By Oluwole Dada
We have spent the last several instalments examining the failure factors that sit at the front end of a product’s commercial life. This includes the cultural mismatch, the cost of production trap, the wrong price, and the different distribution factors. Each of these fails the product before the consumer has had a proper chance to form a relationship with it.
Today, I would like to examine a failure mode that occurs after the consumer has chosen your product, paid for it, and invested their trust in it.
Spare parts unavailability and the inaccessibility of qualified service engineers have ended the commercial lives of products that had no business failing.
The consumer wanted the product. The consumer bought the product. However, the moment they needed the manufacturer when the machine broke down, when the engine required a part, when the equipment needed a certified technician, the manufacturer was nowhere to be found. The promise of ownership collapsed. And the product, along with the brand behind it, was condemned in the consumer’s mind.
This failure mode is most acute in categories involving machinery, automobiles, heavy equipment, and industrial products. A product’s commercial life doesn’t end at the point of purchase, as the organisation’s obligation to the consumer extends well beyond the transaction. This principle travels across categories and deserves the attention of every commercial leader, regardless of what they sell.
When a consumer purchases a vehicle, a generator, a piece of industrial equipment, or any product with mechanical complexity and a reasonable expectation of longevity, they aren’t simply buying the product as it exists on the day of purchase. They’re buying a promise about what ownership will feel like over the product’s lifetime.
Customers buy a product with the confidence that when something goes wrong, and something always eventually goes wrong, there’s a system in place to make it right. This is evident in Nigeria in the brands of cars; brand of white goods and other industrial products customers buy.
A typical example of this is the Toyota brand, either it is a brand new or fairly used one. The Nigerian consumer has developed confidence in this brand over the years because of the availability of spare parts and technicians who understand the product.
The Nigerian environment is littered with several brands that have gone out of the market because of the above reasons. There are vehicle brands available in the Nigerian market whose initial sales proposition is compelling. They have competitive pricing, modern features, and reasonable fuel economy.
However, within twelve to thirty-six months of purchase, the first significant mechanical issue arises. The search for a genuine spare part begins. In some cases, the authorised dealer network cannot supply the part from local stock. The part must be ordered. Lead times stretch to weeks. The consumer becomes stranded with an immobilised vehicle.
I had a personal experience similar to the above some years ago. The vehicle was brand new, but it was one of these new entrants into the Nigerian market. The spare part had to be ordered, and I had to drive that vehicle in that state for a while before the part arrived.
On the other hand, Toyota has built and maintained a different position in the Nigerian market over several decades. This has made the Hilux pickup and the Land Cruiser series reference vehicles for commercial operators, government agencies, and private owners across Nigeria.
Toyota didn’t build that position through advertising. It built it through decades of sustained investment in parts localisation, dealer network development, and the quiet proliferation of product knowledge through the mechanic ecosystem.
The dividend is a market position that competitors with superior product specifications have found consistently impossible to dislodge. On the consumer part, he knows that if something goes wrong with his Toyota, he can find a part and someone who knows how to fit it within a manageable time and at a manageable cost. That knowledge is worth more than any feature advantage a competitor might offer.
Caterpillar is another brand that has built one of the most admired after-sales networks in the capital goods industry. This has made them one of the most recognisable industrial assets on construction sites and mining operations globally. It has dealer network spanning 192 countries and is designed around a single operational commitment of genuine Caterpillar parts availability within 24 hours, anywhere in the world.
This isn’t just a customer service aspiration but an engineering and logistics achievement that took decades and billions of dollars of investment to build.
To avoid customers moving away from your products, ensure the availability of spare parts, accessibility to technicians and after sales service centres.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
