There’s a quiet illusion at the heart of many products, services, and even training programs: the idea that one offering can satisfy a broad, undifferentiated audience. That if we get the design just right, we can meet everyone’s needs in one go. I’d like to challenge that idea with a principle I call market fractionation.
Market fractionation is the view that every market naturally subdivides into progressively narrower bands of readiness, willingness, and capacity. These aren’t flaws in the market. They’re features. Trying to reach everyone with the same message, product, or price point is not only inefficient—it’s counterproductive.
Markets don’t fail to converge because we haven’t tried hard enough. They fragment because people are different. And any attempt to collapse that diversity into a single channel usually ends in blandness, bloat, or burnout.
This is especially evident in training. Some learners are exploring. Others are deeply committed. Some need confidence. Others need tools. Offering a single, expensive, content-heavy training program to all of them ensures that many will disengage. But when we acknowledge market fractionation, we shift our approach:
Many have tried to reconcile this complexity through the metaphor of a funnel. A funnel, in theory, captures a wide audience and filters them downward through a narrowing process of commitment or fit. But the funnel is ultimately an unsatisfying metaphor. It implies a single path and a fixed destination—as if all learners or customers should eventually pass through the same nozzle.
Real learning journeys aren’t linear. They don’t squeeze people downward. They branch, pause, repeat, accelerate, and sometimes restart. A funnel assumes gravity does the work. Fractionation assumes people move volitionally, and that we must build for those varied trajectories.
Market fractionation allows us to serve more people better—not by treating them equally, but by meeting them appropriately.
It also frees us from the tyranny of the mythical average learner or ideal customer. It invites us to listen, segment, and respond.
When we embrace fractionation, we don’t dilute our offering—we multiply our impact. We meet people where they are and walk with them toward where they want to go.
Because in the end, it’s not about scale for its own sake. It’s about resonance. And resonance only happens when we stop shouting to the crowd and start speaking to the fraction that is ready to hear.