Unease: “I can’t see it.” So many of our clients are growing more slowly today because small brands have appeared in niches or on the boundaries of their categories and taken valuable consumers and share. The inability to “see” these growth opportunities isn’t because these companies are blind to the opportunity, but because they are blind to the significance of the opportunity. Virtually every company losing share to a niche brand today probably has a PowerPoint buried on a shared drive somewhere that describes its plan to attack that segment. And chances are, the company passed over the plan in favor of more “comfortable” alternatives. Those alternatives often fail to generate sustained growth — or any growth, for that matter — while the more challenging opportunities grow into scaled businesses that are then either copied or acquired.

On the retail side, emerging customers are often under-resourced in favor of established retailers that drive volume. Meanwhile, companies that get an early start in adapting their businesses to smaller players will enjoy genuine first-mover advantage as these small entities get bigger.

Our solution for overcoming this discomfort is the “W” in the WHOLE Demand framework, which is the wide-angle lens. For companies seeking to grow in an uncomfortable world, the virtue of a wide-angle lens is twofold:

• It allows you to pull back and see a wider definition of the category or consumer need than the conventional definition.
• It appropriately scales your area of focus. Sometimes things that look huge up close really aren’t. This is often the case with companies that focus on line extensions rather than niched innovation or an additional promotion at a retailer instead of a new channel. Because the field of vision of the teams making the decision is too close to the big thing, it makes the small thing next to it look bigger than it really is.

Physical discomfort: “I can’t reach it.” Even if an opportunity is identified, efforts to create or convert demand and engage or convert the consumer/shopper can fall flat. The advertising does not resonate, the retail program does not catch the eye, or the new techniques are ineffective or do not generate enough ROI. We can solve for this gap with the “H” in WHOLE, which stands for human-centric. The critical mindset here is to meet consumers/shoppers where they want to be, not where the brand/company would prefer them to be.

At a simple level, conversations about trying to “shift” shoppers to more lucrative classes of trade and away from retailers they obviously prefer is a failure of human understanding. Most brands cannot change a shopper’s retailer of choice. In consumer marketing, we can often trace this lack of “reach” back to wishing the consumer preferred old and more established platforms of advertising consumption. Human-centric approaches allow companies to speak to their target consumers in language native to them and on the platforms and in the outlets of their choosing.

Pain: “I can’t afford it.” One of the most common objections to growing in uncomfortable places is ROI — that spending a dollar here will not generate the same return as spending it in a more comfortable place. As I hope you are beginning to see, a number of these states of discomfort are interrelated. In this case, the frame of reference and the lack of the right “angle” lens is often a crippling problem afflicting the “O” in our WHOLE Demand framework, or optimization. The common optimization challenges to overcome are:

• Time frame: Very few people in a company are responsible for anything beyond achieving financial objectives for a specific reporting period. This means every piece of optimization is done against a time horizon that may or may not be strategically relevant.
• Granularity: Technology and data allow companies to measure down to very granular levels of activity, even if every activity taken at that level of granularity is not actually significant. Building a new capability often requires a series of activities, rather than one specific activity, yet the short-term unprofitability of each activity masks the ability to build something of real economic benefit when treated as a whole. Optimization has become laser-focused, which is a great thing if the problem you are trying to solve is densely massed and not moving. There’s a reason you don’t take a laser on a duck hunt. It’s not made for scattered or rapidly moving opportunity.

• Interconnectedness: Because approaching uncomfortable places often requires several separate, but related, activities, it may be more reminiscent of acupuncture than laser surgery.
• Uncertainty: Of all these challenges, this may be the single most important element. Very few people in a big company are assigned tasks where failure is an option. Big companies will always say they embrace failure, but the reality is that individuals who do not achieve their short-term objectives do not get paid, promoted, or retained.