Pick a Side

There’s nothing worse than putting real effort into your marketing and hearing crickets on the other side.

You thought it through. You questioned yourself to the point of insanity—is this too opinionated, will it repel people, will someone get mad at me? The protective voice in your head says yes, so you soften your language. Made it safer and posted it anyway because you needed to keep moving.

And it still got ignored.

The irony is that playing it safe was supposed to prevent the crickets. Instead, it’s what caused them.

So you try again. Different topic, same hesitation, same result. And at some point you start wondering if maybe you’re just not interesting enough, or you don’t have a strong enough point of view, or maybe you’re not the problem at all and it’s the platform, or the algorithm, or the timing because the content looks fine. You just can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.

Here’s what’s wrong with it.

You’ve been trying to do two things at once that cannot coexist in the same piece of content. You want to stand out. And you’ve been conditioned your entire life to stay likable. Every time you try to write something that does both, you end up with neither. The content is too safe to make anyone stop scrolling and too watered down to make anyone feel seen.

And the version that comes out the other side doesn’t feel like a failure. It feels like good judgment and professionalism. It feels like you’re being responsible about your brand.

Nobody told you that responsible and invisible are producing the same result.

Standing Out Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

When someone tells you the best way to get your ideal client’s attention is to stand out, you probably picture a complete 180. Preppy to punk rock. Corporate to chaotic. The version of yourself that would make your former colleagues do a double take.

And you’ve seen those brands online. The ones that catch your eye whether you want to admit it or not. Bold, self-assured, saying exactly what you’re thinking but don’t feel you have permission to say out loud. They seem fearless in a way that feels out of reach.

What you can’t tell about some of those brands from the outside, is whether the boldness is real or performed. Committing to a persona and actually being that persona produces content that looks identical in theory, until one of them runs out of road. The performed version eventually feels hollow in a way the right audience can sniff out like a bloodhound.  It’s like a cover band that knows all the words to a song, but not the feeling and emotion behind why it was written or what the songwriter intended the listener to feel.

Which means you can’t use someone else’s brand as your north star. You have no way of knowing which version you’re looking at.

And more importantly, that level of provocation isn’t the only way to stand out. It’s not even the most effective way for most brands to do it.

The best way to stand out is by saying what you do and don’t stand for. 

By unapologetically liking certain things and not liking others. Having an actual opinion and committing to it. It doesn’t mean getting loud or controversial by seeing how many people you can offend. You have to be specific enough about what you truly think. You want the right person to read it and think “damn, she’s talking to me.”

Anything less is indifferent.

In their 2012 TEDxBoulder talk, Rethinking Unpopular, E. Napolitano said “love me or hate me, just don’t be indifferent. Indifferent is confusing.”

Indifferent is also invisible. Indifferent is the safe version you’ve been posting when you edit out your opinions before anyone can see them.

If you are self-editing, would you recognize it? Probably not. Ask yourself if you’ve ever done any of these:

The corporate professional filter.

You write something the way you’d actually say it to a client sitting across from you. Then you read it back and think, that sounds too casual, too direct, not polished enough. So you swap the real words for the professionally acceptable ones, give them credentials and think they sound more palatable. They sound like someone, that someone just isn’t you.

The both sides hedge.

This is corporate filter’s second cousin. It causes you to add the qualifiers like: In my experience. This might not work for everyone. Just my two cents. You don’t add them because you’re uncertain of your viewpoint, you’re preemptively protecting yourself from the people who will disagree. You’re trying to keep one foot in both camps at once so nobody can pin you down and call you out.

The result is content that technically has a point of view and functionally has none. Because the hedge is louder than the opinion.

The industry parrot.

This one is the sneakiest because it feels like being informed instead of self-editing and it happens for one of two reasons. The first is you’re new to the industry and someone with ten years of experience said it, so it must be true. The second is you’ve said it so many times that changing your position feels like losing part of your identity so instead of making a stand on your new position, you dig your heels in and double-down. We humans have an aversion to admitting in public we’re human and that humans can change their minds when presented with new information.

So, you repeat what everyone in your industry has agreed to say because you heard it enough times that it started to feel true. You never stopped to ask, do I actually believe this?

I had a sign on the water fridge in my massage therapy office that said: Contrary to popular belief, the only time you need to drink water after a massage is if you’re thirsty.

I cannot tell you how many massage therapists wanted to burn me at the stake for that one. The industry had collectively agreed that drinking water after a massage flushes out toxins because toxins were an existential evil that needed to be defeated and questioning it felt like heresy. But that’s not how it works. And I wasn’t willing to repeat something just because everyone else was saying it.

That’s the difference between a POV and a performance. A real POV can be backed up. And it’s worth the discomfort of saying it out loud.

All three of these feel like good judgment in the moment, but none of them are. They’re just different versions of filing your edges down before anyone can see them.

Your goal in standing out is to be the most specific version of yourself, not shouting “pick me” with a spotlight and a megaphone. Those are very different things. And only one of them requires you to become someone unrecognizable.

