Is best practice… best?

Founding Partner, Simon Manchipp looks into better ways of working

 

Best practice promises safety. It offers the comfort of the herd. If everyone’s doing carousel headers, icon grids, and pastel gradients, surely we can’t be wrong? Except we can. We are. Spectacularly so.

Best practice is just another term for “what worked yesterday.” And in a world moving at today’s velocity, yesterday is ancient history. What’s worse, when everyone follows the same best practice, the only thing you’ve practised being is invisible.

Walk through any sector audit — fintech, legal, healthcare, retail — and you’ll see the same dreary parade. The same layouts. The same tone. The same bloody carousel. It’s as if an entire industry looked at the competition and thought, “Yes, that mediocrity — I’ll have some of that.”

This isn’t strategy. It’s mimicry. And mimicry is how brands die quietly, expensively, and without anyone noticing they were ever alive.

The Consultant’s Con

The best practice brigade will tell you they’re “de-risking” your brand. What they’re actually doing is de-fanging it. Removing anything that might make someone feel something. Anything that might cause debate. Anything memorable.

Risk isn’t the enemy. Boring is the enemy. Because boring doesn’t get remembered. It doesn’t get recommended. It doesn’t move needles or shift markets or make anyone give a damn.

Show me a sector where everyone looks the same and I’ll show you a sector ripe for disruption. The craft beer explosion happened because mainstream lagers all tasted identical. Challenger banks emerged because high street banks all felt identical. Opportunity lives where conformity breeds.

When Safe Became Dangerous

Here’s the paradox: playing it safe is now the riskiest move you can make. When you look like everyone else, you’re competing purely on price and convenience. You’ve voluntarily turned your brand into a commodity.

Meanwhile, the brands winning are the ones brave enough to stand out. Liquid Death made canned water exciting. Oatly made oat milk confrontational. Monzo made banking feel human. None of them followed best practice. They created their own.

This isn’t about being weird for weird’s sake. It’s about being strategically distinctive. About understanding that in attention economies, invisibility equals death. If your brand doesn’t make people stop, think, or feel something — even something uncomfortable — you’re already losing.

The Way Forward

Question every “best practice” recommendation that crosses your desk. Ask: best for whom? Best for when? Best for what outcome?

If the answer is “because it reduces bounce rates by 3%” but makes you indistinguishable from competitors, bin it. Short-term metrics are seductive, but long-term brand death is permanent.

Build from what’s true about your brand, not what’s trendy in your sector. Let your competitors chase each other’s tails. You chase relevance, distinctiveness, memorability.

Best practice got us here. Worst practice might just save us.

The real best practice? Burn the playbook. Build something people actually remember. Because in a world of infinite sameness, different isn’t just better.

It’s the only thing that works.