Cast a wider net: the best marketing inspiration comes from further afield

One of the fastest ways to break out of the coined “sea of sameness” is to take inspiration from categories and industries outside your own.

It’s no secret that fashion, beauty, sport, entertainment and hospitality are often richer in distinctiveness, emotion and cultural fluency than most B2B sectors. Whether that’s manufacturing, logistics, technology, professional services or others. Although some brands are breaking that perception.

The goal is not to copy what brands in these industries do literally, but rather to borrow the principles behind how they build desire, create meaning, show up differently and stay memorable.

Done well, this approach can unlock fresher creative thinking, differentiated positioning, stronger campaigns, more energised teams and, ultimately, better commercial results.

Stop trying to ‘look credible’ if it means looking identical

There is a quiet crisis across so-called ‘functional’ categories. Brand homogeneity.

Scroll through a dozen websites and social feeds in manufacturing, consulting, SaaS, legal services or financial operations and the pattern is uncomfortably familiar.

The same promises. The same smiling office photography. Often the same corporate blue palettes and jargon-heavy headlines about transformation, excellence and innovation.

Different logo. Same feeling.

In markets where everyone is trying to signal competence, a lot end up stripping away any original personality, genuine points of view and vital memorability in the process.

The result is a category full of brands that are unquestionably competent and professional, but strategically and creatively invisible.

The easiest way to fail is not to be outrageous. It’s to be forgettable. In saturated categories, blending in is often the most self-defeating choice a brand can make, because it leaves price, distribution or incumbency to do all the hard work.

The smartest inspiration may be hiding in categories you are not paid to watch

If your own sector is too self-referential to spark fresh thinking, it’s time to look elsewhere.

Some of the best strategic and creative inspiration often comes not from direct competition, but from dissimilar categories that have noticeably distinctive traits.

• Fashion knows how to build desire.
• Beauty knows how to turn product benefits into rituals and identity.
• Sport knows how to create belonging and emotional stakes.
• Entertainment knows how to sustain attention.
• Hospitality knows how to choreograph an experience.
• Luxury knows how to use restraint, symbolism and scarcity.

We’re not suggesting a manufacturing brand should suddenly start behaving like a streetwear label, or an accounting firm should launch a fragrance-inspired campaign. The point is to study the underlying mechanics:

• Look at fashion for visual confidence and editorial presentation.
• Look at beauty for the way it transforms functional benefits into emotionally resonant language.
• Look at sport for community, symbolism and momentum-building.
• Look at hospitality for experience cues and premium detail.
• Look at entertainment for episodic storytelling and anticipation.

Again, the aim isn’t to directly copy the execution, it’sto see if you can take inspiration from the strategies – helping you show up differently in your category.

This could mean…

• Rethinking your visual world
• Loosening your verbal identity, and exploring more emotionally charged messaging
• Finding more interesting partnerships
• Showing up in unexpected channels
• Or creating campaigns people want to directly engage with (instead of just viewing)

In other words: it’s time to move away from only benchmarking against your category’s norms, if those norms are exactly what is making everyone invisible.

These campaigns and activations do a great job of standing out in their respective categories (and in my opinion, borrowing traits from others):

HP – “The Wolf”

Office printers might not seem like an obvious cybersecurity risk, but unsecured devices can give hackers an easy way into sensitive company data. HP used this insight to highlight its secure printing technology, launching the cinematic campaign “The Wolf” with Christian Slater. The campaign made printer security feel urgent and memorable, borrowing emotional storytelling and high production value traits from Entertainment, not typically seen in B2B (especially in the printer category).

ABAX – “When you don’t use ABAX…”

“When You Don’t Use ABAX” used humour and ‘prank’ scenarios to highlight the risks of not having GPS equipment tracking on building site machinery. Featuring influencer Ryan Belcher (@sq2_contractors) in viral, TikTok-style videos, the campaign dramatized the chaos of lost tools on site – and how that can be relieved with the ABAX app. This campaign and content series brought new levels of humour and relatability to B2B, to a hard to reach (and harder to impress) audience of UK builders.

The payoff is bigger than ‘better creative’

The immediate gain is obvious: stronger differentiation against your competitors. You stop regurgitating expected category codes and start creating new brand signals people can notice and remember.

A deeper gain is also organisational.

Looking outside your category forces teams to think more expansively. It interrupts stale assumptions. It gives marketers permission to pursue fresher references and more ambitious ideas. It often re-energises in-house teams who are tired of making work that simply blends in. And it can open doors to new partnerships, broader audiences and more culturally relevant ways of showing up.

But as always, and most importantly, it can drive growth. The brands that stand out are usually not the ones blending in and sticking to category conventions. They are the ones brave enough to look beyond them.

If you’d like any help exploring new categories for inspiration, or to re-appraise your current brand in your category, contact us today, or connect directly with our Strategy Director, Mark Brighton on LinkedIn or email.