Have You Ever Had a Front Stabber in Your Corner?

E. also talks about what they call front stabbers — the people who will be honest with you to your face while everyone else stays comfortable being honest behind your back.

They told this story about getting ready to go out with their boyfriend at the time, Dominic. E. puts on their favorite purple skirt and Dominic immediately tells them: “You’re not wearing that, just go put something else on” because that skirt makes your ass look like a rectangle. E. got annoyed, marched into the bedroom to prove him wrong, looked in the mirror and — oh shit. He was right.

I had my own version of Dominic. My ex had this infuriating habit of always being right. Not in a superior way — just factually, consistently, and maddeningly right. My ADHD would convince me I had the correct take, capital C, on whatever had set me off that day. I would be fuming, laying out my entire case, and he would just sit there with this dumb-ass smirk on his face and let me finish. Then calmly tell me I was wrong and why I was wrong. He wasn’t trying to be mean, he just knew I was.

I’d drop the subject, but replay the conversation in my head looking for the angle that proved him wrong. Every time, I’d land in the same place.

Son of a bitch!

He’s right.

That smirk wasn’t my ex laughing at me. It was him knowing exactly how this was going to end.

Both my ex and Dominic never apologized for what they said. And neither I nor E. felt like they needed to ask them to.

What Dominic and my ex had in common was calibration. They could see the thing clearly because they weren’t attached to it. E. loved that skirt. I was convinced by my own spiral. Neither of us could see the rectangle because we were inside the bubble.

That’s what you’re missing when you’ve been inside the safe version long enough. An external reference point that can see what you can no longer see about yourself.

What Happens When a Brand Commits (or Doesn’t)

Titan Casket is a brand that says some genuinely unhinged, funny as hell things about death, dying, and burial. They say the things you’re already thinking but don’t feel like you’re allowed to say out loud at a funeral home as a way to humanize a morbid topic. And there is absolutely a section of the population that finds that brand a relief. Humor has always been one of the ways humans process grief, and here’s a company that knows that and leans in.

That brand works because there’s a real human behind it who has been given the greenlight to say the things the industry has agreed, collectively, needs to be somber, but Titan refuses to tip toe around end of life planning in a way that’s socially acceptable because it’s the industry standard. 

But what happens when a brand is too careful?

Early in my marketing career I managed social media for a funeral home. The brand explicitly wanted to dignify the idea of pre-planning your end-of-life decisions, make it more acceptable to discuss instead of being the thing everyone avoided talking about. 

It sounds like a reasonable position given the gravity of the topic.

But every piece of content was so careful and determined not to make anyone uncomfortable that it checked every box and connected with no one.

Why? Because it was using the same exact messaging as every other funeral home in the industry. There was nothing that separated the beliefs and values of the owners  in a way that helped them stand out.

And because they weren’t seeing the results they expected, I was fired. Not because I didn’t know what I was doing. Because I didn’t push hard enough to make them see that careful and invisible were producing the same result.

I was failing the Rectangle Skirt Test before I knew the test existed.

How to Make Sure Your Ass Doesn’t Look Like a Rectangle

The Rectangle Skirt Test is a two-part honesty test.

Part One: are you speaking your truth, or are you performing palatability for someone else’s comfort? You know you’ve failed this part if you’re stumbling over your own words when you read them out loud. You’re thinking I’m not sure this is right but posting it anyway. Or if there’s a version of what you actually think sitting just underneath what you wrote, and you edited it out before anyone could see it.

Part Two: does what you’re saying feel uncomfortable because it’s true, or because it’s mean? They’re not even close to being the same thing.

True is being a front-stabber. It’s saying what someone needs to hear because you care about them making an ass of themselves in public. It’s Dominic and the purple skirt. It’s the dumb-ass smirk that already knows how this ends. It’s the thing that sits uncomfortably for thirty minutes and becomes “Son of a bitch”, he was right.

Mean is trying to make someone feel the same pain you’re carrying. And if you’re honest with yourself, you already know which one it is when you sit down to write.

Permission Isn’t Optional

Here’s the part that’s hard to hear.

You don’t need more confidence before you can start being yourself in your marketing. You need to stop asking for permission and start giving it to yourself so your confidence can grow.

Your exact clients are looking for the person who will stop wasting their time and tell them their ass looks like a rectangle in that skirt. Because they’re already standing in front of the mirror. You’re just confirming what they see.

The edited version of you will never be that person because it isn’t specific enough to be recognizable. And unrecognizable doesn’t convert.

Some people will unfollow when you show up as yourself because the truth is, they liked the costume, not you. Let them go.

Safe mode is the default setting you brought into your marketing. But now that you know it’s there, what you choose to do with that information is up to you.

The Brand Snapshot is a free outside-eye look at whether your real voice is showing up, where the palatable version has taken over, and what the gap between them is costing you.

Show Me Where I’m Going Wrong →

Sara Kotila is the founder of Quirk & Quill Creative. She works with women business owners who are genuinely excellent at what they do and can’t figure out why their marketing isn’t landing. The answer is almost never what they think it is.