ArticleIssue #188 | A Sea of Sameness
I genuinely don’t know where 2026 went – but somehow, we’re in the home stretch of the year. Tomorrow I’m heading out to SMASH, the Senior Care Marketing & Sales Summit, for 3 days with some of the best operators, sales leaders & marketers in senior living. If you’ll be there, drop me a note (just reply to this email) if you’d like to get together.
It’s fitting, then, that the idea behind this issue began with a senior living focus conversation.
A few days ago, our VP of media and I were comparing notes on the H2/Q3/Q4 planning meetings we’ve had with several operators. It seemed as if (almost) every one was a variant on the same theme: what can we actually do between now and year end to move occupancy?
We’re at that time in the calendar when budgets are under review, 2027 plans/strategies/goals are being set and everyone (especially the CFO + investors) wants to know (1) where the leads are coming from and (2) when those leads will turn into butts in beds (which, in turn, equals occupancy, revenue & enterprise value).
Somewhere in that conversation – likely between comparing priorities, offers and “outside the box” ideas operators wanted to try – we both threw our hands up. It was all the f&$*&$% same. To illustrate our point, we “invented” an exercise I’d encourage every operator to try:
- Pull up your top 4 competitors
- Open each website in its own tab, plus yours in a 5th tab
- Create a blank Google Sheet with the competitors in each column + the following rows: “Messaging”, “Offer”, “Visuals”, “Layout”, “Ads”, “Experience”, “Differentiation”
- Go row-by-row + document what you see for each of the above areas
- Then, create 2 duplicates of this sheet (i.e. 2 tabs at the bottom). Have a neutral, non-marketing person do the same on one (i.e. your significant other, your mom/dad, your best friend who drinks too much wine, I don’t care) AND have your AI du jour do the other.
- Finally, have AI (Gemini is actually wonderful at this) compare the responses in each cell across the 3 sheets
I’ll bet you see what we see.
The same stock photo of a smiling resident with a grandchild. The same “vibrant community” headline. The same 3-column amenities grid: chef-prepared dining, engaging activities, peace of mind. The same Thursday bingo post. The same color palettes. The same verbiage. The same offers. The same room layouts. Hell, when we did this for a couple communities in the Dakotas, *they all had the same furniture* (I genuinely wish I was kidding). Cover up the logos, and you’d have a hard time telling which is which.
It’s a sea of sameness.
What’s particularly vexing about it all is that most of what you’ve found doing that exercise is (very likely) competently executed. Each component (judged on its own merits) is perfectly fine. The blogs seem relevant. The websites function. The pictures are pretty. I’d go as far as to say that the volume of quality (i.e. middle-of-the-bell-curve, passing-grade stuff) marketing assets has markedly increased over the last few years.
If you imagine a distribution – “horrific execution” on the left, “stuff that would make Ogilvy proud” on the right – most brands cluster right in the middle.
But the middle of the sea of sameness is where brands, communities, companies, whatever go to die.
That’s what this issue is about: why sameness happens, why it’s so costly, how to break out of it, and what you can do Monday morning to start.
Sameness Isn’t a Senior Living Problem (But You’ll See It There)
Before anyone in senior living feels singled out: this isn’t just you. Sameness is everywhere once you start looking for it. Repeat the exercise from above in any other industry + the same pattern emerges. Compare plumber or roofer websites (if you can find them) – half of them use the same handful of templates. Shopify sites with the same offer, the same pop-ups, the same layout, the same blocks, the same PDP. Dental practices. Law firms. SaaS providers. Tech companies.
This isn’t new, either.
Back in the 2010s, luxury fashion houses with a century of heritage (Burberry, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent & a list of others) swapped their distinctive logos for nearly identical bold, sans-serif wordmarks. The design world (mockingly) coined the practice “blanding.” Burberry (to their credit) eventually saw sense and reverted. Sanity does exist in an increasingly chaotic world.
Then, in 2016, Kyle Chayka coined the term “AirSpace” in The Verge to describe the reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs and white subway tile that made a coffee shop in Brooklyn look exactly like one in Berlin or Seoul. Look at a parking lot and you’ll see a sea of grayscale crossovers that are hard to tell apart from a few yards away. Drive the 215 in Vegas and you’ll see variations on a theme of PI billboards: a headshot, a phone number & some version of “we fight for you.” Visit 5 HVAC websites: “family-owned,” “trusted,” “fast and reliable.” SaaS homepages: “something, something, something…NOW POWERED BY AI” (you laugh, then you cry…because it’s true).
None of this happens because marketers are lazy or because all companies are the same. In fact, I’d argue that once you strip away all the external marketing, you’ll find brands today are MORE differentiated, MORE hyper-focused, MORE wildly relevant to a certain audience than ever before.
