Breaking conventions without breaking credibility
Vincent Roffers, partner and head of strategy at Agenda, challenges category conventions, explaining how distinctiveness works best when expression becomes evidence of strategy.
Every category has a dress code. Law firms project authority. Healthcare brands offer reassurance. AI companies promise innovation. Financial businesses project confidence. These are not arbitrary costumes: familiar cues help audiences understand whom they’re dealing with, particularly when the stakes are high. There’s a reason your bank doesn’t look like a nightclub.
But once everyone adopts the same cues, credibility becomes camouflage. Spend enough time on competitors’ websites and you begin to experience a kind of corporate Groundhog Day: the same visuals, the same claims, the same carefully calibrated adjectives. Everyone looks the part, but few are memorable.
That creates a surprisingly difficult branding challenge. How do you break enough conventions to become distinctive without breaking the signals people rely on to trust you?
The answer starts by distinguishing conventions that establish credibility from habits that merely reinforce sameness.
Consider three recent projects at Agenda: ProRata in AI, Medecision in healthcare technology and Proskauer in legal. On the surface, these businesses could hardly be more different. You’d expect their branding challenges to have very little in common. Yet each revealed a similar lesson about how to stand apart in a category without sacrificing what makes you credible.
AI: ProRata
AI has developed its own category cliches at astonishing speed. Glowing gradients, infinite possibility and a general sense that everything exists in a purple-blue universe several light-years ahead of us.
ProRata, however, had a different story. Its technology focuses on attribution, identifying where content originates and helping ensure creators and publishers receive appropriate credit and compensation when their work is used by AI. While much of the category was preoccupied with what machines could create, ProRata was focused on what could be proven.
Rather than inventing another futuristic identity, we built the brand around citation itself, making attribution visually distinctive. It remained credible as a technology company because its distinctiveness came from something fundamental to the business, not simply a desire to look different.
Healthcare tech: Medecision
Healthcare technology presents the opposite aesthetic: calming blues, reassuring imagery and carefully measured promises. With good reason. Nobody wants technology responsible for people’s care to look like it was designed for a music festival. But reassurance can start to look like inertia, especially for a company built to move an industry forward.
Medecision transforms fragmented healthcare information into actionable intelligence for health plans and providers. Its opportunity wasn’t to promise another data-driven transformation, but to demonstrate what that data actually enables.
Data to Doing captured that movement, while a vibrant visual identity built around bold color and momentum challenged the category’s conventional restraint. We weren’t trying to make healthcare technology look less credible. We were challenging the assumption that credibility had to look a particular way.
Legal: Proskauer
Professional services presents yet another challenge. At the top of the legal market, everybody really is an expert. Claims of being global, collaborative, innovative and client-focused are believable, but interchangeable.
For Proskauer, credibility was the cover charge. Its clients already knew the firm was elite. The opportunity was to articulate something more specific about how it operates: the combination of intellectual firepower and ambition it brings to clients navigating consequential moments.
That became Ambition in Action. The positioning doesn’t reject the conventions of elite legal services. Instead, it gives them a more distinctive point of view, reflecting something real about both the firm’s aspirations and the way clients experience it.
The real goal is specificity, not novelty
Across all three projects, the principle is the same. Distinctiveness works best when expression becomes evidence of strategy, not decoration around it.
So, when confronting category conventions, I find three questions particularly useful: What must remain familiar? What has become generic? And what is unusually true about your business?
The goal isn’t to look nothing like your category. It’s to be familiar enough to trust, but specific enough to choose.
Breaking conventions is easy. Knowing which conventions you can afford to break is the real work.
