Niche marketing always pretended to know us. Demographics. Personas. Segments with neat borders. But life doesn’t stay neat. It spills. It scrolls. It shifts mood to mood, feed to feed.
This morning I woke up to a text I’d missed overnight. Scrolled the news with a hit of anxiety, trying to shake it off. Put the same Spotify loop on repeat while making breakfast and packing lunches for my kids. Reviewed soccer clips on Veo Cam. Deleted the dozens of emails that pile up before the day even starts. Posted a video of the best startup pitch I’ve seen in West Michigan on Instagram. Tried to act like a human on LinkedIn while my InMail inbox drowned me in “quick opportunities.”
Six selves. All before coffee.
By 9 a.m. I was in a meeting that sparked this very piece. My friend Ashton Pienaar was venting about marketing woes. Not his creativity, not his vision. The problem was the outdated machinery admen still sell as “strategy.” Funnels. Personas. The same dusty slides. It wasn’t insight—it was attention theft. Robbing Ashton of his focus, flattening real people into cardboard cutouts.
We got talking. We got real. And we landed here: the niche is dead.
Media isn’t a channel. It’s the mood ring of our lives.
There are 5.41 billion people using social media—nearly two-thirds of humanity—and each of us drifts across seven platforms a month, spending hours scrolling.
A 2025 Deloitte study found more than half of Gen Z say social feeds feel more relevant to their lives than TV or film—because they sync with mood. Lonely at 2 a.m. Hyped at 2 p.m. Angry when politics flare. Numb when memes flood in.
Nike pivots when athletes protest. Duolingo thrives by clowning on TikTok. Barbie’s marketing takeover turned a film into a global mood. Reddit’s five-second Super Bowl ad worked because it felt like the internet itself. None of this is niche. It’s feed work.
Nobody walks down a funnel. They bump into you in the scroll.
More than 58% of consumers now stumble on businesses through social media. That’s not targeting. That’s the algorithm tossing dice.
Micro-influencers on TikTok average 7.5% engagement, more than double Instagram. They don’t sell demographics. They sell recognition. Even locally, 63% of people say one good online interaction was enough to make them plan a visit.
That’s why Ashton’s frustration hit so hard. His work deserves focus, not being chopped into clichés for ad copy. He doesn’t need a cardboard persona. He needs real people in his DMs, commenting, showing up.
Liquid Death didn’t sell hydration. They sold rebellion. Just like Crocs turned ugly shoes into a flex by leaning into absurdity. That’s not a funnel. That’s a feed moment.
The only real niche left is flexibility.
Niche marketing was always about control. It let marketers pretend they knew people by cutting them into shapes. But people don’t live in boxes. They live in their feeds.
And those feeds move faster every year—through storms, memes, music drops, politics, shifting moods, endless notifications. The winners aren’t the ones building walls. They’re the ones riding the scroll.
That morning, Ashton and I laughed at the absurdity of it all. Caricatures of customers, Funnels drawn on slides. The truth is simpler. The niche is dead. It was always dead. And now we can finally admit it.
