By Oluwole Dada
In the first two instalments of this series, it was established that product failure is far more common than most organisations are prepared to admit, and that the sources of failure are more varied than a simple post-mortem on the marketing plan tends to reveal. The last article indicated that the lack of adaptability to environmental changes by organizations is one of the major factors responsible for product failure. Today, I will continue the substantive examination of other specific failure factors. Each one will be worked through in detail, with the real-world illustrations that make the lesson not just instructive but unforgettable.
Over the coming series, I will be examining what happens when organisations get the consumer insight wrong, when they price products incorrectly for the market they are entering, when they distribute inadequately, when they communicate without clarity, and when they launch at the wrong moment or against the wrong competitive context. The graveyard of failed products is full of decisions that seemed reasonable at the time of launch. My task, across this series, is to help readers understand what made them wrong and what can be done to ensure your products are not the next ones to join them.
I will start with one of the most preventable causes of product failure, and, paradoxically, one of the most frequently repeated mistakes in consumer goods marketing: the failure to account for cultural and taste differences between the market a product was designed for and the market into which it is being introduced. It is not a failure mode that catches only inexperienced organisations. Some of the largest consumer goods companies in the world, with sophisticated research capabilities and substantial market intelligence budgets, have launched products that collapsed because they did not adequately reckon with the cultural and sensory distance between their product’s origin and its intended destination.
The question is why so many organisations do not look hard enough. Let me state something plainly, because I think it is understood in principle far more often than it is applied in practice: marketing is cultural. What consumers want, what they trust, what they find appealing, what they find offensive, what tastes good to them, and what packaging communicates quality to their eye, are all culturally determined. They are shaped by history, by tradition, by geography, by language, by religion, by the food a person grew up eating, and by the social context in which consumption takes place. A product that ignores these determinants is set up for failure.
The Kellogg’s experience in India is one of the most studied illustrations of this failure in global marketing literature. When Kellogg’s entered the Indian market in 1994 with its flagship breakfast cereals, the company assumed that what had worked in Western markets: quick, convenient, nutritious breakfast products would find a receptive audience in India’s growing urban middle class. What it failed to adequately account for was that Indian breakfast culture was deeply rooted in warm, freshly prepared food. The idea of eating cold cereal with cold milk was not merely unfamiliar but culturally discordant.
Indian consumers who tried the product found that their warm milk, poured over the cereal in the way they were accustomed to consuming breakfast, turned the cereal soggy almost immediately. The product, which had been engineered for cold milk, performed poorly in the consumption context that Indian culture made inevitable. Kellogg’s spent the better part of a decade reformulating its approach, developing warmer, spicier variants, repositioning around Indian meal occasions, and building local manufacturing capability before it found a viable market position. The original product was not bad. It was just culturally displaced.
At the other end of the scale, McDonald’s is frequently cited as a global brand that got cultural adaptation right. When McDonald’s entered the Indian market, it removed beef and pork from its menu entirely. This was a non-negotiable cultural adaptation given the religious dietary restrictions of its target consumer base. It developed the McAloo Tikki burger using locally familiar ingredients, built a supply chain with Indian agricultural partners, and positioned the brand within the context of Indian family dining occasions. The result was one of McDonald’s most successful emerging market expansions. The brand did not ask India to adapt to McDonald’s. It adapted McDonald’s to India. That distinction is the entire lesson.
Every product that will succeed will have to put the cultural inclination of their prospective customers into consideration. Ignoring this always leads to disaster for the organization. This cultural factor will continue in the next series.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