It just doesn’t show. That’s all to say, the sea of sameness doesn’t have to be. It comes to be for reasons that feel completely rational in the moment:
- Best practices are averages: When everyone studies what the category leader does and copies it, the whole category converges on the same playbook, the same aesthetic, the same [whatever]. But, as more brands do the same things, the marginal returns from doing that thing converge to zero. Soon, everyone is doing it just to avoid falling behind. Do what everyone else does, you’ll get what everyone else gets.
- Bureaucracy is risk-averse: Nobody gets fired for approving “vibrant community” or “the community that provides peace of mind.” But….someone might well be fired for approving a line that’s actually memorable.
- The incestuous nature of most verticals: The same website platforms, the same design packages, the same stuff winning the same awards year-after-year, the same templates, the same stock libraries, the same handful of agencies, the same people hopping from one brand to another.
- And now, AI. Ask Claude to write a homepage copy for an AL community and you’ll get the statistical average of every AL homepage it has ever read. These tools are built to predict the most likely next word. The most likely word is, by definition, the one everyone else already used.
So, why does it show up so acutely in senior living?
The answer I’ve come to is a product of 3 factors: (1) the product looks similar on paper (units, layouts, services, dining, activities, levels of care), so messaging defaults to the spec sheet; (2) risk-aversion dominates in healthcare + adjacent fields; no one gets fired for saying the same things as everyone else, lawyers/execs/boards are hyper-cautious and the easiest-to-defend position is always in the middle of the herd (this is the “no one ever got fired for hiring McKinsey” principle) and (3) the buyer is usually an adult child researching on behalf of an ailing/aging parent, often in a compressed, stressful window after a fall or a diagnosis, with 4-5 tabs open at once….with much of that research centered on a single question: “How much does XXX care actually cost?”
#3 is the price question. But the decision is never just about price. If every site looks the same, though, price is the only thing left to compare.
Why the Middle Is Still Death
Time for some (semi-useless) historical knowledge that might make you more fun at trivia night: way back in 1933, a German psychologist named Hedwig von Restorff ran a set of memory experiments that gave us one of the most durable findings in cognitive psychology: show people a list of similar items with one that’s different, and the different one is the one they remember.
It’s now called the isolation effect, or simply the Von Restorff effect.
Think back to the exercise at the beginning of the article. Imagine you’re that adult child with 4 tabs open, browsing 4 communities, reading 4 nearly identical homepages, seeing 4 “vibrant” headlines…but with 4 slightly different price points. When you close the laptop, what do you remember? The honest answer: the price ranges (because there was nothing else worth remembering).
Why? Because nothing else worth remembering was conveyed by the communities they viewed (note: that’s NOT to say that each of those communities doesn’t have things worth remembering – each one likely does. It just wasn’t shared).
This leads us to the 2nd thing that flows from the Von Restorff effect:
When nothing distinguishes the options, people don’t stop deciding. They simply decide on whatever is easiest to compare: price, distance, or whoever called back first. Which means sameness transforms your community into a commodity. Commodities compete on price.
If you’ve ever watched a market where every community is running some version of a move-in special, you’ve watched sameness get expensive. Concessions become the differentiator because nothing else is.
That’s the trap of the middle. You’re not the cheapest option, so you can’t win on price. You’re not the most memorable option, so you can’t win on preference. You’re just…there.1 of 4 tabs. I wrote about this back in Issue #146 | The Middle Is Death, and it’s never been truer than it is in senior living right now: the middle is death.
One important nuance here. Standing out doesn’t require you to invent an amenity no one else has. Byron Sharp and the team at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have argued for years that most brands don’t win by being meaningfully different; they win by being distinctive, easy to recognize and easy to remember. For a senior living community, that’s stupendous news: you don’t need a rooftop helipad or Prince William to visit. You simply need to be unmistakably, specifically you.
The “Stand Out” Playbook
Here’s the honest answer we give every client who asks what will drive results in Q4: there is no magic bullet. Everything matters. But some things matter more than others, and most of them cost less than another month of discounts.
1. Run the swap test on your messaging. Take your homepage hero headline + the paragraph immediately below it. Replace your community’s name with your biggest competitor’s. If it still reads as true, you haven’t written copy for your community; you’ve written copy for the category. The fix is specifics: the director of nursing who’s been there for a 18 years. The garden residents actually planted and tend to each day. The way your team handles the first 30 days for a new MC family. The little things your team does to make each unit feel like home. Say the things only you can say.
2. Let one resident carry the story. Back in Issue #173, I talked about the spotlight and the floodlight. An amenities grid is a floodlight: wide, even & impossible to feel anything about. Families don’t feel 14 amenities – they feel a single resident’s actual afternoon. In that issue, I shared a test where a single family quote (“He Is Thriving”) went up against a stats-and-features ad for the same community. The specific version won (and it wasn’t close): 75% higher CTR, 2x higher conversion rate & 43% lower CPL. People join people. Stop repeating the category story + start telling your story.
