"Competent Beige": When AI Optimises the Soul Out of Your Brand

I was on LinkedIn the other day and three posts from three different brands, in completely different sectors, could have been written by the same person. Same rhythm, same safe, balanced tone, and the same vaguely inspirational sign-off. Polished, professional, and utterly forgettable.

We haven’t just adopted AI as a tool. We’ve adopted it as a voice, and that voice is turning every brand into the same beige, competent, forgettable version of itself.

I’m calling it Competent Beige. It’s becoming an epidemic.

AI doesn’t create. It averages. You feed it the sum total of human expression and ask it to produce the most likely “correct” output. What you get back isn’t a point of view. It’s a probability.

When a brand asks Claude to “write our social copy in a professional but approachable tone”, what comes out is the mathematical centre of every brand that has ever described itself that way. It’s not wrong. It’s just not yours.

The market is noticing, and 54% of Americans now report AI fatigue - not because they dislike the technology, but because they’re tired of the output. Everything sounds the same. Everything looks the same. Everything feels like it was made by the same polite, helpful assistant who has never had an opinion about anything.

This keeps working because of how our brains are wired.

Cognitive Bias Theory tells us we have a deep preference for things that look “optimised”. We see a polished surface and our brain reads it as trustworthy. High CTR? Good. Clean conversion path? Good. Remove all friction? Obviously good.

The problem is that resonance doesn’t come from optimisation. It comes from friction. The slightly odd phrasing that makes you stop scrolling. The opinion that makes you think “I disagree” or “finally, someone said it.” When brands use AI to sand down every rough edge, they’re not just removing errors. They’re removing the very signals that make humans pay attention.

Think about the brands you actually love. The ones you’d recommend to a friend. They all have something in common: they have a point of view. Something a risk-averse content team would have smoothed out. Something an algorithm would have flagged as “off-brand.”

We’ve confused “polished” with “good”. They’re not the same thing.

Social Identity Theory tells us something fundamental about why we choose the brands we choose. We don’t buy products just for what they do. We buy them for what they say about us. Brands are identity signals. They help us tell the world (and ourselves) who we are.

For a brand to work as an identity signal, it has to have edges. It has to stand for something specific enough that some people love it and other people don’t. That’s not a flaw. That’s the entire point.

Competent Beige kills this dead. If your brand sounds like every other brand run through the same AI prompt, there’s nothing for anyone to grab onto. You can’t build a tribe around a mathematical average. You can’t signal who you are with something that’s designed to appeal to everyone.

I see this play out in UK student accommodation year after year. Half the sector uses the same pool of influencers to promote their properties. Same faces. Same voices. Same creative style. The operators change, the buildings change, the cities change, but the content is indistinguishable. And year after year, student panels and surveys tell us the same thing: that our residents want real people, just like them. Not a cheeky approximation, with charm, swagger, and on-screen personality. Not polished, scripted, “authentic” influencer content. Actual residents. Actual lives. IRL. The brands keep ignoring this because the influencer route is optimised, measurable, safe - it’s visible, and looks like you’re doing something. And mostly, the content keeps being ignored because it looks like every other brand’s.

When you optimise for everyone, you end up meaning nothing to anyone, and you look the same as everyone.

Self-Determination Theory has been telling us for decades that autonomy, the sense that what you’re doing comes from you, is a fundamental human need.

The moment a brand owner stops asking “who are we?” and starts asking the AI “what should we sound like?”, something important has been lost. Not the brand’s competence. Its autonomy. Its ability to say “this is us, take it or leave it.”

Some brands that used to have personality, humour, a bit of swagger, now sounding like every other brands’s ChatGPT output. The rough edges have been smoothed. The weird bits have been removed. What’s left is… fine. Competent. Beige.

Competence is a baseline - it just means you’re not failing. Distinctiveness is where value actually lives. That’s what makes someone choose you instead of the next option.

The brands that survive the era of AI fatigue won’t be the ones that sound the most polished. They’ll be the ones brave enough to sound like themselves. The ones that keep the rough edges and the human bits that a probability engine would normally smooth right out of existence.

Stop trying to be perfectly beige.

Start being human.

David Chadderton spent his twenties and thirties teaching people how to make life-or-death decisions at forty thousand feet. He now applies the same principles to consumer psychology, which, depending on the brief, can feel equally high-stakes. He’s the creator of the STAR Framework and the author of The STAR Framework: Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Engagement (NYC Big Book Award 2025), The STAR Operating System: Decode Mindset, Understand Motivation, Transform Human Behaviour, and Dear Algorithm, It’s Not Me, It’s You. By day, a Chief Marketing Officer. By night, a behavioural science obsessive who writes The Unoptimised Human because he can’t stop thinking about why people do what they do.