The Year of the Normie

Why influence is getting quieter, smaller, and harder to fake.

This week I heard a marketing executive confidently declare that 2026 will be the year of the influencer.

Wait, what? Then I fired off a note about it on my way home which went viral and collected a lot of opinions in the replies, but I digress.

My prediction? 2026 is going to be the year of the normie.

To be clear, this does not mean influencers are going away. But the ecosystem is undergoing a seismic shift, driven partly by platforms like ShopMy and Substack, and partly by a growing collective dissonance around how we’re being marketed to.

I no longer want to hear how your morning routine “leveled up” when you started Athletic Greens. I do want to know where the woman with the cool fashion director job got the loafers she wears to walk her son to school every morning. The one who posts irregularly. The one who still feels vaguely uncomfortable about ads. The one whose Instagram doesn’t feel like a job because it isn’t.

Who the normie actually is

I’ve been in marketing for so long that I like to joke I can’t be marketed to.

Do you know how long I’ve had these Dorsey earrings open in my tabs? It took a creator post, a site visit, another creator post, seventeen paid ads, and six more site visits just to get them into my cart. Into the cart.

Meanwhile, the last three things I actually bought were influenced by women with focused, niche content, a real POV, full-time jobs, and a very “buy this or don’t, whatever” attitude. I’ve been telling founders for years that people don’t want to be sold to and they’re only just starting to understand what that actually means.

When I say “normie,” I don’t mean anti-creator. I mean anti-performance. A normie can absolutely be on ShopMy. The difference isn’t whether there’s a link — it’s whether the link is the point. Normies lead with taste and say, “Hey, you might like this.” They don’t start with monetization and reverse-engineer a personality around it.

She might have a ShopMy because people keep asking where things are from. She might link something because it’s easier than replying to ten DMs. But she’s not shaping her behavior around conversion — and that’s exactly why it works.

Matthieu Blazy’s Métiers d’Art show in the New York City subway felt like a beacon for the normie economy.

Why this shift is happening now

This moment feels familiar. Much like the DTC performance boom of the late 2010s, brands are finally realizing they can’t just throw more money at the problem. When growth was easy, no one questioned the system. When it got expensive, and started underperforming, everyone did.

Influencer marketing isn’t dead, but it is under the same pressure. Engagement is down (as The Business of Fashion has reported), consumer skepticism is up — especially among Gen Z — and feeds are saturated to the point of visual white noise. When everything looks like an ad, people don’t go searching for better influencers. They start looking for less mediated opinions.

That’s why the girl with 3,200 followers suddenly feels more compelling than the one with 300k. Not because she’s niche but because she’s not optimizing. She still sounds like a person.

Meanwhile, buying behavior is shifting. Consumers are spreading their purchasing power across more creators, more touchpoints, and longer consideration windows which quietly breaks the old one-post-to-purchase model. Here babe, I read this McKinsey report so you didn’t have to.

What’s replacing it isn’t anti-influencer so much as post-transactional: smaller creators, longer relationships, community over campaigns. Fewer posts designed to convert, more content designed to mean something.

Asking the experts

I asked influencer marketing expert — and one of my favorite people — Julia Casella where she sees the industry headed, and her answer mirrored exactly what’s happening culturally.

“Consumers are smarter than ever and highly attuned to when content is clearly sponsored versus genuinely recommended. As a result, authenticity isn’t really a trend so much as a strategy, and my POV is that brands should move away from transactional influencer marketing toward long-term, relationship-driven strategies.”

Julia also pointed out that follower count is becoming a weak KPI. Creators with smaller but highly engaged audiences—who consistently use and talk about a product—often outperform larger creators brought in for one-off campaigns.

“Large influencers still play an important role, primarily for awareness and visibility. I view them as complementary to the strategy, similar to a billboard, rather than the core driver of trust or conversion. Relevance should come before reach. For example: instead of targeting broad ‘skincare influencers,’ focus on creators already talking about the specific problem you’re solving. Depth of alignment will consistently outperform scale.”

It’s worth noting that Julia’s taught me so much of what I know about influencer marketing and how it actually works. You can read more of her writing about it here.

Cultural power has moved to small spaces

I tell my students all the time, the conversation is shifting into spaces that are harder to access. The most influential spaces right now aren’t feeds. They’re group chats, DMs, close friends stories, substack channels, etc.

These are private, low-stakes, mostly unmonetized spaces. And they’re where decisions actually get made. You don’t need reach in those rooms. You need trust.

Ok… so what actually works now?

Let’s start with a hard truth: the normie economy isn’t a channel, it’s a circle of trust. And the second you try to operationalize it the way you do influencer marketing, you break the spell. You don’t run a “normie campaign.” You create conditions where they feel like talking.

Here’s what I think we’ll see more of in 2026:

1. Seeding (without expectation)

Seeding is back in a big way. What’s working now is almost aggressively un-marketing. No contracts. No posting expectations. No “would love to see this on your feed!” energy. Absolutely no follow-ups asking when content is going live.

The best seeding today looks like a thoughtful note, zero pressure, a very long timeline, and a genuine comfort with getting absolutely nothing in return. The question isn’t “will they post?” It’s “would I still want this person to have the product if they never said a word?”

If silence makes you jumpy, girl don’t do it.

2. Rethinking how you measure value (because CAC is no longer your north star)

The other uncomfortable truth: CAC math is quietly breaking everyone’s brains. It broke mine a long time ago. Performance marketing trained brands to expect instant gratification — clicks, attribution, conversion windows.

The normie economy does not show up like that. It shows up as delayed demand, multiple touchpoints, offline validation, and a lot of “wait… I’ve seen this a few times” energy.

By the time someone actually buys, the influence has already compounded — and you often can’t trace it back to one post, one person, or one moment. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Brands who thrive here stop asking “did this convert?” and start asking “is this showing up consistently in the right rooms?”

3. Creating trust with the normies already using your product

The hardest shift is control. You cannot manage your way into trust. The normie does not want to be onboarded. She doesn’t want a brief. She definitely doesn’t want to feel useful.

But when you see normies already using your product — posting it casually, recommending it in group chats, bringing it up unprompted — your job is not to optimize them. It’s to protect the vibe.

That means letting them speak in their own words, on their own timeline, in their own corners of the internet. The fastest way to kill normie trust is to professionalize it.

This isn’t anti-influencer. It’s post-influencer. Creators aren’t disappearing and influence isn’t going away. What is ending is the idea that professionalized influence is the most persuasive force in culture.

And the brands that understand that now won’t be scrambling in 2026 trying to catch up. They’ll already be there.