If you have to choose between being bland and being remarkable as a small company, choose remarkable. But you should probably choose to concentrate your remarkable budget rather than spreading it thinly over a bunch of places where most customers won’t perceive it.
BigCo is BigCo not because they don’t have smart people but because they are pursuing variance minimization intentionally. That took them a lot of hard work to achieve.
But you’re going to hopefully look a lot like BigCo in places where BigCo is BigCo simply because efficiently operating processes are a good thing.
You probably do not need to spend much time reinventing invoicing.
You probably do not need to spend much time reinventing invoicing.
You have some opportunities that BigCo does not. One is that you can tolerate non-bland choices which don’t work for everyone, where BigCo has relatively little room for maneuver there because they have to keep the accounts they have and not alienate material parts of the market.
A small company, on the other hand, can cheerfully sacrifice a million accounts they don’t have to gain ten.
(This might suggest outrage bait as a marketing strategy, and I generally find that tedious. I’m thinking more along the lines of “We have a written voice. You can like it or you can not like it, but it is going nowhere.”)
BigCo will swear blind that their written voice survives being interpreted by a marketing agency after seven rounds of revisions and then review by 23 internal stakeholders. And indeed, it does, because nobody can BigCo like BigCo does; saying nothing, forgettably.
