Build your own brand, not someone else's : Alex Waite, Shaped By

In this episode of The Changemakers, Dave Corlett is joined by Alex Waite, Strategy Director at Shaped By, to tackle a common hurdle in the B2B tech world: the "imitation trap". 

As startups achieve product-market fit and move into scale-up territory, this inflection point often necessitates a brand evolution to power their next phase of growth. But the pressure to “grow up” at this point often leads founders and leaders to mimic how successful brands have done this, rather than digging into their own authentic truth to find the real story.

Dave and Alex unpack:

• The surface level trap: why looking at other brands’ identities is reductive and ignores the thousands of internal decisions that actually build a brand
• The attribution danger: how imitating established brands is more likely to confuse people than lead to success 
• The rise of agentic buyers: why AI and LLMs make brand clarity more vital than ever
• The Ferrari factor: moving beyond cold specs to build emotional bias and become the human choice in a world of automation.

If you’re a startup marketing leader or founder feeling the pressure to do what others are doing, this conversation is your permission to stop looking afar and start looking within.

🎧 Listen now

Timestamps

• 01:12 – the "imitation" challenge: why clients often want to copy successful brands.
• 03:03 – why it’s natural (but dangerous) for scale-ups to look for external reference points.
• 05:15 – the Wizz example: you only see the "outer layers" of a brand’s success.
• 06:12 – the danger of defaulting to category norms and boxing yourself in.
• 07:49 – attribution risk: why mimicking a bigger brand helps them, not you.
• 09:42 – chasing moving targets: you don’t know what your competitors are fixing internally.
• 15:03 – the "AI Native" myth and the pressure of moving too fast.
• 17:50 – why clarity is the ultimate defense against the rise of agentic (AI) buyers.
• 22:49 – real talk: can you ever be truly original in a world of "remixes"?
• 39:58 – advice for CMOs: how to handle a founder who wants to copy another brand.

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