The problem with copying what worked for another brand

A competitor launches a gamified loyalty campaign. Participation numbers climb, press picks it up, leadership takes notice. The instinctive response: do the same thing.

It is an understandable reflex. It is also one of the most common reasons campaigns underperform.

At Livewall, we see this pattern regularly. A brand comes in with a brief that starts with: 'We want something like what X did.' Sometimes that is useful inspiration. More often it is a recipe for mediocrity, because the context that made another brand's activation successful simply does not exist for yours.

Context is everything

What works for a brand cannot be separated from who that brand is, who its audience is, and what moment it is operating in. A gamified loyalty programme that fits perfectly into the daily habits of sports enthusiasts performs differently in a market with different purchase patterns. A viral mechanic that felt natural for a musician falls flat for an insurance brand.

That does not mean you cannot learn from others. It means you need to understand what was underneath the surface before you try to replicate it.

Three questions to ask before borrowing anything

Before lifting a mechanic or format from another brand, there are three questions worth answering honestly.

Does our audience share the same motivation? Engagement with a brand that features in someone's daily life is fundamentally different from engagement with a brand they encounter a few times a year. A collect-and-win mechanic that rewards frequent visitors only works if your customers actually have that frequency.

Does this fit who we are as a brand? An activation that feels like a natural extension of the brand generates more participation than one that feels imported. If your brand is serious and functional, a playful adventure game may not be the right call, however well it worked elsewhere.

Have we earned this kind of interaction with our audience? A community or fan base that is already active responds very differently to a new mechanic than an audience that barely knows your brand. The starting position matters, and it directly affects outcomes.

A real brand differentiation strategy starts with these questions, not with which format looked good in a case study.

The difference between inspiration and imitation

Inspiration is valuable. You look at what worked, understand why it worked, and then ask: what version of this principle fits our brand?

That is a different question from: how quickly can we replicate this?

The most effective activations we've built at Livewall start from the behaviour we want to create, not from the format we want to copy. What should the user do? What motivates them? What context makes that action easy and appealing?

For Decathlon, the key was that the mechanic aligned with the sports-minded identity of the customer and the practical orientation of the brand. Not just a game, but an interactive campaign that revealed something meaningful about the customer and delivered value to both sides.

For an artist platform like the one built for Warner Music's Ed Sheeran campaign, a completely different kind of engagement applies. Fans want to feel something, share something, feel connected to the artist. The mechanic has to amplify that feeling, not deliver a generic loyalty experience.

When a format is transferable

Some formats are more robust than others. Collect-and-win mechanics, daily return triggers, and social sharing incentives work broadly, provided they are properly fitted to the brand's context.

It is no coincidence that at Livewall we work with several brands on seasonal and advent-style campaigns. That format carries proven psychological principles: daily anticipation, progression, surprise. But how those principles are expressed differs completely between brands.

A seasonal activation for Rituals is luxurious and sensory. A similar return mechanic for a retailer like HEMA is warm, humorous, and tied to everyday shopping. Same underlying principle. Completely different execution.

That is the point. The psychology can be borrowed. The identity and context have to come from you. Anyone who forgets that and copies only the format misses exactly what made the format powerful in the first place.

How to actually start

The better approach does not begin with what others have done. It begins with your own brand, your own audience, and your own objective.

What do you want people to do? What do we know about their motivations and habits? What fits the tone and identity of our brand? What trust and engagement have we already built?

After that, you can look at precedents, inside and outside your sector, to understand which mechanics have proven themselves for similar behavioural patterns. But translating that into your own context is the actual work.

At Livewall, we call this the behavioural strategy behind an activation. Before any format or mechanic exists, there needs to be a clear answer to: what makes this valuable for the user of this specific brand? If that answer does not hold, it does not matter how well the format performed somewhere else.

A genuine brand differentiation strategy is built on understanding what makes your brand distinct, not on cataloguing what made other brands successful. The two are related, but they are not the same thing.