By Costanza De Salvia
All aspects of our lives used to be neatly separated. Office workers by day, family duties by evening, consumers on weekends.
In 2026, the lines between work and life have never been so faded: work calls on the school run, grocery orders mid-meeting, athleisure as workwear. Bringing your dog to work or seeing screaming kids on Teams calls is no longer noteworthy, it’s routine. Despite ongoing criticism of hybrid working (which is a completely different topic for another day), it is simply the reality we live in.
This blur wasn’t created overnight. And Covid didn’t invent it, but it certainly anchored it. The result is a new type of consumer behaviour. And it matters.
The collapse of the 9-to-5 consumer reveals how outdated many brand strategies still are. Campaigns built around ‘work mode’ or ‘home mode’ assume people can be neatly categorised. But they can’t. This kind of siloed thinking leads to siloed outputs, and audiences feel the disconnect immediately. Some brands are already adapting, not by saying more, but by behaving differently. Meeting people where they are.
Huel has become a go-to office-day food, offering a convenient, nutritionally complete alternative to the sad desk lunch. But more than that, it reflects a shift in how we live. Food is no longer a pause between roles. It fuels a day that moves fluidly from office to gym to home without clear boundaries.
Microsoft Teams introduced a virtual makeup feature in partnership with Maybelline, tapping into a very simple human truth: people want to feel confident and presentable on camera, even when working from a spare room or kitchen table. It is a reminder that even enterprise technology brands now have to think like lifestyle brands. Professional identity and personal reality sit in the same frame.
IKEA’s Life at Home reports position the brand as a participant in the way people actually live, not just a seller of furniture. By studying and sharing the messy realities of work, life, study and play colliding under one roof, IKEA earns relevance through insight and utility rather than promotional noise.
Pret A Manger’s subscription coffee model acknowledges shifts in how we operate our 9-5. Consumers are not always in the office, but they still crave ritual and consistency. By pricing around habit rather than location, Pret recognises that the commute may be flexible, but the need for small daily anchors is not.
Uniqlo’s positioning around ‘LifeWear’ extends naturally into work-from-home clothing designed for comfort without signalling disengagement on a midday Zoom call. It recognises that what we wear now must perform across contexts, just like we do. Style and practicality are no longer separate wardrobes.
What these examples show is not only clever comms, but an understanding that reputation is built through action. Products, services and experiences that flex with people’s lives do more for trust than any amount of brand messaging could ever do.
For marketers, blurred boundaries demand a shift in mindset. Ads that speak only to ‘the office worker’, ‘the parent’ or ‘the student’ miss the point. People are all of these things, often simultaneously, and expect brands to recognise that complexity.
Successful brands will understand not just where their product belongs, but how it moves across roles, spaces and states of mind.
Ultimately, we are all…people. Consumers are also colleagues, clients, neighbours and carers. Treating them as one-dimensional audiences is not just lazy, it’s ineffective.
In 2026, brands do not need to be everywhere. They need to earn their place by being genuinely useful in the moments that matter.