For years, marketing has debated two views of growth. One says brands grow through penetration — reach more buyers, increase availability, build salience.
The other says brands grow through differentiation — create meaning, shape demand, build willingness to pay. That debate misses the real distinction.
There are two fundamentally different ways to grow:
- Market Taking. Compete within an existing market. Optimize reach. Increase penetration. Win share from competitors. This is where understanding consumer panel data, shopper behavior, lots of work of many US and European scholars have contributed. An example from Australia is Byron Sharp’s work and EBI, it is very powerful. It explains how brands grow once a market is stable and demand is well understood. Economists call it: equilibrium.
- Market Making. Shape the market itself. Redefine demand. Create new use cases. Shift willingness to pay. This is where the dominant marketing and brand model operates. Not just competing within the system, but changing what the system is.
For decades, many markets behaved in ways that made market taking effective. But that is changing. AI is not just improving marketing execution.
It is reshaping how customers discover, decide, and act. As Sangeet Paul Choudary argues in his new book: Reshuffle, AI changes the coordination logic of the economy. It reorganizes how value is created and captured.
Rita McGrath has made a similar point from a strategy perspective: advantage is no longer stable. It is transient and continuously reconfigured. In that world, markets don’t just grow. They move. They expand in new directions. They fragment. They recombine.
Which means growth increasingly comes from market making, not just market taking.
Most companies are still optimizing for share. Fewer are shaping where demand is going. That is the gap.
Are you competing for share in a market — or creating the market itself?
One generation illustrates this shift more than any other. Gen Z does not just choose between existing brands; they redefine what makes a brand worth choosing. For a closer look at how to build strategy around this cohort, explore our guide to Gen Z brand strategy.
To discuss how these insights apply to your organization, get in touch with our team.