Last week, I began this series by examining the sobering reality that most new products do not survive despite the optimism, investment, and planning that accompany their launch. While conventional wisdom suggests that products fail primarily because of poor planning, I argued that planning, though essential, is never sufficient.

Using the failure of New Coke as a corporate illustration, I highlighted how even the most rigorous research can overlook powerful emotional and environmental factors that shape consumer behaviour. In today’s volatile marketplace, competitive dynamics, policy shifts, and changing customer preferences mean that product success depends not only on sound planning but also on the ability to adapt continuously.

When Procter & Gamble launched its Agbara manufacturing plant for the expansion of its consumer goods into the Nigerian market in the early 2010s, the plans were built on economic assumptions that reflected the period's relative stability and growth trajectory.

Within a few years, the naira depreciated sharply, import costs escalated dramatically, and the premium consumer segments that the products were targeting had contracted significantly as purchasing power eroded. Products that had been priced correctly became unaffordable to large portions of their target audience. This wasn’t because of poor marketing, or weak distribution, but because the economic environment had shifted in ways that no plan had adequately stress tested.

The broader point is illustrated most starkly in the COVID-19 period. Products across categories from hospitality, travel, entertainment and foodservice were not failing because their brand managers had made poor decisions. They were failing because a global environmental event of unprecedented scale had eliminated the conditions in which those products could operate.

The environmental variable, in that case, was absolute. No amount of marketing investment could compensate for a world in which the product's consumption context had ceased to exist. The brands that survived were those with the organizational agility to pivot their offering, their distribution model, or their consumer proposition fast enough to remain relevant in a radically altered environment. One company that tried to find a way around the impact of the pandemic was Unilever.

They increased investment in digital channels and accelerated their e-commerce pivot across multiple African markets such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana. They redirected distribution investment away from channels that had been closed and towards digital and direct-to-consumer channels that remained accessible. They also used social media to drive purchases. It was not a perfect transition. But it was a responsive one and it shows a very agile organization.

The above examples show that the lack of agility of parent companies to adapt and respond to rapidly changing environmental conditions is sometimes responsible for products failure. If the planning stage cannot guarantee success and environmental factors can undermine even the most carefully designed product strategy, the practical conclusion for the business leader is agility.

Agility, in this context, is not a soft cultural aspiration. It is a hard competitive capability. It is the difference between a product that adapts and survives and a product that holds its original position too rigidly and is eventually consumed by the forces it refused to acknowledge.

Nokia's decline offers one of the most instructive illustrations of rigidity in the face of environmental change. Nokia's product planning in the mid-2000s was not reckless. The company's research and development capability was substantial, and its understanding of the mobile telecommunications market was deep. What Nokia lacked was the organizational agility to respond decisively when the environmental variable rendered its existing product architecture obsolete. The plan was good. The response to the change in the plan's underlying assumptions was fatally slow. The product portfolio collapsed as a result.

Compare that to Netflix, which launched as a DVD-by-mail service in 1998. The environmental variable of broadband internet penetration expanded through the mid-2000s, which led to the restructuring of its entire product and business model around streaming. Netflix did not resist the environmental change. It ran towards it. Today, Netflix has over 260 million subscribers globally. The DVD-by-mail business it started with is a footnote. The agility that enabled that transition was the most consequential competitive asset the organization possessed.

The Nigerian market equivalents of this lesson are numerous and instructive. The consumer goods brand that identified the shift toward smaller, more affordable pack sizes as purchasing power contracted in 2016 and acted on it within a single product cycle gained shelf space and consumer loyalty that took competitors years to recover. That movement where an organization can sense an environmental shift and respond before the market delivers its verdict is what separates the brands that endure from the ones that occupy the graveyard I described at the opening of this piece.

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