There’s a sentence shape that has become so common in brand copy that it’s losing its distinction. Which is ironic, because its precise purpose is to make distinctions.  

It’s not X…It’s Y. 

We know that overusing this construction can lead to repetitive, formulaic prose. But there is a monumental problem that we’ve casually skipped over if that’s the only takeaway.  

Namely, that relying on the pre-set template of ‘It’s not X … It’s Y’ means getting stuck in the loop of telling people what you’re not before telling them who you are.  

And, unfortunately, what’s the first thing we do when we’re told not to think about something?  

Why it has become so popular   

It isn’t marketing, it’s a high performance tune up 

It’s not a slide deck – it’s how people feel

These aren’t words, they’re a new direction 

You will have heard, read, or maybe even used a version of it yourself, possibly this week, and especially if you’ve spent some time on LinkedIn.  

Negation is by no means an illegitimate means of defining something. Positioning theory has told us for fifty years that the fastest way into a crowded mind is to borrow ground someone else has already built and push off it.  

And this goes right down into the building blocks of communication. Words only mean what they mean in relation to all the other meanings that they exclude.  

So, position-by-contrast is, to a certain degree, how meaning-making has always worked.  

However, the problem comes about when this logic becomes the default means of brand communication. Moreover, the problem gets worse when brands can’t escape this model because they’ve outsourced all communication to LLMs that are trained to reach for the most likely sentence shape, rather than for the shape that best expresses something true.  

What readers do when you tell them not to think about something  

Writers should be concerned if it’s starting to feel like every description that they formulate starts with what the brand isn’t. And there’s a psychological reason for this.  

This problem is glaring and obvious. But sometimes the louder an alarm going off in the background the more likely it is that we think someone else is dealing with it.  

You might not have heard of the Wegner test, but you’ll instinctively understand what it illustrates: that people tend to think about something they’re told not to.  

It’s not to say that there aren’t variables which can complicate this picture. Not all ‘nots’ are created equally. But this doesn’t give us a free pass to ignore Wegner’s insights wholesale.   

The experiment should encourage us to rethink how copy works; in particular, it should get us to consider how likely it is that your reader is thinking about the X first before they move onto the more important Y.  

The negative comparison, then, has a price.   

Why you can’t outsource the thinking  

A generative large language model producing brand copy won’t start off by making a well-informed judgement about your positioning.  

Quite simply, it’s predicting the next most probable words, and ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ is a very probable shape; it quickly gets you to a finished-seeming sentence representing a finished-seeming idea.  

However, the situation comes to be a snake eating its own tail: it appears too often precisely because of its likelihood, being a phrase heavily represented in exactly the corpus of confident brand statements an LLM has learned from.  

And fluency can easily get mistaken for insight in a machine for just the same reason it does in a tired copywriter working to a deadline. But now this line of least resistance has been made even harder to resist, and that ease has been scaled up exponentially.  

Where does this lead? Copy that differentiates every statement from what it’s not and, in the process, becomes difficult to differentiate from all the other copy that differentiates every statement from what it’s not which, in the process, becomes difficult to differentiate from…  

A small test   

Remove the X and start with the Y.  

You might just find that you’ll remove your reader’s stress and cut straight to the why.  

If it doesn’t cut straight to the why, there’s your problem. 

Words matter. Get in touch to find out more about our Copy Training Consultation services.