Good enough is no longer good enough for ad agencies in a year marked by change, where the winners and losers will be decided. Happiness Saigon’s Linh Nguyen brings an interesting perspective on her approach.
The joys of the middle row (Adobe Stock)
On a recent long-haul flight, I found myself in the worst possible place on the plane: the middle seat in the middle row, wedged neatly between two strangers, with no window to look out of, no aisle to escape to, and no armrest that was truly mine. It wasn’t dramatic discomfort: the flight took off on time, the food was almost edible, the turbulence was manageable. It was a strangely airless experience with no view, no control, no real sense of where I was, other than somewhere in between for a very long time.
What makes the middle seat so uniquely unpleasant is not that it is objectively the worst. It is that it gives you just enough of everything to function, while quietly taking away all the things that make a long journey bearable: the ability to stretch, to lean, to see the horizon.
Business, unfortunately, has its own version of that middle seat. We dress it up with reassuring language as middle management, mid-market, middle class as if the word itself guarantees stability, prudence, responsibility. For many leaders, being “somewhere in the middle” feels like proof that they’ve avoided catastrophe at the bottom and hubris at the top. Revenue is not skyrocketing, but it isn’t collapsing; costs are under control; the organisation “runs”. On the dashboard, everything looks, if not thrilling, then at least acceptable.
Yet if you look at the brand and agency landscape in 2025, you see the same pattern that played out on my fourteen-hour flight. A large number of businesses are occupying the corporate equivalent of the middle seat: their numbers are stable, their pipeline is OK, their work is good enough to ship, and precisely because nothing is visibly on fire, nobody feels an urgent need to move, differently. On paper, nothing is broken, but in practice nothing is particularly sharp either. We obsess over brands fighting for survival at the bottom and defending dominance at the top, while the truly precarious position sits quietly in that crowded middle where “we’re doing fine” slowly, almost politely, erodes into a more uncomfortable truth: If we disappeared tomorrow, very few people would notice for long.
When people hear middle brand, they still tend to picture a mid-end price point, not cheap, not premium, comfortably parked in the middle of the shelf; but in 2025, that definition has become dangerously incomplete, because the real middle is no longer a question of how much you charge, it is a question of how clearly you stand for something in the minds of the people you serve. A middle brand today is one that is slightly out of focus on all the dimensions that matter.
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Strategically, it sits between stories, neither the default low-cost choice nor the brand people are willing to stretch their budget for, speaking in a fluent but generic language of “quality”, “innovation” and “customer-centricity” that reads well on a slide yet evaporates the moment a consumer tries to explain why they chose it over the next option.
Operationally, it behaves like a generalist that has never quite made up its mind, not specialised enough to command a genuine premium, not standardised enough to win the game of scale and efficiency, so it lives in a world of “a bit customised” solutions that create the comforting illusion of tailoring without ever compounding into a real competitive moat, while quietly adding layers of complexity and cost.
Culturally, it is organised around comfort more than conviction: people inside can describe in great detail what the company has been, but when you ask the deceptively simple question “What will we be known for three years from now that we are not known for today?”, the answers drift back to the past or dissolve into abstractions about being relevant and trusted, and nobody is miserable, yet very few are truly animated by a sense of where this is going.
Stripped of all the corporate language, a middle brand is one that is perfectly capable of surviving, quarter after quarter, but insufficiently clear or committed to be consciously chosen when it really counts, and while that used to be tolerable in a slower, less polarised market, in the current environment it has quietly shifted from being a manageable compromise to being a structural liability.
Fine has become a red flag rather than a comfort word because three powerful shifts are quietly draining the safety out of the middle at the same time. At one end of the spectrum, consumers and clients are increasingly willing to pay decisively more for the things that truly matter to them, whether that is better ingredients, a richer experience or a closer alignment with their own values; at the other end, for everything that does not sit in that inner circle of importance, they are ruthlessly pragmatic and hunt for speed, convenience and the lowest possible cost. When something feels meaningful, they want the best they can reasonably afford, and when it does not, they simply choose whatever option does the job for the least money.
At the same time, AI and automation do not begin by attacking the extremes; they start by flattening the average, turning anything that looks and feels like the familiar industry standard deck, campaign, proposal or feature into something that can be replicated, remixed and delivered at a fraction of the previous cost. If the essence of your value proposition is “what others already do, but reliably”, with no deeper edge or distinction underneath, then you have effectively volunteered to compete with templates, generic tools and low-cost providers that can undercut you without breaking a sweat.
Layered on top of this, margin pressure is intensifying while strong talent remains expensive. Brands at the top of their category can still defend their prices with a sharp and believable story about the value they create, and operators at the very bottom can defend their volume with scale and a consciously lean operating model, but the actors in the middle are being squeezed between those two positions without either a compelling narrative to justify their pricing or the operational discipline to win the efficiency game.
In that context, the sentence “we are doing fine” no longer means “we are safe”; more often than not, it means “we have simply not yet felt the consequences of being forgettable”.
