The Velveteen Rabbit

It is worth pausing on what the rabbit is actually made of before going further. Velveteen is a cotton fabric woven to imitate velvet. It looks like velvet. It has the texture and appearance of velvet. But it is the affordable, mass-produced copy of the real thing. The rabbit is therefore doubly an imitation, made of fake velvet, and pretending to be a real rabbit. He is, by his very construction, a copy of something more expensive and more genuine.

Margery Williams named him with extraordinary precision. The thing made of imitation material, imitating a real animal, becomes the most Real object in the nursery. Not despite being made of imitation fabric. Not despite being a copy. Because of what happens to him through genuine love over time.

Real is not a performance. It is not a coat of fresh paint. It is not the impressive mechanism of the mechanical toys who can do things the rabbit cannot. 

Real is what happens when something is genuinely itself, consistently, over time, for the people who need it to be exactly what it is.

The professional world in 2026 is the nursery. And it is very full of mechanical toys.

Catherine Kaputa, whose work on personal branding has shaped a generation of professionals, identifies the pull toward generic positioning as the single most common and most damaging mistake people make when trying to build a professional identity. 

The instinct, she observes, is to copy. To look at what others in your field are doing and do a version of the same thing. To present yourself in the language and format that the market seems to expect. To be a credible, professional, competent version of the category you belong to.

The result is what she calls a 'me-too brand'. 

Same letters. Same badge. Same assumption of sameness.

The pull toward imitation is not laziness. It is a rational response to uncertainty. When you are not sure what to say about yourself, saying what others say feels safer. When you are not sure what your positioning is, borrowing the language of your profession feels like a reasonable starting point. When you are worried about being judged, presenting a polished, conventional surface feels like protection.

But the polish is the problem. The conventional surface is precisely what makes you invisible to the person who is looking for someone genuinely different. They scroll past the mechanical toys because mechanical toys all look the same. 

They stop when they find something that feels Real.

The nursery today,  are the professional social media sites. It is the professional services directory. It is the search result page wher many professionals present themselves in language so similar that the only visible differentiator is price.

These professionals are competent,  excellent, many built their presentation the way they did for entirely rational reasons - because that is what their professional environment told them a credible, successful practitioner looked like. 

The navy blue website. The city skyline. The biography written in the language of the category. These were not failures of imagination. They were accurate readings of a world that had consistent signals. The world changed. The presentation has simply not yet caught up.

The problem is not the quality of what they do. It is that they have described what they do in the language of their category rather than the language of who they actually are. 

They have made themselves legible to a professional peer and invisible to the client who is looking for someone specific.

The mechanical toys in Williams' nursery could do things the velveteen rabbit could not. They were objectively more impressive in demonstrable ways. But they were interchangeable with each other. 

The rabbit, once Real, was the only thing in the nursery that the child actually needed.

The Skin Horse is honest about what becoming Real costs. Most of your hair gets loved off. Your eyes drop out. You get loose in the joints and very shabby. It does not happen all at once. It takes a long time.

In professional terms this means: becoming Real requires being willing to be specific about who you are and what you stand for, which means accepting that you will not be right for everyone. 

It requires being willing to show up consistently as yourself rather than as the most acceptable version of the category you belong to. It requires allowing the process of genuine engagement with real clients over real time to shape what you become, rather than deciding in advance what the most impressive version of yourself looks like and performing that.

Kaputa makes the same point from a strategic direction. Authentic positioning, she argues, is not about presenting a version of yourself that is more appealing than the real thing. 

It is about examining what is genuinely true about who you are and what you do, and finding the language that makes that truth legible to the people who need it. The brand narrative, she is emphatic, always has to be true. (And this is not easy.)

There is a specific moment in Williams' story that is worth pausing on. The velveteen rabbit, sitting in the garden with the boy, encounters two real rabbits. They are everything he is not - alive, wild, capable of things he cannot do. They invite him to join them. He cannot. He is stuffed. He has no hind legs that work. And in that moment he feels acutely how much he lacks.

This is the moment that many professionals recognise from their own experience. The competitor with more credentials, a larger network, a shinier profile, a more impressive client list. The person in the room who seems to have all the things you do not. The instinct in that moment is to try to become more like them. To acquire the things that seem to make them impressive. To borrow their language, their positioning, their way of presenting.

But the rabbit does not become Real by becoming more like the wild rabbits. He becomes Real by being exactly and completely what he is, for the child who needs him to be precisely that.

The professional who tries to position themselves by becoming a better version of their most impressive competitor will always be behind. They are chasing a target that is already moving. The professional who examines honestly what is genuinely distinctive about what they bring, what they see that others miss, what their particular combination of experience and perspective and way of working produces for the specific client who needs it, that professional is not competing with anyone. 

They are occupying a position that nobody else holds.

At the end of Williams' story, the velveteen rabbit is discarded. 

The boy gets scarlet fever and everything in the nursery that might carry infection is burned. The rabbit is thrown on the rubbish heap to await destruction. And there, alone in the garden, he cries a real tear - because he has become Real enough to cry. 

A fairy comes because of that tear. She kisses him and he becomes a real rabbit, released into the forest with the wild rabbits. When the boy recovers and goes outside to play, he sees a rabbit that reminds him of his old toy. The rabbit looks back and recognises him.

The sequence matters. 

The rabbit does not become Real in order to avoid being discarded. He becomes Real and is discarded anyway. The becoming Real and the being thrown away happen in the same moment. 

What the fairy rescues is not the toy. It is the Real thing that was always inside the toy, waiting to emerge. 

The corporate presentation - the borrowed language, the expected surface - was the toy. The professional inside it was always Real. 

The process of honest positioning does not create something new. It lets what was always there become visible.

That is not a small distinction. It means the work of positioning is not reinvention. It is excavation.

The mechanical toys in the nursery were impressive. The rabbit was Real.

In an overcrowded market, in an age where the generic is everywhere and the authentic is rare, Real is the only positioning that lasts.

The examination that reveals what is genuinely Real about your practice is the work nobody does alone.

Most professionals know their positioning is not quite right. They feel the gap between what they do and how they describe it. They sense that the language they are using is borrowed rather than earned. But the examination that would close that gap - honest, precise, done with someone who can ask the question you cannot ask yourself - rarely happens without a structured space for it.

That is what the business consultancy sessions at Alexander Christian are for. Not to tell you who you are. To help you find the language for what is already there

Authentic Positioning

Me-Too Brand