The Next Billion

Why growth in consumer healthcare will be won by reimagining categories, not competing harder within them.

August 2026
by Maximilian Maurer

A parent and a small child reading together on a living room rug while another parent works from the sofa.

Every quarterly earnings call in consumer health opens with the same word: share. It shapes board discussions, investor narratives and marketing budgets. We think it is the wrong place to look for growth.

Over the past months we have worked alongside leading consumer healthcare companies in Europe and the US on a different question: not how to win a bigger slice of the people already buying, but who the category is failing to reach at all, and why they stay out.

What came out of that work is not a hypothesis. It is built on qualitative and quantitative consumer research carried out inside live client projects, and tested against the categories those clients actually compete in. This paper sets out what we learned and what it means for anyone trying to grow a consumer health category.

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In this paper

The consumer cohorts the category keeps under-serving, and why the usual language does not reach them.
The barriers that decide whether someone enters a health category at all, before price or product come into it.
What challenger brands did differently, and what that implies for incumbents.
How to create new consumers instead of redividing the ones you already have.