3. Treat reviews as your best salespeople. Reviews are often the first proof point an adult child frantically searching relies upon (after all, you can’t start calling/texting people at 11 pm on a Tuesday, but you CAN go 20 pages deep on Google or Reddit reviews). Those reviews are doing more selling than a brochure ever will. Ask for them consistently, at natural moments like the 30- and 90-day mark after move-in. Respond to each one, especially the critical ones, in a real, human voice (i.e. don’t let ChatGPT draft your response; actually do it yourself). Then, mine them. The reality is that the exact phrases families use to describe you are exponentially better headlines than anything the marketing committee will contrive during a brainstorming session.
4. Answer the price question. The reality is that over 90% of customer journeys in SL have price (“how much does it cost?”) as one of the first 3 questions asked (the other 2, if you’re curious: which communities are near me and what care level does my parent need). Most community websites respond with “call for pricing.” The only problem? In the era of AI, that means the people are going to anchor on whatever Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude or (gasp) Grok tell them (spoiler alert: if you aren’t tracking how commonly-used AI engines respond to the question “How much does [care type] cost at [your community name]?” – you probably should).
None of that means you have to publish your pricing/rate card…but a starting range, a plain-language explanation of what drives cost & a clear list of what’s included will set you apart from the 3 other sites that dodge the question. Being the community that answers honestly is a differentiator on its own.
5. Write for people AND for the machines they are (increasingly) relying upon. More and more early research is happening through AI tools, where a family asks a question and gets a synthesized answer. We know – from Google’s own patents – that engines reward novelty, uniqueness and content that adds net-new information to the model’s corpus (this is known as “information gain” – I wrote about it here). Well, logically, if your copy could be true of any other community, then you’ve given the model precisely zero net-new information. No novelty = nothing unique to work with = default to what’s different (location, price, care levels).
The solution is clear, structured, specific content (levels of care, what’s included, unique offerings, clear pricing ranges, differentiated, emotive copy, details/bios of your team, specific ways in which your community is different, real FAQs written the way people actually ask them) gives models a reason to name you….AND helps you appeal to the stressed adult child skimming your site at 11pm by giving them something to remember.
6. Make your ads & socials sound like you. Try the bingo-post test: if your last 10 social posts could run on a competitor’s page without anyone noticing, they’re just activity for the sake of activity. The same goes for ad creative. Real staff, real residents (with permission), real moments from your community will beat polished stock every time, because nobody else can run them.
7. For God’s sake, pick up the phone. You can have the best website, the best reviews and the best ads in your market….and none of it matters if a family reaches out and waits 2 days to hear back (yes, that happens – quite a bit, actually). Or, worse, is routed to an AI chatbot.
Don’t believe me? In a study published in Harvard Business Review, companies that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly 7x more likely to qualify it than companies that waited even one more hour, and more than 60x more likely than firms that waited a day or longer. These families are making one of the hardest decisions of their lives. Their mental framework (which they won’t articulate, but will sincerely agree if asked) is that your level of responsiveness at the beginning of the process is the best it will ever be. If it takes you 18 hours to respond to a lead, the question that percolates just under the surface is, “If it took them almost a day to respond to me when they were competing for our money, how long will it take once they have it?”
The response from operators/people at the community is almost always the inverse: when we respond to inquiries slowly, it’s because we’re dedicating our resources to helping the people + families actually here. Both can (and likely are) true – but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the consequence of first truth is that you never have an opportunity to explain the second.
The solution is simple: when someone reaches out, give them a real person who answers, listens and responds quickly. Speed to lead isn’t just a book title or catchphrase; it’s the whole game.
Why Now?
It’s tempting to treat Q4 as a sprint to hit the number, then punt the bigger questions raised here to January.
I’d argue the opposite. There are 3 reasons this is exactly the time to have the standing-out conversation:
#1: budgets, goals + 2027 plans are being done right now. If differentiation isn’t in the plan, it won’t get funded in it, and “same as last year + 5%” is how a community stays in the middle.
#2: the holidays. Over the next 3 months, a lot of families will gather in person. A lot of adult children will see a parent for the first time in a while. They’ll notice things. Many of the hardest conversations in senior living are triggered by what’s said (or unsaid) around a Thanksgiving table. The research starts that night, with a belly full of turkey + apple pie, but a mind filled with questions, doubt + anxiety. When that adult daughter opens 4 tabs at 11 pm, you want to be the one that looks, sounds & responds differently.
#3: compounding is a thing. Reviews take time to cultivate. New content takes time to get found, (by people, by search engines + by AI models). Creative takes time to create + test. Start now, and it’s working for you when demand arrives. Start in January, and you’re still building while the families are already deciding.
There’s no magic bullet. Everything matters. But the communities that win in 2027 won’t be the ones with the biggest concession or the prettiest amenities grid; they’ll be the community a family remembers after closing the other 3 tabs.
And the community that answers the phone.
