TL;DR
- Branding feels fake when the words could describe any competitor and nothing on the page proves them.
- Looking like everybody else is not the crime it is usually made out to be — familiar layouts test well.
- Vague copy is expensive because most of it is never read. What survives has to be the specific part.
- The fix is subtraction: cut every claim you cannot back, then replace it with one you can.
Everybody can spot it, and almost nobody can name it. You land on a company’s website, read three sentences about their passion for delivering excellence through innovative solutions, and something goes quietly cold. You have not caught them lying. You have simply stopped believing them. The interesting question is what actually triggers that, because most of the usual answers are wrong.
What people mean when they say a brand feels fake
It is almost never a design judgement. Ask someone why a site felt hollow and they will not mention the kerning. They will paraphrase a sentence back at you with a slight sneer, or point out that the testimonial has no name attached, or say that they could not work out what the company actually does.
That points at three specific faults rather than a general air of inconsistency:
Three ways a brand starts to sound false
Fault one
The unfalsifiable promise
A claim written so that it could never be wrong, and therefore says nothing. "Committed to quality." "Customer-focused." Nobody has ever advertised the opposite.
Fault two
The borrowed voice
Language lifted wholesale from a larger competitor in an entirely different market. It reads as costume, because the reader has met the original.
Fault three
The missing proof
Numbers with no source, testimonials with no surname, awards with no year. The absence is louder than the claim.
All three are failures of specificity, not of polish. A rough site with one concrete, checkable fact on it reads as more honest than a beautiful one built entirely out of adjectives.
Sameness is not the crime it is made out to be
The standard agency line is that your brand feels generic because your website looks like everyone else’s. It is a comfortable argument for anyone selling a redesign, and the research is much less supportive of it than you would expect.
Start with how ordinary a default build now is. W3Techs, surveying in September 2026, put WordPress alone on 40.7% of all websites and 58.9% of the CMS market. Most of those sites are running a theme somebody else designed, which means a familiar-looking layout is not an unusual condition. It is the normal one.
More awkwardly, familiarity appears to help. Tuch and colleagues, in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in 2012, tested 119 real websites and found that low visual complexity and high prototypicality — how closely a page matches what people expect that kind of page to look like — produced the most positive first impressions, at speeds as short as 17 milliseconds. A conventional layout is working with people’s expectations, not against them.
Looking like your competitors costs you distinctiveness. It does not, on its own, cost you credibility. So if your brand feels fake, a redesign is unlikely to fix it. The sentences will simply be set in a nicer typeface.
Vague copy is expensive because almost nobody reads it
There is a second reason waffle does more damage than it seems to. It uses up the small amount of attention you are given, and there is much less of that than most brand documents assume.
Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen Norman Group, drawing on Microsoft’s analysis of more than 205,000 pages in 2011, found that visitors often leave a page within 10-20 seconds, and that holding anyone for longer means communicating your value proposition within about 10 seconds. Earlier Nielsen Norman Group analysis of 45,237 page views, published in 2008, concluded that on an average page a visitor has time to read at most 28% of the words, and that 20% is the likelier figure. Both are old studies and worth treating as directional rather than precise.
The implication is uncomfortable for anyone who has written a mission statement. If roughly a fifth of your words get read, and the first ten seconds decide whether the rest are read at all, then a paragraph of positioning language is not neutral padding. It is spending the whole budget on nothing.
The fix is subtraction, then one specific replacement
The repair is unglamorous and mostly involves deleting things. It also takes about a week rather than a quarter.
Five passes over your own copy
- Test every claim for its opposite
If no sane competitor would claim the reverse, the sentence carries no information. "Reliable", "passionate", "results-driven" all fail this. Delete them rather than rewriting them.
- Find the sentence only you could have written
Somewhere in your business there is a fact nobody else can state: a process you use, a guarantee you honour, a type of job you turn down. That sentence is your positioning. Move it to the top.
- Attach a source to every number
Any figure on your site should name where it came from and, ideally, link to it. If you cannot source it, take it off. An unsourced statistic is the fastest way to lose a sceptical reader.
- Name your proof
Full names on testimonials, dated awards, real photographs of real work. Anonymous praise reads as invented, whether or not it is.
- Read the first ten seconds aloud
Cover everything below the fold and read what is left to somebody outside the business. If they cannot say what you do and who for, nothing further down the page will rescue it.
A worked example. A small commercial cleaning firm opens with “Delivering exceptional standards through a passionate, customer-focused approach.” Every word survives the opposite test as a claim no competitor would deny, so it all goes. What replaces it comes out of a conversation with the operations manager: the firm only takes contracts within a twenty-mile radius, so the same two cleaners attend every visit and the client has their mobile number. That is one sentence, it is checkable, and no competitor running a national franchise model can copy it. Sorting the rest of the page is the same judgement made repeatedly.
Keep it, and move it up the page
- Constraints, guarantees, and the work you refuse
- Prices, ranges, or the reason you cannot publish them
- Testimonials carrying a full name and a date
Cut it, and do not bother rewriting it
- Adjectives that describe an attitude rather than a service
- Any number without a source
- Testimonials without a full name and a date
Where consistency does earn its place
None of this makes brand consistency worthless, and it would be dishonest to pretend the case for it collapses entirely. Using the same typefaces and the same tone across your site, your proposals and your invoices makes your business easier to recognise on the fourth or fifth contact, and it makes producing anything new faster and cheaper. Those are real benefits.
They are just not the benefit being sold when someone tells you that inconsistency is why your brand feels hollow. Consistency makes a message recognisable. It cannot make an empty message true. Get the sentence right first, then make it consistent everywhere.
Good to know
FAQs
Almost always because the language is generic. Copy assembled from claims any competitor could make signals nothing about you, however true it is. The reader is not doubting your competence — they are being given nothing to judge it by.
Usually not. A redesign changes the setting of the sentences, not the sentences. Conventional, familiar layouts actually test well on first impressions, so looking like your competitors is a distinctiveness problem rather than a credibility one.
Ask whether a competitor could honestly claim the opposite. If not, the claim carries no information and can be deleted without loss. What survives that test is your actual positioning.
Constraints and specifics. The area you cover, the jobs you refuse, your response time, how you price, who answers the phone. Concrete detail is proof even when you have no clients to quote.
Less than you think. Visitors read a fraction of what is on a page and decide quickly whether to stay, so the specific part has to come first rather than after the positioning paragraph.
Next step
Copy that sounds like everyone else's?
We work with businesses across Brighton and London on positioning, messaging and the websites that carry them.