Why products fail (Part VIII)

We have worked through several of the structural failure factors that bring products to an early end. This includes cultural and taste mismatch, cost of production exposure, and the pricing mistakes that either price the consumer out of the market or gift the competitive advantage to a rival. Each of these, in its own way, is a failure of external alignment: the failure to match the product’s realities to the realities of the market it is entering. Today’s failure factor is different in character. It is not primarily about the numbers, or the consumer’s purchasing power, or the cost base. It is about identity.

Specifically, it is about the failure to give a product a compelling, distinctive, and defensible identity of its own. It is the failure to answer the question that every consumer, consciously or not, asks about every product they encounter: what makes this different from everything else on this shelf, and why should that difference matter to me? When a product cannot answer that question, it does not just struggle. It disappears. This is because the consumer’s attention is finite, the shelf is crowded, and a product that is indistinguishable from its neighbour has no mechanism for creating preference.

That reason is what we call product uniqueness. And its absence is one of the most reliable predictors of product failure in the consumer goods market. Let me address something that I see in organisations across markets and categories. When a competitor’s product is performing well, the organisation that is losing market share to it faces a tempting option: copy it. Reformulate to match it. Adjust the packaging to resemble it. Price to undercut it. All this may work…