Saturated
The playbook worked; that's exactly the problem
Three conversations in one week have got my brain obsessing.
The other week, at a girls’ night to see ‘Wuthering Heights’, the conversation turned to Botox when, to our collective joy, Margot Robbie had a very normal, movable forehead throughout the film.
“It’s chic not to have a smooth forehead now.”
We all nodded, with our un-toxed foreheads of at least 8 months. Botox saturation is here.
The same week, a csuite told me they were sick of agencies talking about growth. “Yes, they helped us grow, but they spent 3x more doing it. Profitability is on the floor. What did we actually build?” The average marketing playbook is, I’m sorry to say, null and void. And just one too many agencies have claimed to be “not like every other agency.” I say that with love, as I have admittedly written those very words on collateral and websites alike.
Also that week, my husband and dad both took off their Garmin and Whoop bands after “bad” scores made them feel worse. Mentally and physically.
It isn’t random. A girls night, a boardroom, a Sunday morning. Three different settings, one very clear signal. So why is everything hitting its limit at the same time?
It’s not a coincidence
It is what happens when we have been living in a monoculture.
The cycle has a name, several, actually.
This cycle of saturation leading to rejection is nothing new. Countless frameworks document it. As far back as 1904, Georg Simmel’s essay Fashion described how the elite adopt something to signal distinction, then abandon it the moment the masses catch up. Saturation isn’t the end of the cycle. It’s the trigger for the next one.
Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation (1962) mapped the same behaviour. Ideas move through a population in a bell curve from innovators through to laggards, and by the time the laggards arrive, the early adopters are already gone. Gartner’s Hype Cycle (1995) tracked it through technology. Peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, eventual plateau of productivity. Painfully recognisable in the current AI moment. And the concept of trend fatigue, which emerged in writing about the internet in the 2010s argued that the internet compressed the whole cycle from years to months.
What I’m most interested in is how the rapid spread of information — driven largely, though not exclusively, by algorithmic platforms — has caused a monoculture-isation of, well, almost everything. When everyone is exposed to the same things at the same time, Simmel’s trickle down doesn’t just happen faster; it happens globally and simultaneously. The cycle that once played out across decades now plays out across a single news feed.
And so here we are. A mass rejection happening across arenas that, for the past decade, have felt like the norm, the status quo, the way we’d simply continue to live forever.
The decade of optimisation
During this decade, the premise was simple: everything can be improved with the right system, tool or framework. Bodies. Businesses. Beauty routines. If you could measure it, you could optimise it. And if you could optimise it, you could win.
And honestly? It worked. Growth marketing delivered scale. Wellness tech delivered awareness. Aesthetic medicine delivered confidence. The tools were real and the results were real. So the playbooks spread — quickly and widely — because algorithmic platforms made sure that what worked for one reached everyone almost immediately.
But that’s exactly the problem.
When a genuinely effective idea spreads at global speed, it stops being an edge and becomes a baseline.
Anders Braso, CMO at Monocle, shared a post on LinkedIn recently:
“Digital makes distribution cheap and fast. It doesn’t make people stop, remember or commit… Distribution is not the hard part. Everything else is.”
And once it’s a baseline, two things happen. The returns diminish, because everyone is doing it, and the signal flips. What once communicated aspiration starts to communicate conformity. This is Simmel’s cycle, just running at a speed he couldn’t have anticipated, across domains he never imagined.
What the rejection is actually telling us
Here’s what I think is important to get right. Noticing Margot Robbie’s forehead isn’t anti-Botox. It’s anti-ubiquity. The csuite isn’t anti-growth. It’s anti a system that overpromised and underdelivered at scale. The men taking off their fitness trackers aren’t anti-health. They’re exhausted by the anxiety of constant measurement with very little emotional return.
The rejection isn’t of the thing itself. It’s of the monoculture the thing created.
And this distinction matters a lot if you’re in strategy. Because the instinct when you see rejection is to find the next thing. New treatment, new agency model, new wellness protocol. But that completely misreads what’s happening. People aren’t asking for a replacement. They’re asking for something that feels chosen rather than prescribed. Personal rather than algorithmic. Considered rather than just… optimised.
The opportunity isn’t spotting what comes next in the cycle. It’s understanding what the cycle is revealing about what people actually want. Which, as it turns out, is something the past decade was never really designed to give them.
So what does this mean for brands?
