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Most established consumer goods businesses understand why their growth has stalled. But that understanding alone hasn’t been enough to restart growth, because the biggest barriers are often organisational, not analytical.
Ask the leadership team of a business struggling for growth what has happened and you will usually get a clear answer. The category has matured. Private label has taken the value tier. A focused challenger is capturing occasions that once belonged to them.
The diagnosis is rarely the problem.
Over the past five years, many of the largest global consumer goods businesses have delivered low single-digit growth, often near zero in real terms. Bain’s Insurgent Brands research found that around 120 high-growth consumer brands captured nearly 40% of US category growth.
Established businesses can usually explain why challengers are taking share. The harder question is why knowing this hasn’t enabled them to respond.
What gets in the way of growth?
Understanding a growth problem and being able to act on it are two different things. Again and again, we see bold ideas weakened somewhere between the strategy and the market.
Three organisational barriers are particularly common.
First, category disruption can feel like self-sabotage. For an established brand, challenging the conventions of a category can mean questioning the things that made it successful. That creates a very real risk of destabilising existing revenue, so bold thinking is often softened before it reaches the market.
Second, large organisations are designed for alignment, not speed. Opportunities pass through corporate strategies, category plans, brand teams and innovation pipelines. By the time everyone has agreed, approved and allocated resources, the opportunity may have moved on. Challengers do not necessarily win because they have better insight. They often win because they act while larger competitors are still aligning.
Third, incentives favour short-term delivery. Talented people with strong ideas are measured against quarterly targets and often move roles before anything has time to compound. The organisation becomes very good at delivering the next quarter but struggles to build sustained momentum.
What the businesses still growing do differently
The strongest performers are not necessarily generating more ideas or producing more analysis. They are better at making choices and organising around them.
They invest time upfront in aligning around a small number of priorities: where they are going, where they will focus and what sits outside scope. Once that direction is genuinely shared, teams can move without constantly checking back in.
They also treat today’s performance and tomorrow’s category leadership as part of the same question. Short-term activity still matters, but not when it consistently weakens the relevance, distinctiveness and trust that create future demand.
LEGO offers a useful example. Following a period of over-diversification, the business returned its focus to the core and established clear priorities before pursuing new sources of growth. Its subsequent expansion among adult fans was grounded in a real and growing consumer need for screen-free, creative time. STRAT7 forecasts that by 2032, two in every five dollars spent in the hobby and toy category will be on kidult products.
The important lesson is not simply that LEGO found a promising new audience. It created the clarity and focus needed to act on the opportunity without losing sight of what made the brand successful.
From understanding to action
The fundamentals of growth strategy have not changed. Businesses still need to understand consumers, make clear choices and execute with discipline.
What has changed is the speed and complexity at which this needs to happen. Insight now has to connect across markets and functions, decisions have to weigh immediate performance against future demand, and plans have to adapt as conditions change.
AI can help by connecting evidence more quickly, identifying emerging opportunities and letting teams test and adapt plans as conditions shift. At STRAT7 that runs through Nucleus, our suite of proprietary AI agents. But it cannot make the most important choices for an organisation. Strategy still requires human judgement, accountability and the willingness to decide what not to do.
Ultimately, growth does not come from more ideas, more frameworks or more activity. It comes from building an organisation capable of acting on what it already knows.
Our new ebook, Cracking the growth code, explores what gets in the way, what the businesses still growing do differently and a practical three-step playbook for turning understanding into sustained growth.
About the author
- Helen Donald
- Managing Director, STRAT7 Advisory
Helen leads STRAT7’s growth and innovation consulting practice and has overseen major global innovation programmes across FMCG, health and consumer goods. She specialises in running high velocity, insight driven innovation processes that blend cultural understanding, commercial rigour and human centred thinking.
