Transitions: What CMOs Are Missing About These Moments That Matter

I have been thinking a lot about transitions lately.

We like to think of life in chapters. But most of us don’t experience clean page turns. We experience transitions. Not quite an ending. Not yet a beginning.

Transitions are those quiet, liminal moments when something shifts beneath the surface. They don’t always come with headlines or hashtags. They don’t announce themselves on a calendar. But they change us.

A job ends. A partner leaves. Or arrives. A child moves out. A diagnosis lands. A new city becomes home. A retirement party is held, but its purpose is unclear.

Or, perhaps, you wake up and realize the life you built no longer fits.

We don’t always know what to call these moments. They aren’t crises. They aren’t celebrations. They’re thresholds.

And they are profoundly powerful.

Transitions Are the Next Growth Market

At The Epilogue Company, we’ve spent a great deal of time discussing aging, not just as a demographic reality, but as a cultural reckoning. But age alone is an imprecise marker of who someone is or what they need. That’s because the real shifts in a person’s life - emotionally, socially, financially - aren’t tied to a number. They’re tied to a state.

Transitions are emotional fault lines. They shake assumptions. They reorder priorities. They crack open the space for reinvention, often quietly, invisibly. One day, everything changes.

These are not edge cases. They are the case.

Right now, the most important consumer, employee, or citizen your brand needs to reach is not in a clearly defined segment. They’re in motion.

And motion changes everything.

What Marketers Miss About the In-Between

Most brand strategies are built on identity categories: age, gender, income, ethnicity, job title, and parental status. But few know what to do with the in-between.

We’re good at beginnings and endings. But what about the middle? The moment between “we” and “me”? The moment between ambition and burnout? The moment between structure and self-definition?

These are the moments when people are most open to a new voice, a new product, a new story about themselves.

These are the moments when a brand can step in and say, with clarity and care, 'We see you.’ Not just where you are. But who you are becoming.

And yet, these moments are almost invisible in most data sets. Transitions don’t show up in CRM fields or DMP profiles. They’re not easily bucketed into personas. But they leave fingerprints: shifts in behaviour, changes in purchase patterns, spikes in emotional content.

The clues are there, if you know how to look.

Designing for the Threshold

To design for transitions is not to target a group. It’s to meet a state.

It requires softer tools:

·      Empathy. Timing. Language that respects uncertainty.

·      Products that allow for reinvention.

·      Campaigns that don’t just inspire, but accompany.

Because when someone is in transition, they’re not just buying a thing. They’re trying on a new version of themselves. And the brands that earn trust in those moments aren’t the ones that shout.

They’re the ones who listen well enough to whisper the right thing at the right time.

A Call to Brand Builders, Strategists, and Storytellers

If you’re looking for brand growth, stop thinking about their demographic. Start asking what they’re walking through because that’s where loyalty lives. That’s where transformation begins. That’s where the real market hides, in plain sight, in the pause between roles, in the field before the path, in the story just about to turn.

Are you paying attention to that moment? Because we are, and that’s where we do our best work.

Let’s be honest.

I’ve been writing about this stuff for 18 months. Not one brand. Not one agency. Not one CMO has reached out. And yet, every panel talks about empathy. Every keynote promises relevance. Every strategy deck says it’s about real people.

So, where are you?

We’ve mapped the terrain and named the opportunity. Shown the emotional and economic case for building with people in transition, not just in youth, or wealth, or trend cycles. And still - silence.

So I’ll ask the question plainly.

Who’s going to be brave enough to go first?

To stop chasing the same audience in the same ways and step into the vast, open, untapped market of age, transition, and identity in motion?

Not as a token gesture. Not buried in the innovation budget. But as a real, considered move toward growth.

Because that growth opportunity? It’s already here. And if you’re not building for it, someone else will.

The Epilogue Company. Strategic Insights for brands, agencies, and individuals navigating what comes next. Decoding The Epilogue Economy™.