Marketing A Bad Product Only Makes It Fail Faster

The fastest way to run out of money as a business in Nigeria is to market a product people will not come back to.

Nigerian customers have alternatives now, and better ones. When a new product disappoints, the app that already works is one tap away and costs nothing to open.

Take a Nigerian fintech that runs adverts and gets the downloads it wanted. Somebody who downloaded the app tries to send money and the transfer does not go through quickly. They open the app they were already using instead, and it works. The next person who downloads it that week meets the same delay and does the same thing. The business paid to bring both of them in and lost them before the first transaction finished.

The founder counts the downloads and sees that the customers did not stay. He decides the problem is that not enough people know about the product. So he increases the marketing budget, and the new people who arrive meet the same product that lost the last set.

The marketing money is the same money that pays rent, salaries, and the people building the product. Every Naira the business spends on adverts for a product people abandon is a Naira it could have spent improving the product.

The damage runs deeper than the money. Every person who tried the product and left knows something about the business now, and they tell people. In Nigeria, one warning from somebody trusted travels further than any advert, so the business is paying to build a reputation it will have to fight later.

The product comes before the marketing. Build it until the people using it come back on their own, then spend to bring more people to it. Before the next campaign, check one number. Count the customers who used the product last month, then count how many of them came back this month. Few coming back means the product is losing people faster than marketing can replace them, and no budget fixes that. Plenty coming back means the product is working and retaining its customers.

Nigeria's digital economy is built by businesses that keep the customers they win. A business marketing a product people walk away from is spending its survival money to put a failing product in front of more people, and every one of them leaves knowing something about the business that money cannot buy back.