There are four oat milks on the shelf at the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne now, and three of them are wearing the same outfit. Same off white carton, same hand lettered joke, same slightly ironic paragraph on the back explaining that it is only a beverage and please do not make it weird. One of them invented that. The other two arrived later and did not particularly pretend otherwise.
I thought about that shelf all week, because Instagram spent the week doing the same thing at a considerably larger scale.
Reels is TikTok. Not adjacent to TikTok, not inspired by TikTok. It is a short vertical video feed with a music library and a remix culture, shipped by a company that watched a competitor build something and decided to build that instead. Stories was Snapchat. This is the house style now.
What surprises me is not the copying. It is that nobody involved seems embarrassed.
Feature copying is now so normalized that originality has stopped being an expectation and become a pleasant surprise.
I am not outraged about this and I do not think you should be either. But it does change what a brand strategist should be spending her energy protecting.
Because here is what a clone can genuinely take from you. It can take your format, your interface, your posting cadence, your filter, your aspect ratio. Those are all copyable in a quarter by forty engineers with a roadmap. What it cannot take is the reason anyone shows up.
TikTok has something Instagram cannot ship, which is a specific relationship to being unpolished. Snapchat had it too. Stories did not win by copying the feature, exactly. It took the part that was copyable and left Snapchat holding the part that was not, and the part that was not turned out to be worth less than everyone assumed.
The lesson transfers directly to shelves and storefronts. Salt & Straw's competitors can put strange flavors on a menu, and they do, and it changes nothing, because the strangeness is downstream of a genuine appetite for it. Trader Joe's private label has been copied by every grocery chain in America and remains uncopied in the only way that counts.
What it cannot take is the reason anyone shows up.
So make Reels if your audience is there. Use the format. Formats are free and being precious about them is a luxury nobody is paying you for. Just be honest with yourself about which part of the brand is the format and which part is the thing underneath, and spend accordingly. I bought the original oat milk, incidentally. Not out of loyalty. It was simply better.