Everything is starting to look the same. Alex Murrell called it "The Age of Average" in his 2023 essay: the same pale interiors in every Airbnb, the same friendly blob illustrations on every start-up website, the same grille on every SUV, the same skinny sans-serif on every rebrand. He put the images side by side and the effect was hard to unsee. Fifty coffee shops from fifty cities, and you could not tell one from another.
Murrell was writing about how things look. The same convergence is happening in how things feel. Open a banking app, book a flight, order a takeaway: the journeys are now so alike you could swap the logos mid-task and nobody would blink. Every organisation is optimising towards the same "best practice", running the same patterns, testing their way to some bland future. The result is smooth, competent, and interchangeable.
This is the same sea of sameness that I've been hearing about in presentations and pitches for years, and brand-led customer experience is the way out of it. Brand as the reason your experience behaves differently from everyone else's, in the specific moments a customer would notice, rather than brand as a fresh coat of paint over an experience identical to the competitor next door.
The average is now automated
If you want to watch the averaging happen in real time, scroll LinkedIn for five minutes. The posts have converged on a single voice: the punchy one-line opener, the personal confession that resolves into a business lesson, the tidy bulleted list of takeaways, the closing question that is not really a question. AI writing tools did not invent that template, but they have industrialised it. Originality.ai, an AI-detection firm, has been measuring the shift: its analysis of LinkedIn found that over half of long-form posts on the platform are now likely AI-generated.
The tools are not the bad guy here. Averaging is simply what they do. A model is trained on everything, so by default it returns the middle of everything. Ask it for a LinkedIn post and you get the most statistically LinkedIn post possible. Use it without an opinion of your own and you are publishing the average, with your name attached.
Which... is... fine, right up until you remember what the average is worth. When every voice sounds the same, no single voice is worth listening to. The feed becomes background noise, the way fifty identical coffee shops become one long beige corridor. Attention goes to whatever is recognisably itself.
The same mechanism is arriving in customer experience. The journeys were already converging when humans were copying each other's onboarding flows by hand. Now the copying is automated too, and the drift to the middle will only accelerate. Which makes the ability to be distinct more valuable, not less.
Distinctiveness is a skill, not a gift
This is worth sitting with if you are early in your career. The floor just rose. A competent post, a competent CV, a competent strategy deck can now be generated in seconds, which means competence alone no longer separates anyone from anyone. What cannot be generated is a point of view: what you have noticed, what you disagree with, what you would do differently and why.
Distinctiveness gets treated as a personality trait, something you either have or you do not. I think it is better understood as a skill, and like any skill it responds to practice. Forming actual opinions. Making choices that cost you something. Saying the thing plainly instead of the way everyone else says it. Being recognisably the same person across every context you show up in. Brands have known this for decades. People are about to need it just as much.
The practical version for a young professional is simple, if uncomfortable: before you publish anything, ask what in it could only have come from you. If the answer is nothing, the tool wrote it, and the reader will feel that even if they cannot name it.
The case for the slow lane
The received wisdom in experience design says remove friction. Faster, smoother, fewer steps, fewer clicks. It is a good rule most of the time, and a terrible rule all of the time. Because the brands people actually remember and talk about are often the ones adding friction, deliberately, in moments where slowness is the point.
The supermarket slow lane. Jumbo, the Dutch supermarket chain, runs a deliberately slow checkout for older shoppers who want a chat with the cashier rather than a fast exit. It is slower by design. It is also the most talked-about thing the chain does, and a genuine response to loneliness among its customers.
The sink in the shop. Aesop staff will wash your hands at an in-store basin, unhurried, both of you standing at the tap while the queue does whatever the queue does. A two-minute ritual that no efficiency audit would ever approve, and the single most memorable thing about the store.
The human who answers. First Direct built an entire banking brand on a phone that a person picks up, at any hour, with no menu to fight through first. Answering calls with humans is expensive friction by every operational measure. It is also the whole brand.
Each of these is slower, costlier and less "efficient" than the category norm. Each is a behaviour you could identify with the logo removed, which remains my working test for whether a brand has made it off the wall and into the experience.
I made a version of this argument back in 2021: strip every bit of "pain" and "friction" out of a journey and you strip out the personality and the memorable moments along with it. The industry has thoroughly memorised the first half of that lesson, the smoothing half. The second half, can we remember that as well.
So where else could the slow lane logic go? A bank branch that keeps one desk for people who want their paperwork explained at walking pace. An airline check-in lane for nervous flyers, staffed by people chosen for patience rather than throughput. A telco that gives you the direct line of the one person handling your complaint, so the friction of repeating yourself disappears and the friction of a real relationship replaces it. None of these are efficient. All of them would be remembered.
The evidence, such as it is
The commercial case does not rest on sentiment. Havas has run its Meaningful Brands study for the best part of two decades, and the headline finding barely moves: most brands could disappear tomorrow and people would not care. It was 74% of brands when the study began in 2008, and 78% in the latest edition. That is the measurable cost of sameness. On the other side of the ledger, Daniel Kahneman's peak-end research showed that people judge an experience by its most intense moment and its ending, not by how smooth the middle was. The pattern points one way: people do not remember smooth, they remember different, and they choose what they remember.
Start with one moment
You do not need a transformation programme to act on any of this. It doesn't have to be hard. It probably won't take you long. Pick one moment. If you run an experience, find the single point in your journey where behaving like your brand would be most visible, and ask what it would do there that a competitor would not. If the honest answer is "the same as everyone else", that is the work, and it is usually cheaper than the rebrand.
And if you are a person rather than a brand, the move is just the same. Take the next thing you were about to publish and delete every line a tool could have written for you. What is left is the distinct bit. There may not be much of it at first. That is normal. It grows with use.
I'd love to hear your thoughts...
References: Alex Murrell, The Age of Average (2023). Originality.ai, AI Content Published on LinkedIn. Havas, Meaningful Brands. Daniel Kahneman et al., the peak-end rule.