Every business leader obsesses over the same question: How do we grow? Most look at their competitors, trying to steal market share or add features to climb upmarket.
But what if the biggest opportunity for growth isn’t in your current market at all?
Greg and I dove deep into this concept on the Circuit Breaker podcast, exploring something called ‘non-consumption’.
I think it might just change how you think about business growth forever.
What is non-consumption?
Non-consumption isn’t about people who simply don’t buy your product. It’s much more specific than that.
The concept of non-consumption is where people want to make progress, but they can’t. It’s this notion of pent-up demand – someone has a struggling moment, but they haven’t quite figured out the tradeoffs or decisions they need to make.
Picture this: You’re at your kid’s soccer game and something amazing happens. You desperately want to capture that moment, but your professional camera is sitting at home. You know your phone camera isn’t great, but you take the picture anyway because it’s better than having no memory at all.
That’s non-consumption in action. You wanted to make progress (capture a great photo), but barriers prevented you from using the ideal solution (your professional camera wasn’t accessible).
So you found a workaround that was “better than nothing.”
The growth engine you’re missing out on
Here’s why this matters for your business: non-consumption is where explosive growth comes from.
If you think about growth from the supply side, I could be stealing share from somebody else. But when you really look at where markets have exploded, things like photography for example, the non-consumption is how many people want to take a picture but didn’t have a camera with them.
The camera industry spent decades making better and better cameras. But they missed the real opportunity: making cameras accessible when and where people needed them.
Enter the smartphone camera.
Was it as good as a professional camera? Not even close.
But it solved the accessibility problem, and the camera market dropped over 90% in less than a decade.
Non-consumption vs. blue sky innovation
Most companies approach innovation by asking, “What cool features can we add?”
This blue sky thinking typically leads you upmarket – more features, higher prices, better margins.
Non-consumption flips this on its head.
Instead of asking what you can add, you ask: “Who wants to make progress but can’t, and what’s in their way?”
Nine times out of ten, it’s about something being sometimes half as good, as opposed to being something twice as good. The goal isn’t perfection – it’s solving the struggle when and where people need it solved.
This is why startups often disrupt established players.
Big companies have “the church of finance” – they can’t justify lower-margin products that serve the underserved.
So they keep moving upmarket while scrappy newcomers serve the non-consumption market below them.
Learn more about how we help companies unravel this with our CPG design consulting.
Your next move
Understanding non-consumption starts with a simple shift in perspective. Instead of asking “How can I get more people to buy my product?” ask “How many people want to do what my product does, but can’t?”
Then dig deeper: What’s really stopping them? Is it price? Access? Knowledge? Timing? Anxiety about change?
Your homework is this: Think about something in your personal life where you want to make progress but can’t. What barriers are holding you back? Now apply that same lens to your business.
Where might your potential customers be stuck in non-consumption?
The biggest growth opportunities often hide in plain sight – in the struggles of people who want what you offer but can’t quite get there.
Find them, understand their barriers, and you might just discover your next breakthrough.
In the meantime, I suggest checking out this article on non-consumption from The Christensen Institute.