Identity Mimicry

One who knows themselves knows all. Valluvar’s point was about individuals, but watch what happens when an organisation loses that self-knowledge. It starts copying. The Spotify of logistics. The Apple of supply chain. The Netflix of HR. Everyone in the room nods. Nobody believes it. But nobody says that out loud, because the consultancy that delivered the rebrand cost more than your annual training budget.

When I mapped HP’s corporate splits, I lost count. One company became two (HP Inc and HPE). Then HPE spun off its software division. Then its enterprise services. Then Micro Focus absorbed the spinoff and itself collapsed. By 2023, HP’s original identity was distributed across four separate entities, none of which could answer the question: ‘What is HP?’ Carly Fiorina’s 2002 merger with Compaq was supposed to create clarity. Instead, it began a twenty-year fragmentation. The company that invented the garage startup became an identity crisis with a stock ticker.

Copying isn’t laziness. It’s fear wearing a strategy hat. In evolutionary biology, Batesian mimicry is when a harmless species evolves to look like a dangerous one. The hoverfly mimics the wasp. It gets left alone, but it can’t actually sting. The protection works until a predator calls the bluff. Borrowed identity survives exactly as long as nobody asks what’s underneath. The moment a customer, an investor, or a talented recruit looks closely, the disguise collapses.

Pull up your company’s homepage right now. Find one phrase that your closest competitor couldn’t also claim with a straight face. If every sentence on your About page could be swapped into theirs without anyone noticing, you don’t have an identity. You have a costume.

That camouflage has a name. Identity Mimicry. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Untie The Knot

Uproot

The organisation never discovered its own identity. Instead, it borrowed one. “We should be like Netflix.” “Let’s adopt Google’s culture.” The mimicry feels strategic because it references success. But copying someone else’s identity is not strategy. It is surrender. The real cause: nobody sat with the discomfort of asking “who are WE?” long enough to find an honest answer.

Navigate

The organisation can describe what makes it different from every competitor, and that description sounds like nobody else. The identity is discovered, not imported.

Tool

CORE / Origin: the unique founding conditions and lived experience that no competitor shares. Origin is the one thing that cannot be copied.

Implement

List your top 3 “we want to be like ___” references. For each one, write down what you are actually admiring. Then ask: “Do we have our own version of this, born from our own experience?” If yes, name it. If no, that is a real gap to build, not borrow.

Emerge

When the identity is authentic, marketing stops sounding generic, the employer brand attracts people who fit (not people who fit anywhere), and strategy meetings stop opening with “what is X company doing?”