Consumers Don’t Reward ‘Okay’
How did it go with Sophie L. today?
It took our membership team an hour to get her to renew.
Hopeless.
I’m afraid there’s not a single man in New York City that’ll date this girl.
What seems to be the issue?
That’s the thing. There is nothing wrong with her.
She’s okay attractive… okay money, okay educated, okay personality.
There’s just not a standout quality.
She’s not competitive in the mainstream market… and there is no niche market for her.
Exactly.
And if there’s no specialty appeal… then there’s no place for her in any market.
Taken from Materialists, matchmaker Lucy and her colleague discuss the brutality of New York’s saturated dating economy.
Image: Materialists (2025), courtesy of A24.
What makes this exchange resonate isn’t its cruelty, but its clarity. Nothing is wrong, yet nothing is compelling. The problem isn’t absence; it’s dilution. In a market dense with choice, broad acceptability no longer creates momentum. It simply fails to create reason.
This is increasingly how the market behaves when scale begins to outweigh meaning. As reach expands, craft is compressed and storytelling settles into familiar rhythms, the signals that once carried value lose their force. When everything appears refined, refinement stops communicating quality. When excellence is universally claimed, it becomes assumed, and therefore overlooked. The outcome is rarely rejection; more often, it is quiet indifference.
Consumers aren’t struggling with a lack of choice. They’re navigating an excess without orientation. Too many offerings occupy the same horizontal space: competent, fluent, and broadly credible, yet difficult to distinguish. Without a clear centre of gravity, decisions default to habit, convenience, or price rather than belief.
“There’s nothing wrong with …” becomes a shorthand for this horizontal condition — the space of ‘okay’ where everything functions but nothing stands apart.
The idea of being T-shaped matters at a brand level. The horizontal bar continues to expand as consumer expectations rise. Scale, reach, visibility, consistency and now sustainability are no longer differentiators; they are the baseline. They establish presence, but not preference.
What creates distinction is the vertical stroke. Depth that hasn’t been engineered out in the name of efficiency. Craft that hasn’t been diluted for repeatability. A story or a point of view with the confidence to take a position, and the substance to hold it. The willingness to take risks, to double down on what makes your brand, your brand.
When that verticality thins, the consequences are familiar. Trust in value erodes. Creativity begins to feel fatigued and referential. Distribution models designed for scale lose their ability to create intimacy. Vision drifts away from execution. Meanwhile, the core customer shifts - culturally as much as demographically - while the category continues to speak in a language shaped by past success.
A niche, in this context, isn’t about narrowing ambition. It’s about coherence. It gives meaning structure and allows belief to form. Specialisation signals confidence - not only in capability, but in judgement. It shows a willingness to stand somewhere deliberately, rather than everywhere vaguely.
There is nothing wrong with being ‘okay’.
But without a standout quality, without specialty appeal, without depth beneath the surface, the market is left without a reason to choose, or a reason to care.
Every Sophie L needs a niche.
Get in touch to define your brand’s true differentiator in an increasingly crowded market.
