By: Todd Irwin
This is the paradox of today’s technology and AI sectors: markets brimming with radical potential, but brands drowning in sameness. Startup after startup promises to “redefine productivity,” “empower the future,” or “revolutionize the way we work.” Scroll through their websites, and you won’t find strategy, you’ll find a thesaurus. And behind it all, a dangerous assumption that innovation is its own brand. Well, it isn’t.
The real failure here isn’t linguistic. It’s conceptual. Most tech companies are still operating under the outdated belief that branding is about standing out—being different for difference’s sake. In truth, the most effective brands aren’t those that differentiate the most. They’re the ones that solve the most relevant customer problem most clearly and most completely, and in a way that casts the rest of the market as less capable. This is what the principle of de-positioning is all about. So if tech companies want to survive the coming shakeout, they’ll need to embrace it fast.
White Space Is a Mirage in Tech
Marketers are taught in school and just about every marketing book to build brands by identifying “white space”—those untouched corners of a competitive map where no one else plants a flag. And sure, this might still work in slow markets. But technology doesn’t move slowly, so by the time you tried to claim the white space, someone else is already duplicating your product and undercutting your narrative. In hyper-competitive markets like AI, “white space” is a mirage. The real opportunity now isn’t to find empty ground. It’s to take someone else’s.
This is what de-positioning does. It’s not about what makes your company unique. It’s about what makes your competitor less relevant. It turns brand strategy into a game of competitive subtraction. When executed properly, your brand doesn’t just stand out because it looks and sounds different, it makes the alternatives feel irrelevant because you solve better. By the way, this isn’t just theory. This is how human cognition actually works.
Branding Isn’t a Feeling—It’s a Cognitive Weapon
Interference Theory, first formalized by psychologist John A. McGeoch in the 40s, explains a cognitive limitation we all experience: our brains struggle to retain multiple conflicting pieces of information at once. When two concepts compete for memory space, the stronger association overwrites the weaker one. This is the neurological reasoning. This is why branding matters so much. And this is why most tech companies fail. Because when you try to own multiple ideas or a list of dozens of features, none of them stick. You crowd the customer’s mind with noise. Your message collapses under its own weight.
But interference also creates a big opportunity. If you consistently own one clear idea—one benefit, one solution, one point of clarity—you don’t just earn recall. You erase your competitors in the process. In branding, singularity of brand concept is not a communications tactic. It’s a cognitive weapon.
The Engel-Blackwell-Miniard (EBM) Model of consumer behavior further reinforces this. First introduced in the 60s, the EBM Model maps the 5 stages consumers go through when making a purchasing decision: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior. Critically, everything starts with the recognition of a pain point. No one begins a purchase journey thinking, “I want something different.” They think, “I want something that works.” A problem triggers the search. Once they’re searching, the brands that win are the ones that speak directly and convincingly to the pain that started it all.
Most tech brands skip this concept entirely. Instead of meeting the customer at the pain, they greet them with a product tour. Instead of saying, “We understand your problem better than anyone,” they say, “Look what we built and how detailed it is.” In doing so, they insert themselves into the wrong part of the EBM funnel, usually the “evaluation of alternatives” stage, where rational comparisons are made and price becomes a major factor. This is an unwinnable game because the earlier you enter the decision journey, the more power you have to frame the choice.
De-positioning enters at the correct stage, meeting customers at the moment of pain. Then it positions the brand as the solution and in turn the competition as part of the reason that pain still exists. It doesn’t fight for consideration. It writes the consideration set.
The company, Snowflake, is a good example. They entered a cloud infrastructure market dominated by giants like Amazon and Google, and on paper, they were late. Strategically though, they were early. Because Snowflake spotted something the giants missed. Most legacy cloud platforms treated data like a locked asset. It was siloed, static, and fundamentally uncooperative. So Snowflake made interoperability its entire brand. “The Data Cloud” wasn’t a product descriptor. It was a positioning nuke that turned the rest of the category into a problem. Suddenly, closed platforms didn’t just seem old, they seemed dangerous. And Snowflake, the upstart, looked like the only company that actually understood the future.
Also, consider Runway, the generative AI platform quietly reshaping how creatives think about video. While dozens of competitors chased the “create faster” messaging, Runway chose something else: emotional relevance. It identified a specific cultural anxiety in the market—creatives feeling displaced by technology—and solved it through brand language, UX, and positioning that felt empathetic, like it cured the anxiety, not clinical. It wasn’t “look what our model can do.” It was “let’s make something remarkable together.” That shift, subtle but surgical, de-positioned other AI platforms as tools for engineers, not artists. Runway didn’t just gain customers. It gained brand trust and word of mouth.
The Difference Between Marketing and Brand Strategy
This is the difference between marketing a product and building a brand. Products compete on features. Brands compete on solutions with meaning. In the tech world, brand meaning is increasingly scarce. The current AI branding wave, in particular, suffers from terminal vagueness. Everyone is “aligned,” “open,” “human-first,” “responsibly developed,” or “committed to transparency. These terms are vague enough to be safe and safe enough to be ignored. They don’t position. They don’t differentiate. And they definitely don’t de-position.
Trust Is the Only Brand Advantage That Lasts
This market doesn’t need another mission statement. It needs a brand to say what the customer’s actually thinking: “This is all moving too fast. I need something I can trust.” The companies that win the next wave of AI won’t be the ones that sound the smartest. They’ll be the ones that feel the safest and make the competition feel like a risk. Trust, after all, is the ultimate brand asset. Trust isn’t built by telling people you’re trustworthy. Trust is built by showing up exactly where the pain lives and solving it. Not once, but over and over again. That’s what turns customers into advocates. Not messaging frameworks. Just solving the pain better than anyone else. This is where most tech brands fall apart.
Tech companies mistake brand for voice, for visual brand identity, and for messaging. But brand is not how you sound. Brand is what you solve. And brand is how completely you solve it compared to everyone else. If you don’t solve customer pain points better, someone else will beat you to it. If you’re not solving, you’re just another logo with an AI badge.
In the end, every tech company faces the same choice: de-position or be de-positioned. Those who chase novelty will be forgotten. Those who solve meaningfully get remembered. The tech market is brutal. It only rewards those who build brands that serve the customer. And serving the customer starts with solving the problem.
