Niche is the New Normal

How “niche stacking” builds scale, one community at a time

For decades, marketers chased scale.

The playbook was simple: tell one story to as many people as possible. Buy big media, drive awareness, and assume relevance would follow. That worked when distribution was scarce—when most people saw the same ads, watched the same shows, read the same magazines.

That world is gone. Today, attention is fragmented, personalized, and shaped by countless micro-cultures.

But what if the “mass audience” hasn’t disappeared—just scattered into smaller, self-defining groups with their own language, rituals, and leaders? And what if you could still reach that audience by stacking those groups instead of broadcasting to them?

That’s the idea I’m exploring today, inspired by Abby Ho, VP of Digital & Social for Disney Branded Television and author of Fellow Kids, a must-read Substack on Gen Alpha, whose sharp observation in a recent essay on the “Affinity Economy” sums up where marketing is headed: “Broad = sum of niches.”

In today’s newsletter, I build on that idea with something I call “niche stacking”—a practical way to make “Broad = sum of niches” real. The model connects adjacent communities, turning each niche into a high-trust distribution node that scales from the inside out.

Here’s how it works, how it comes to life, and what it means for how brands grow today.