Thursday, November 12, 2026
4 in 5 US small business owners say their marketing is only "somewhat" effective, at best. A one-sentence positioning exercise, borrowed from brand strategist Marty Neumeier, shows SME owners why.
Last updated 15 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
This is a story about an owner who wants to be remembered — but whose ads, website and socials could quietly be swapped with a competitor's and nobody would notice the difference. You've posted. You've boosted. You've even paid someone to "make it pop." It still doesn't land, and you've started to suspect the problem isn't the budget. It's that nothing about what you're putting out actually looks, sounds or feels like it could only be you.
A 2026 US survey of 1,000 small business owners and workers found 52.5% say their marketing has at some point looked cheap enough that they suspect it cost them customers (UPrinting, US, 2026). "Cheap" rarely means poorly made — it usually means forgettable: the same stock photo style, the same three colours every competitor uses, the same generic claim about quality and service that every business in the category also makes. Customers can't choose a brand they can't tell apart from the one next to it.
Jenni Romaniuk's work on distinctive brand assets, built on the evidence base behind how brands actually grow, makes a deceptively simple case: the sensory, specific details customers can spot from across the room — a colour, a sound, a shape, a line — do more for recall than another clever headline ever will.
Kevin's seen a distinctive asset work in its most literal form. A light-and-sound installations team, competing in a crowded, technical category where every competitor's site looked identical, put one sign on their wall: "We Are Big In Japan." It wasn't a mission statement. It wasn't a value proposition. It was odd enough that every client who walked in asked about it — and every one of them remembered the business because of it, long after they'd forgotten which competitor they'd also gotten a quote from.
"Kevin, you distilled business, marketing and sales strategy into powerful simple concepts and actions with real life stories of your start-up business and corporate life. You walk the talk with empathy and passion. Feedback has been off the charts. The energy in the room was palpable."
Nikki
MahiTahi / Colab
Something odd and specific feels riskier in the room than something safe and polished, even though safe and polished is exactly what's failing to get remembered. This isn't for you if you've already got a distinctive asset customers mention unprompted — some owners have built that without ever naming it, and it shows in how easily people refer them. It's for the owner whose marketing could be screenshotted, have the logo removed, and nobody in the industry could tell you whose it was.
You don't need a bigger budget to be remembered. You need one specific thing, repeated on purpose, until it's unmistakably yours.
A specific, sensory detail — a colour, sound, shape or phrase — that customers associate with a brand strongly enough to recognise it even without the logo attached, drawing on Jenni Romaniuk's research into how brands build recall.
A logo only works if someone's already looking at it. A distinctive asset works in the background — in a sound, a colour, a turn of phrase — and gets noticed even when a customer isn't actively paying attention to your marketing.
Screenshot it, remove your logo and name, and ask whether a customer in your industry could still tell you whose it was. If the honest answer is no, that's the gap this post is about.
If your marketing could belong to any competitor in your category, that's the first thing worth fixing.
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