Target non-consumption
When: Growth has stalled and every plan is a share fight against entrenched competitors. The market looks saturated when measured by current buyers of the category. Winning a point of share costs more each quarter.
The action: Look for people who hold the job but hire nothing, or hire a clumsy workaround, because the current solutions demand too much money, skill, access, or time. Design for the barrier that keeps them out rather than for the feature race among existing buyers. Good enough for the excluded beats better for the served.
Forces: Non-consumers are invisible in market sizing built from category sales, so the opportunity is systematically understated and hard to defend internally. Serving them usually means accepting worse performance on the metrics incumbents compete on, which the organisation's best customers and loudest salespeople will resist.
Signals: Within weeks, the team can name a specific excluded population and the barrier excluding them. Within a quarter, pipeline or usage includes first-time hirers of the category rather than switchers from competitors.
When not to: When apparent non-consumption is actually absence of the job, since no amount of accessibility creates a struggle that does not exist. When the barrier is structural and immovable, as with regulation or physics, rather than cost, skill, or access.
Instance: Christensen's transistor radio account, in which Sony served teenagers who could never have bought a tabletop radio, trading fidelity for portability and price, and grew the market from people the incumbents did not count.
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