I want to be honest about something before I go any further. A lot of what will be written about this moment will tell you to “embrace authenticity” or “lead with purpose” and I find that mostly unhelpful. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s already becoming the next version of the same problem. The moment authenticity becomes a playbook, it isn’t authentic anymore. We’ve arguably already done that lap. There are a lot of “purpose-led” brands out there that feel about as genuine as a motivational poster in a WeWork.
So let me try and say something more useful.
What this moment is actually asking for is a tolerance for specificity. The mass market playbook worked because scale was the goal, reach everyone, optimise for conversion, measure everything. But when everyone has run the same play, scale stops being a competitive advantage and starts being a liability. You’re everywhere and you stand for nothing in particular. Sound familiar?
The brands that do well from here aren’t necessarily the biggest or the loudest. They’re the ones willing to be genuinely, specifically, sometimes uncomfortably for someone. A point of view that not everyone agrees with. An aesthetic that wasn’t designed by committee. A customer they’d rather lose than mislead.
And look, Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass school would push back on me here and they’re not entirely wrong. But I’d argue the context has shifted enough to matter. Distinctive used to mean recognisable. Now it needs to mean irreducible. Hard to copy because it actually comes from somewhere real.
And for agencies and consultancies specifically
That csuite conversation haunts me a little if I’m honest. Because I’ve sat in rooms where the growth numbers looked incredible and nobody was asking the harder question. What are we actually building here? What does this company mean to people? Is any of this defensible when the paid media turns off?
The agencies that survive this moment won’t be the ones with the best performance marketing capability. That’s increasingly commoditised and AI is going to eat most of it, let’s just be real about that. The ones that survive will be the ones who can help clients figure out what they actually stand for. And then build something that earns loyalty rather than just buying it.
That’s slower work. It’s harder to put in a deck. It’s less immediately measurable. And it requires a level of strategic honesty that the growth era frankly didn’t reward. But the bill has arrived.
What multiplicity actually looks like
Multiplicity sounds like a theory word but it’s really just this: there is no longer one version of aspirational. There are many; they coexist, and they often directly contradict each other.
Smooth foreheads and movable foreheads. Viral growth and profitable businesses. Optimised bodies and bodies that are just allowed to exist. None of these is winning. All of them are valid simultaneously. And that is genuinely new or at least it’s happening at a scale and speed that makes it feel new.
For most of the last decade the algorithm flattened this. It found what performed, served it to everyone and in doing so created a kind of false consensus. We all thought everyone wanted the same things because our feeds showed us a world where everyone wanted the same things. We optimised toward a monoculture that was, at least partly, an illusion created by the very tools we were using to measure it. Which is a bit of a mindbend when you sit with it.
What we’re seeing now is the illusion cracking. And underneath it is a much messier, more interesting, more human reality. People want different things. They always did. We just forgot for a bit.
What this means practically
For brands, the segmentation models that served the last decade probably need a rethink. Demographics were always a blunt instrument but they’re particularly unhelpful now, because the fragmenting isn’t happening along traditional lines. It’s happening along values, aesthetics and what I’d loosely call vibe. Who do I want to be associated with? What does choosing this brand say about who I am?
The smart move is to keep creating new forms of scarcity. Not artificial scarcity, people see through that immediately, but genuine specificity. Something so clearly itself that it can’t easily be replicated.
The other thing I keep coming back to is how we listen. The mass feedback tools of the last decade, surveys, NPS, performance dashboards, are good at telling you what is happening at scale. They’re much less good at telling you why and almost useless at telling you what’s shifting before it shows up in the numbers.
The signal that Botox saturation had arrived didn’t come from a report. It came from a conversation at a girls’ night. The signal that growth marketing had hit its ceiling came from a tired csuite in a meeting room. Neither of those signals would have shown up in a dashboard, because dashboards measure what’s already happened at scale. By the time it’s at scale, the people you most want to reach are already somewhere else.
Simmel wrote about this in 1904. The cycle isn’t new. What’s new is that we built tools precise enough to optimise the cycle — and in doing so, made it run faster and flatten further than anyone could have imagined. The question isn’t what comes next. It’s whether your bold enough to trust what you’re hearing in the room more than what you’re reading in the trend report.
Saturation provides opportunity. Are you willing to grab it?
Yes!! Recently, I've found myself jotting down notes in my notes app during convos with friends because it links to broader trends I notice (which are then reported a week or two later). Great read.
This was a great read!