Try a simple experiment: copy the "About us" text from your own website and paste it onto the sites of your three closest competitors. If nothing feels wrong, what you have is not a brand but a description of a category. In marketing this is called the interchangeability test, and the result is the same for most companies.
How to run the interchangeability test
The interchangeability test is the fastest way to measure whether a brand's promise actually belongs to it: remove your brand name from the sentence and insert a competitor's name. If the sentence still looks true, that sentence is saying nothing.
- Gather your homepage headline, the first paragraph of your "About us" page and the copy from your last three social posts.
- Delete your brand name from every sentence and write your strongest competitor's name instead.
- Read it out loud. If you catch yourself thinking "yes, they would say that too", mark the sentence.
- Separate the unmarked ones. What remains is your brand's real material — usually one or two sentences.
The test stings, but it is cheap. In half an hour it can explain why a six-month campaign was never remembered.
How a category's shared language forms
Nobody writes clichés on purpose. Category language forms like this: a company looks at the market leader, finds its sentences "safe", adjusts them slightly and uses them. The third company copies the second. Five years later everyone in the sector uses the same three adjectives and none of them sticks in anyone's mind.
Internal pressure adds to it: in a board meeting nobody objects to "innovative, reliable, customer-focused". Sentences that draw no objection are sentences that draw no attention.
Ten common clichés and what to use instead
| Cliché | Why it is empty | Instead |
|---|---|---|
| High quality | Nobody claims low quality | The measure that makes quality verifiable (time, tolerance, warranty) |
| Reliable | Cannot be claimed, only proven | References, certificates, years, repeat-customer rate |
| Customer-focused | No competitor says "product-focused" | A concrete difference in how you work (single contact, reply within 24 hours) |
| Innovative | Everyone's claim | The actual innovation you shipped in the last 12 months |
| Expert team | Unmeasurable | Team size, field of expertise, average experience |
| Turnkey solutions | A category description, not a promise | Which stages of the process you take on |
| Affordable prices | A concession, not a position | What the price is based on (scope, model) |
| Industry pioneer | Unproven superiority | The first concrete thing you did, and when |
| Solution partner | A polite word for supplier | The form of collaboration (embedded team, long-term agreement) |
| Global standards | Which standard is unclear | The standard's name and number |
Four ways out of cliché
- Specificity: Replace the adjective with a number. Not "fast delivery" but "within 48 hours of order". A number is the one thing a competitor cannot copy — if they do, they are lying.
- Proof: Put evidence behind every claim. Delete any claim you cannot prove; you lose nothing, since nobody believed it anyway.
- Contrast: Say what you do not do. "We don't take every job, we only work in this field" builds more trust than ten sentences of praise.
- Mechanism: Describe the method, not the outcome. "We grow your brand" is everyone's sentence; "we grow it through this three-stage process" is yours.
Standing out is not being strange
The common mistake when escaping cliché is becoming incomprehensible. Writing a sentence nobody else uses is easy; you then have a sentence nobody understands. The measure is this: your sentence must be impossible for a competitor to own, yet clear enough for a customer to grasp at once. Differentiation comes from stating a different truth, not from wordplay.
At Circle we start positioning work with exactly this test: we line up every promise from the brand and three competitors, then eliminate the interchangeable ones. The few sentences left are the ground the brand actually owns — communication is built from there.
Frequently asked questions
Should category clichés never be used?
They can support, but they cannot carry. "Reliable" taking up space in a headline is a problem; appearing inside a customer testimonial, it is valuable.
What if our product really is identical to the competition?
Then the difference is found outside the product: service model, lead time, after-sales, specialisation or the brand's stance. Of two companies selling the same machine, the one that says "we only sell to the food industry" is no longer the same company.
How many competitors should we test against?
Three is enough: the market leader, the closest in size, and the one pressuring you on price. More complicates the table without changing the outcome.
If the copy changes, must the logo and identity change too?
Not always. In most cases the promise and language change while the visual identity stays. Whether the identity also needs to change is a separate diagnosis.
Next step
Use the Positioning Statement Builder to test your current promise: it forms your sentence, flags empty phrases like "quality" and "reliable", and tells you whether your proof is concrete.
