Why brands are moving down from big names to small profiles

There is a shift that has been under way for a while and that this year has become hard to ignore: more and more brands would rather work with many small profiles than with a single big name.

It is not generosity or a passing fad. The numbers simply work out better.

What broke in the previous model

A huge profile reaches an enormous number of people, but people with nothing in common with each other. When it recommends something, a good share of the audience is not nearby, is not interested, or has already learned to read it straight as advertising.

What small profiles have

Fewer people, but people who genuinely know whoever is posting. When someone like that recommends something it looks far more like advice than an ad, because that is literally what it is.

Where local fits into this

Follow that reasoning all the way down and you land at neighbourhood scale: the person with two hundred followers who all live ten minutes from your business. For a national brand that is too small to bother with. For the bar on the corner it is exactly the right size.

That is the part of the shift almost nobody is paying attention to, and it is precisely where we are.