If you’ve ever walked into a shop and asked for your favourite drink only to hear, “We don’t have it,” chances are you blamed the manufacturer.
After all, if consumers love the product, shouldn’t distributors be fighting over it?
Oh well, welcome to one of the greatest mysteries in Nigerian FMCG.
Sometimes, distributors refuse to buy products that consumers genuinely love.
Strange? Yes.
Uncommon? Not at all.
Years ago, I imagined distribution worked like a romantic relationship. Consumers fall in love with a product. Distributors notice the love story and immediately rush to supply more.
Simple.
Then I entered the FMCG world and discovered that distribution is less like romance and more like a complicated Nigerian family meeting where everybody has an opinion and nobody wants to lose money.
You see, consumers see products.
Distributors see economics.
A consumer may love a particular beer, malt, soft drink, seasoning cube, or detergent because it tastes better, looks better, smells better, or simply reminds them of good times.
The distributor, however, is asking entirely different questions.
“How much profit will I make?”
“How quickly will it move?”
“Will retailers pay me on time?”
“Will this product occupy my warehouse for three months like an unwanted in-law?”
These questions matter.
A lot.
Imagine a product that consumers adore but delivers very little margin to distributors. The manufacturer is celebrating consumer acceptance while the distributor is staring at spreadsheets and wondering why everybody else seems happy except him.
Then there is the issue of incentives.
In Nigeria’s fiercely competitive marketplace, products don’t just compete on shelves. They compete in warehouses, delivery trucks, and distributor conversations.
A distributor may be offered better incentives, faster credit terms, promotional support, or volume rewards by a competing brand. Suddenly, the consumer’s favourite product is no longer the distributor’s favourite product.
The consumer is thinking about taste.
The distributor is thinking about survival.
Another fascinating reason is logistics.
Consumers rarely think about logistics until something is unavailable.
A product may be loved by consumers but difficult to transport, difficult to stack, prone to breakage, or complicated to manage. Every extra challenge adds cost.
And distributors dislike unnecessary costs the same way Lagos motorists dislike unexpected traffic.
Which is passionately.
Then comes one of my favourite realities: Empties.
In the returnable bottle business, a product may sell beautifully but become a headache if empty bottles don’t come back efficiently.
The consumer is enjoying the drink.
The distributor is wondering where all the bottles disappeared to.
Sometimes they’re in people’s homes.
Sometimes they’re being repurposed.
Sometimes they’re simply lost in the maze that is the Nigerian market.
Either way, the economics suffer.
Perhaps the biggest lesson is this: Demand alone does not guarantee distribution.
A product succeeds when everyone in the value chain wins.
Consumers must love it.
Retailers must stock it.
Distributors must profit from it.
And manufacturers must support it.
Remove any one of these pieces and the entire system starts wobbling.
So? When next you cannot find your favourite product on the shelf, remember that the problem may not be consumer demand at all.
Somewhere in Nigeria, a distributor may be looking at that same product and saying:
“Yes, consumers love it. But my calculator does not.”
And in FMCG, calculators often have the final say.
