BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA, October 2026. Kathryn Porritt, founder of Iconic Empire and author of Iconic Influence, is arguing that experienced practitioners are misreading the current market as a downturn when the structure underneath it is changing permanently. Her position is that artificial intelligence is removing the middle of the expert services market rather than compressing it temporarily, and that practitioners who wait for conditions to return will wait indefinitely.
Porritt's Brisbane-based company works with experts, authors, speakers and chief executives on premium positioning and has done so for ten years across more than twenty-five industries.
The argument
Porritt's claim is that abundance at the low end and scarcity at the high end are happening simultaneously, and that the space between them is where most established practitioners currently earn.
"The middle is collapsing. And it isn't coming back. AI is commoditising everything average. The mass market is racing to the bottom on price," she writes in Iconic Influence. "At the bottom, AI scales infinitely. At the top, Icons command deals worth hundreds of thousands for a single conversation. Everything in between is being squeezed out of existence."
Her conclusion is that mastery becomes more valuable rather than less as capable output becomes cheap. "In a world of artificial everything, authentic human mastery becomes the ultimate luxury," she writes.
Why she says practitioners miss it
Porritt attributes the misreading to the way the change arrives, which is gradually and in the form of ordinary commercial pressure rather than as an announcement.
She argues that the experienced practitioner experiences it as clients negotiating harder, proposals taking longer to convert, and competitors with less depth winning work on price. Each of those reads as a bad quarter. Taken together, she says, they describe a market that has stopped paying a premium for competence because competence is no longer scarce.
Porritt is direct that the argument does not apply universally. Practitioners still building a first body of work, she says, are well served by the volume route, and the case she makes is aimed at people with decades of demonstrable depth who are being paid as though they were interchangeable.
What she says replaces it
Her prescription is positional rather than operational, and she says it runs in a fixed order.
Porritt's sequence is to reposition, then repackage, then reprice, and she argues that practitioners who attempt the third step alone find the market declines to carry the number because nothing upstream has changed about how they are understood.
She describes the destination as a category of one, which she defines as a position in which comparison becomes impossible rather than merely unfavourable. In Iconic Influence she frames the test as the point at which a buyer's question stops being "why you" and becomes "how do I get access to you."
Context
Porritt is the founder of Iconic Empire and the author of Iconic Influence, which sets out the descension model in full. She has previously authored a book with Penguin Viking and developed the Laws of Luxury and Hypertargeting processes. Details of the book are at https://iconicempire.com/iconic-influence-book/.
About Iconic Empire
Iconic Empire is a luxury and premium strategy company for expert brands, founded by Kathryn Porritt and based in Brisbane, Australia, serving clients globally. It works with experts, authors, speakers and chief executives to build premium positioning and commissioned offers through two rooms, the Iconic Boardroom and the Atelier, both by application. Kathryn Porritt is the founder and chief executive of Iconic Empire and an investor in elite personal brands. More information is available at https://iconicempire.com/.