When you walk down the aisle of any major supermarket in Lagos, you are walking through a commercial battlefield. The products you see on those shelves are the survivors who have won enough consumer confidence, enough shelf space, and enough marketing investment to remain visible.

What has happened over the years are products that came before them, they generated real boardroom excitement, absorbed significant capital, and then quietly disappeared. They were pulled from the market after the organization had exhausted its willingness to fund failure.

That invisible graveyard of failed products is larger than most business leaders appreciate. However, the casualty rate is sobering enough to demand serious attention from everyone including CEOs, commercial directors, brand managers and even managers on the factory floor. Everyone in the organization has a part to play to bring a new product to market or keep an existing one alive. Research published by the Harvard Business Review puts the failure rate of new consumer products at between 75% and 80%. Let that number settle for a moment.

These failed products leave behind them the wreckage of spent budgets, disappointed investors, and organizations that must now explain to their boards why the product they championed twelve months ago is no longer on the shelf. I am embarking on this series as my attempt to examine the cause of these failures, go behind the headline number and look at the specific, identifiable reasons why products fail. Lessons will be drawn from local and global examples. The focus of this series will be primarily on fast moving consumer goods or what some practitioners call consumer packaged goods.

Examples of products that have been discontinued in Nigeria include Okin biscuits, Omo detergent, Dr. Pepper, Time Cola, Snaps, etc. Some will have their names mentioned in the series, others will have their identities protected for reasons of commercial sensitivity, though the lessons they carry are no less real. There is a school of thought in marketing circles that argues products fail from the planning stage.

It states that the seeds of a product's eventual collapse are sown in the earliest decisions about its design, its positioning, its pricing, and its target consumer. There is truth in this argument. I admit that poor planning does kill products. However, I would like to challenge the absolute version of this claim, because I think it leads organizations to a false conclusion: that if the planning is rigorous enough, failure can be prevented.

Planning of a product is not enough to save a product from failing. Not in any market, and certainly not in the African consumer goods market, where environmental volatility is not an occasional disruption but a persistent operating condition. An example of this is the story of New Coke: one of the most extensively planned, researched, and tested product launches in the history of the consumer goods industry. In 1985, Coca-Cola spent over two years and several million dollars on consumer research before reformulating its flagship product and introducing New Coke to the American market.

Blind taste tests involving nearly 200,000 consumers showed a clear preference for the new formula. Every measurable planning indicator pointed toward success. Within 79 days of launch, the product had generated such an intense consumer backlash that Coca-Cola was forced to reverse the decision and restore the original formula which was rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic. Despite the meticulous planning, the failure was still catastrophic. What the research had not captured was the emotional relationship consumers had with the original product. This was an intangible that no taste test could measure.

The lesson here is not that planning is irrelevant. It is that planning is necessary but insufficient. The market is not a controlled environment. It is a living system shaped by human behaviour, competitive dynamics, economic forces, and cultural variables that resist even the most sophisticated modelling. The most that good planning can do is reduce the probability of failure and improve the organization’s readiness to respond when the unexpected occurs. It cannot eliminate the unexpected.

One critical factor that sits entirely outside the control of everyone is the environmental factor. I consider it one of the most underappreciated dimensions of product failure. The irony here is that the environment is quite unstable and volatile. Human behaviour change, government policies change and several environmental factors that are beyond the organizations change. You analyze the market, you segment the consumer base, you define your positioning, you plan your distribution, you set your price, and you launch. The implicit assumption is that the environment will hold reasonably still while you execute. That assumption is not merely imperfect. It is dangerous.

Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.