What to do when competitors start telling your brand story
When a category goes mainstream, the playing field gets crowded.
More competitors. More advertising. More influencers. More brands saying the same thing.
And suddenly, brand differentiation gets harder.
The part that catches most brands off guard is competitors eventually don’t just copy your product. They start copying your brand story. The team-on-camera videos, the process talk, the hometown pride. The tactic spreads as fast as everything else did.
That’s when differentiation gets harder and exactly when your story becomes more valuable. Those things existed before the marketing campaign. They existed before the competitor showed up. And if you tell them well, they can’t be copied.
Brand storytelling is most effective when it communicates the specific history, people, process, and place that make a company different.
why your brand exists?
Not another surface-level origin story
“We started in a garage.” “We saw a gap in the market.” “We wanted to make something better.” Great. But that’s the beginning of the story, not THE story.
What was the obsession before the business existed? What did you fight for as the company grew? Talk about the scrappy years, the hard parts that led to a better outcome, and the decisions that shaped the company.
Show, don’t tell. Nobody can tell your brand story better than you. But only if it’s the specific version, not the highlight reel version every competitor is telling too.
Who is part of your brand story?
Put people on camera
Craftsmanship doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are people behind it. Maybe that’s you. Maybe it’s a team of craftspeople you’ve spent years building. Maybe it’s someone who’s spent twenty years mastering one very specific part of the process. The kind of person who can taste, feel, or hear a difference nobody else notices.
Let people meet them. Talk about why they were hired, what they know, what they notice that other people don’t. “We have an incredible team” says nothing. Watching someone talk about the one detail they’ve obsessed over for a decade says everything.
Wooj, the 3D-printed lamp company, doesn’t just put its founder in front of the camera. Its social ads feature different team members talking about what they’re proud of, what they notice, and even their personal favorites along side the sale and feature information. They’re giving the brand specific stories to tell.
How can you show your product is different?
Tease the secret sauce
If your product is genuinely different, don’t hide all the interesting parts. Don’t reveal your secret formula, but make sure people know there is one.
Talk about what it’s made from, how long it takes to make, what gets done by hand, what takes years to learn, and what decisions cost more money but make a better product. When a category is crowded, the details become valuable specifically because they’re harder to fake.
POPFLEX’s founder, Cassey Ho, shared that one pant launch (Y2K cargo) took years of back-and-forth prototyping to get it right. Tweaking the fit, the rise, the leg width, through what she says were far more prototypes than most brands ever allow. In her words: "We must have gone through hundreds of prototypes, but it was worth it." It sold out multiple times. Those are the details a competitor can’t fake their way into after the fact.
Where do you make or source your product?
Don’t forget
Place gives a brand context. It tells people that your product didn’t just appear out of nowhere.
Your materials come from a place with a long production history. Your city has a manufacturing tradition you’re continuing. Your region shaped the product in a way that couldn’t have happened anywhere else.
A current BS Creative client is proudly making guitars out of Kansas City. A city most people don’t associate with instrument craftsmanship. If place matters to your story, don’t bury it in the About page.
A few phrases to retire
Generic language is exactly how a competitor ends up sounding like you in the first place. Vague enough that your story and theirs are interchangeable.
“Quality” - says nothing. Every competitor claims it too. Show what makes you high quality.
“It does X” - feature language works until your category becomes mainstream. Then features become table stakes. Show why it’s worth caring about, not just what it does.
“The product speaks for itself” - a great photo stops the scroll, a story is what someone remembers after.
Your competitors can copy the format. They can put their founder on camera. They can show the factory. They can talk about materials and craftsmanship. They can’t copy what actually happened to you.
That’s the part that doesn’t scale for them and it’s the part specialty and craft-forward brands already have, whether or not they’ve started using it.
Sara Sampey is Co-Founder of BS Creative, a story-first video and audio studio helping intentional brands turn their process into proof. Through documentary storytelling, BS Creative captures the people, craftsmanship, and decisions behind the products customers trust.
How you make it matters.