The Middle Is Where Growth Dies

Stop playing it safe and pick a side

Reade Milner
November 18, 2025

^This^3-minute^{read brought to you by the team at}^{Rogue Pine}

The market isn’t a bell curve anymore. It’s a barbell.

On one end, premium brands like Apple, Tesla, and Ritz-Carlton keep raising the ceiling with high-touch experiences and premium pricing.

On the other hand, budget players like Aldi, Spirit Airlines, and Temu win with scale and simplicity.

Both thrive. Both are growing.

But those brands in the middle? That once-safe, steady arena where most brands used to live? They’re disappearing.

Consumers have polarized. They either want the best or the cheapest.

Anything in between feels like compromise, and compromise doesn’t sell.

The “safe” middle market is now where growth goes to die.

Mid-tier brands can’t out-price the discounters or out-shine the premium players. They’re too expensive to be cheap and too generic to be elite.

Look at retail: Sears and JCPenney collapsed trying to be everything to everyone.

Hospitality? Airbnb and Four Seasons dominate opposite poles, while mid-range hotels drown in sameness.

Even in SaaS, freemium and enterprise thrive, while middle-priced point solutions get squeezed to death.

When your brand is “sort of affordable” or “kind of nice,” it’s invisible.

Invisible is not how you want to be described. The middle is not where you want to be.

If you’re in a market that’s flattening out, your next move isn’t to broaden your appeal—it’s to sharpen it.

Decide which end of the barbell you belong on:

Then, build every message, product decision, and customer interaction around that choice.

The middle may offer comfort, but it doesn’t offer growth.

If your brand feels stuck in the middle, another campaign isn’t going to fix it.

Instead, you need a positioning shift.

You need to realign your brand strategy and persona, and then you need to filter everything you do through that.

At Rogue Pine, we help growth-stage leaders find their edge, clarify their story, and choose a side worth scaling.