Some of the fastest-growing consumer markets are not built around new problems at all. They are built around old ones that people have always had but rarely spoken about openly. That is the argument Conor Deane, a marketing strategist focused on consumer behaviour, makes about where demand is quietly concentrating, and it rests on a simple observation about what the internet has changed.
For most of history, deeply personal concerns were kept private, discussed only with a doctor if at all. Someone experiencing hair loss, struggling with fertility, or navigating menopause had few places to turn for candid information and little sense of how many others shared the same experience. The problem existed, but the demand around it was invisible, scattered across individuals who mostly suffered in silence and assumed they were alone.
The internet, in Deane’s framing, changed this by giving private problems a public archive. Communities, forums, videos, and personal accounts now let people research sensitive concerns quietly, reading about others’ experiences without ever having to reveal their own. A person can spend weeks learning about a condition, its treatments, and its outcomes before speaking to anyone, and in doing so they discover that their private struggle is in fact widely shared.
That shift has a significant commercial consequence. Demand that was always present but hidden becomes visible and, crucially, reachable. When thousands of people are quietly researching the same personal problem, that collective interest becomes something businesses can see, understand, and serve. The market did not grow because more people developed the problem. It grew because the people who already had it became findable and could find solutions in turn.
Deane points to a range of deeply personal areas that fit this pattern, including hair loss, fertility, and the health changes associated with menopause. Each involves a concern that people have long felt private about, and each has seen growing open conversation online in recent years. As that conversation grows, the previously hidden demand surfaces, and industries form or expand around meeting it.
What makes these markets distinctive, in his view, is the emotional weight they carry. These are not casual purchases but decisions tied to identity, wellbeing, and confidence, which means the people researching them are highly motivated and deeply engaged. They read extensively, weigh their options carefully, and place enormous value on trust.
For businesses in these spaces, that combination of high emotion and careful research changes what effective communication looks like.
It also raises the stakes on how a business shows up. Because these are sensitive subjects, people approaching them are especially attentive to whether a company feels trustworthy, discreet, and genuinely understanding. A tone that works for selling ordinary products can fall flat, or even repel, when the subject is something a person feels vulnerable about. Deane argues that understanding this emotional context is what separates businesses that connect in these markets from those that do not.
The broader lesson he draws is that visibility, not novelty, is driving some of the most significant market growth of the coming years. The problems are old and human. What is new is that the internet has made the people who have them visible to one another and to the businesses that can help. For anyone trying to understand where demand is heading, Deane suggests looking not for brand-new problems but for long-standing private ones that are only now being discussed in the open.
That reframing matters because it changes how a business finds opportunity. Rather than inventing a need, the task becomes recognising a need that was always there and meeting the newly visible demand with genuine understanding. In Deane’s view, the companies that grasp this, and that treat these sensitive subjects with the care they require, are positioned to build some of the defining consumer businesses of the next decade around problems people once barely talked about.
