In 1917, German U-boats were sinking Allied ships at a rate that would have ended the war inside a year. The Admiralty had tried everything. Nets, depth charges, convoys. Nothing was working fast enough. So they called in a marine painter called Norman Wilkinson and gave him a problem: make these ships harder to hit.
His answer was to make them impossible to miss.
Wilkinson painted them in wild geometric patterns. Black and white chevrons. Curves that ran the wrong way. Blocks of colour that made the bow look like the stern. Four thousand ships, each one unique, each design hand-coloured by a team of art students working from wooden models in a London basement. The Admiralty called it Dazzle Camouflage. The sailors called it Razzle Dazzle. Picasso saw a painted cannon passing through Paris and told Gertrude Stein: "Yes, it is we who made it. That is cubism."
It was not camouflage. It was the opposite of camouflage.
A U-boat commander firing a torpedo had to estimate three things by eye: the target's speed, its direction, and how far away it was. Get any one of those wrong by a few degrees and the torpedo misses. Wilkinson understood that you couldn't hide a ship in open water. But you could make it very, very hard to read. The patterns didn't conceal the ship. They corrupted the information the enemy needed to sink it.
That logic has aged better than most things from 1917.
Look at any competitive category today and you'll see the opposite instinct. The same tone of voice. The same colour palette. The same stock photography of the same person doing the same thing with the same expression. It's not a strategy. It's a reflex. When the market gets difficult, the first instinct is to look at what everyone else is doing and do something similar. Safety in numbers. Category camouflage.
Except it isn't safe. It's the most expensive position in marketing.
Dazzle in practice doesn't mean loud for the sake of it. Wilkinson wasn't decorating those ships. Every line had a job. A curve at the bow created a false wave, making the ship look like it was heading somewhere it wasn't. A block of colour at the stern disguised where the hull ended and the sea began. The confusion was engineered, not accidental.
The brands that dazzle do the same thing. They don't just look different:
They behave in ways the category can't easily replicate.
They show up in places competitors haven't thought to go.
They build a tone, a rhythm, a point of view that's specific enough that copying it would feel like wearing someone else's suit.
The distinction isn't cosmetic. It's structural. It runs through the product, the communication, the experience, the way they treat a Tuesday afternoon on social media.
It's the whole hull, not a lick of paint.
And this matters more now than it ever has. At the IPA Effectiveness Conference last week, one figure landed harder than most: roughly 70% of media spend now goes into low-attention channels. Scroll-past, skip-after-five, sound-off, half-a-screen-while-doing-something-else channels. If your brand looks like the category, you are invisible in exactly the places where most of the money is being spent. You are paying to not be noticed. That is the cost of grey.
Grey doesn't protect you. It just means nobody notices you going under.
Wilkinson's genius wasn't the paint. It was understanding what the torpedo needed. A clean read. Speed, direction, distance. Take any one of those away and the shot misses. Every category has torpedoes. Competitors, own-label, the challenger brand with nothing to lose and a pitch deck full of ambition. They all need the same thing from you: a clean read of what you are, where you're heading, and how to position against it.
So here's the question worth taking back to your next brand review. Can your competitor get a clean shot at you? Can they describe your position, match your tone, take your place on the shelf, and have nobody notice the difference? Because if they can, you're not dazzling. You're grey. And grey doesn't get torpedoed. Grey just sinks quietly, and nobody writes about it afterwards.
The brands that are hardest to ignore are the ones that are hardest to sink.
At The Behaviours Agency, we help brands become harder to aim at. If your competitors can describe your position, match your tone, and take your place without anyone noticing, that’s the conversation we should be having.