What makes middle brands so difficult to manage is precisely the fact that they almost never die in a dramatic, headline-grabbing way; there is no single scandal, no catastrophic quarter that forces a reckoning, only a long sequence of small, reasonable compromises through which the brand quietly loses altitude. It often begins with what looks like a harmless plateau, when growth flattens but does not collapse and leadership reassures itself that the economy is soft, competition is fierce, budgets are under pressure, yet somehow they are still holding up, so the internal story becomes one of resilience rather than of early stagnation.
From there, many organisations slip into a gentle dilution of themselves, adding products, services and audience segments instead of committing to a sharper edge, layering on new lines, sub-brands and solutions for every emerging brief in the hope of becoming relevant to everyone, and in the process becoming truly specific to no one at all. At the same time, a slower drift sets in beneath the surface: the best clients quietly start placing their more ambitious budgets with sharper players without making a loud exit, the most restless talent quietly returns recruiters’ calls, the company still has business and people, yet the energy has moved elsewhere, leaving behind a core that feels stable enough, respectable enough and each year a little less interesting.
By the time a real cliff appears, with a more distinctive brand taking the high ground of the category while a lean competitor builds a compelling low-cost alternative, the middle brand discovers that the only customers who remain deeply dependent on it are those without the time, capability or courage to move, which is not loyalty so much as inertia. From the outside, it rarely looks as if something dramatic has happened; the brand did not explode, it simply ceased to be missed.
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The most uncomfortable aspect of this dynamic is that no dashboard will ever light up with an alert that says you have become a middle brand; it is a qualitative diagnosis that you can feel long before it appears in the numbers. You can feel it in the reactions when you ask your team what the company will be famous for in three years and the room reaches instinctively for abstract adjectives. You can hear it when your pricing conversation with clients leans on “we work really hard” rather than on a specific, differentiated value. You can sense it when the majority of your pipeline consists of work that keeps the lights on but does not stretch your capabilities, reputation or relevance
You can also test it with a brutally simple hypothetical: if your brand or agency disappeared tomorrow, would your best clients feel stuck or would they, after a few urgent emails, be able to redistribute the work without fundamentally rethinking their business? If the answer is closer to the latter, you may not be in crisis. But you are in the middle.
The one piece of good news for brands stuck in the middle is that this state is not a life sentence but a position, and positions can be changed; the harder truth is that you cannot ease your way out of the middle by polishing language or fine tuning processes while keeping your underlying stance intact, at some point you have to decide what you want to be and accept the trade offs that follow.
One path is to move decisively toward a meaningfully premium role, which is not simply a matter of charging more but of being willing to stand for something sharper and narrower, choosing a specific audience, problem or angle in the category and going deep enough that the usual suspects cannot follow with a minor adjustment, turning your expertise into recognisable products, methodologies or experiences, and learning to say no to work that does not reinforce that edge so that price becomes a reflection of focus rather than vanity.
The other path is to embrace the role of efficient value provider, an honest route for organisations whose real strength lies in execution, scale and reliability rather than in thought leadership, and one that demands discipline in standardising the core offer, stripping away bespoke flourishes that add complexity without adding real value, and competing openly on speed, predictability and cost; it is not glamorous, but when done well it is far more defensible than a vague ambition to be everything to everyone. In either case, the underlying shift is the same, you move from the comfortable claim that you can do many things reasonably well to the much sharper reality that you are either unmistakably excellent at a chosen thing or unmistakably efficient at delivering it.
Once that choice is made, leadership has to live it in ways that go beyond slogans. For CMOs and brand leaders, the first responsibility is to tell the truth about where the brand really sits in the category, looking past market share charts and old awards to the more uncomfortable question of whether you are truly chosen or merely acceptable, and then redirecting budget away from endlessly polishing incremental work that keeps you vaguely present toward a smaller number of bolder, more coherent moves that reinforce the direction you have chosen, premium or value but not both at the same time.
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For agency leaders, the test is as much about ego as about strategy, because the temptation to keep calling yourself full service and to say yes to every brief is particularly strong in uncertain times, while the agencies that will actually survive and command respect are the ones clients can describe in one clean sentence when recommending them to a friend; if your own elevator pitch sounds indistinguishable from a procurement template, you are still squarely in the middle no matter what your credentials deck claims.
And for the people who work inside these organisations, the question becomes deeply personal: when you look at the place you are in, are you learning how to build something sharp or are you simply learning how to maintain something comfortable, and if this organisation were to look exactly the same three years from now, would you feel proud that you stayed for that journey or would you find yourself quietly rehearsing explanations for why you did.
Don’t let fine be your final story
Fine is seductive because it does not hurt, does not embarrass, and allows leaders to sleep at night while investors still nod along, yet in the context of 2025 (and beyond) staying the same is no longer a neutral act but a choice, whether acknowledged or not, to let others define the top and the bottom of your category while you quietly occupy whatever is left in the middle, far away from where people look when they are making the decisions that shape their future. The tragedy of middle brands is not that they are fundamentally weak but that they never fully decide who they want to be, and if your brand, your agency or your own career feels merely fine at this moment, that sensation should not be read as reassurance but as a final, generous early warning signal, a prompt not to panic but to choose.
Linh Nguyen is strategy director at Happiness Saigon (Vietnam).