Most agencies and tech companies don’t have a positioning problem - they have a reflection problem (that feels like a positioning problem)
The longer they work with a certain type of client, the more they start to look like them. The tone of voice softens to sound more “brand,” the colour palette starts echoing client decks, the website shifts to feel familiar to the industries they serve.
And suddenly, their brand stops looking like an agency and starts looking like a watered-down version of their clients.
It feels strategic - “we’re speaking their language” - but it’s not. It’s camouflage.
How It Happens
It usually starts with good intentions. You land a client in beauty, fashion, F&B - whatever your niche is. You tweak your pitch deck to look a little more like theirs. You start describing your work using their vocabulary.
The next client likes that familiarity, so you double down. Before long, you’ve built an identity that feels safe, polished, and entirely forgettable.
That’s the mirror problem: you become so focused on appealing to your clients that you forget to attract them.
The Cost of Camouflage
When your brand mirrors your clients’, you might win a few short-term contracts. But you’ll struggle to win trust.
Why? Because you look like a follower - not a leader.
You blend into their world instead of sitting just outside it, offering a new perspective.
Clients don’t hire agencies or SaaS platforms to reflect them back. They hire them to challenge, interpret, and sharpen their thinking. If you look and sound like your clients, you’ve already lost the authority to guide them.
Reclaiming Your Own Identity
Breaking the mirror starts with one question:
Does your brand look like the kind of company your clients want to work with, or the kind they already are?
A few practical ways to course-correct:
Audit your touchpoints. Read your site, your case studies, your proposals. Are you speaking from your expertise or parroting theirs?
Lead with process, not portfolio. Clients hire how you think, not just what you’ve done.
Find your internal voice. The most authentic tone of your brand probably exists in your internal Slack or Notion docs; not your homepage copy.
So What Should You Reflect Instead?
Mirror your values, not your clients’ aesthetics.
If you help ecommerce brands move faster, look like speed.
If you help them make sense of complexity, sound like clarity.
If you build tools that automate manual work, your brand should feel frictionless - not like a DTC candle company.
In other words:
Express the outcome you deliver, not the industry you serve.
For agencies, that might mean showing the way you think, not the brands you’ve worked with. For SaaS, it might mean designing around your conviction; what you believe about how the world should work.
You don’t need to look like your clients to connect with them. You just need to look like someone who understands them deeply enough to show them something new.
Be the Lens, Not the Mirror
The best agencies and SaaS companies don’t try to blend in. They position themselves as a lens, something that helps their clients see themselves more clearly.
You can’t do that if you’re too busy trying to look like them.
Your audience already knows their world.
What they’re paying for is your view of it.