where your positioning lives.
If you want help closing it, that's what the Brand Clarity Workshop is for.