A brand manager walks into a post-mortem meeting, slides stacked, numbers ready, and still cannot quite explain what went wrong. It happens more often than anyone in the industry likes to admit, and it tends to follow a familiar pattern.
Competitive markets have a way of humbling even the most prepared teams. The product looked good on paper, the research checked out, and yet something between conception and shelf broke down. Seasoned brand managers tend to recognise the moment the second it arrives, even if they struggle to name it in real time.
What makes this pattern worth paying attention to is how consistently it repeats across categories, regions, and company sizes. It is not random. The conditions that cause products to fail tend to show up in the same order, wearing slightly different clothes each time.
That recognition, that gut-drop feeling in the room, is actually the starting point for something useful. The question is whether teams are willing to sit with it long enough to learn what it is really telling them.
Originally published by BusinessDay.