There is a pattern that has become common in Nigerian business. A competitor posts a win — a new product, a revenue milestone, a campaign that appears to be working — and within days the business watching it has shifted direction. No internal review. No look at what the numbers are actually saying. Just a reaction to something seen on a screen, dressed up as a strategic decision.
The problem is not that Nigerian founders pay attention to what is happening in the market. Awareness of what competitors are doing is reasonable. The problem is when that awareness replaces internal data as the primary input for business decisions. A business that changes direction based on what another business posted has made a decision without the most important piece of information — what its own customers are doing, what its own revenue is saying, and where its own operation is actually winning or losing.
The businesses being watched and copied online are showing results. They are not showing what built those results. A post about a product launch does not show the months of customer conversations that shaped it. A revenue announcement does not show the pricing decisions, the failed campaigns, or the structural changes that made it possible. What gets posted is the outcome. The work that produced it stays invisible. A business copying the outcome without understanding the work is building on a foundation it cannot see.
This produces a specific kind of instability. A business with no clear direction of its own will follow every trend that surfaces, and arrive nowhere. It will be influenced by what a competitor announced last week, then by what a business in a different market posted this month, then by what an influencer said worked for them. At every point it is reacting to external signals and ignoring the internal ones. The data inside the business — the conversion numbers, the customer behaviour, the revenue patterns — is sitting there and nobody is reading it because something on social media felt more urgent.
The information a business needs to make good decisions already exists inside it. Which customers are buying and why. Which part of the offer is converting and which is not. Where money is coming in and where it is leaving. That information is specific, current, and directly relevant to the decisions that need to be made. Social media is general, curated, and built for an audience — not for a competitor trying to understand what actually worked.
The strategy a business needs is in its own numbers. Not on another business's page.
Founder & CEO of SAVA Global.
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