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Several classes of materials manifest displacive phase transitions, including shape memory alloys, many electronically correlated materials, superconductors, and ferroelectrics. Each of these classes of materials displays a wide range of fascinating properties and functionalities that are studied in disparate communities. However, these materials’ classes share similar electronic and phononic instabilities in conjunction with microstructural features. Specifically, the common motifs include twinned microstructures, anomalies in the transport behavior, softening of specific phonons, and frequently also (giant) Kohn anomalies, soft phonons, and/or nesting of the Fermi surface. These effects, phenomena, and their applications have until now been discussed in separate communities, which is a missed opportunity. In this perspective a unified framework is presented to understand these materials, by identifying similarities, defining a unified phenomenological description of displacive phase transitions and the associated order parameters, and introducing the main symmetry-breaking mechanisms. This unified framework aims to bring together experimental and theoretical know-how and methodologies across disciplines to enable unraveling hitherto missing important mechanistic understanding about the phase transitions in (magnetic) shape memory alloys, superconductors and correlated materials, and ferroelectrics. Connecting structural and electronic phenomena and microstructure to functional properties may offer so-far unknown pathways to innovate applications based on these materials.