Why relevance is becoming harder to earn.

We don’t have a consumption problem. We have an abundance problem.

There are more brands to discover, more products to buy, more places to go, more shows to watch, more people to follow and more content to consume than any of us could fit into a lifetime.

Almost all of it is accessible. Much of it is good.

And there will always be more.

What does it mean to be relevant when everything is competing to be relevant?

For a long time, relevance in marketing was closely connected to interest. Understand your consumer. Identify a need. Find the right message. Reach the right person at the right moment.

If something felt sufficiently interesting, useful or desirable, attention would follow.

Today, being interesting is a much lower bar.

We are surrounded by interesting things.

A restaurant we might want to try. A brand we could buy. A podcast we should listen to. A destination worth visiting. A series someone insists we need to watch. A product that would probably make our life slightly better.

We can be interested in all of them.

And choose almost none of them.

This changes the meaning of relevance.

Relevance used to mean: “This is interesting to me.”
Increasingly, it means: “This matters to me.”

That difference is easy to underestimate.

Because much of modern marketing has become exceptionally good at competing for attention. We optimize media, personalize messages, improve conversion, create more content and find increasingly sophisticated ways to reach people.

All of this matters.

But attention is not the same as relevance.

A view is not a relationship. A click is not necessarily interest. And interest is certainly not meaning.

The harder question is what makes someone care enough to choose one thing over all the other perfectly good things available to them.

This is why the competitive set for brands has quietly expanded.

A beauty brand is not only competing with other beauty brands. It is competing with a holiday, a restaurant, a creator, a subscription, a concert, a WhatsApp conversation — and sometimes simply with the decision to buy nothing at all.

Everyone is competing for a limited amount of attention, money, time and emotional space.

And those resources are not becoming more abundant.

So perhaps the next chapter of growth requires a slightly different question.

Not only: How do we reach more people?

But: Why should we matter to them?

That question takes us beyond media efficiency and conversion funnels.

It asks what a brand represents. What role it plays in people’s lives. What it understands about the culture around it. What it contributes beyond another product, another campaign or another piece of content asking for attention.

Because in a world of abundance, availability is no longer enough.

Visibility is no longer enough.

Even being interesting may no longer be enough.

The next growth problem is not how to reach more people. It is how to matter to them.

Because when people can choose almost anything, the brands that grow will be the ones they would actually miss.