Bad Launches Kill Good Products

By Sajib Sanyal-

A few years into my career in sales and marketing across FMCG and tobacco companies, I noticed a pattern that had nothing to do with product quality.

The products that failed in-market weren't usually bad products. They were good products launched by teams who had spent 95% of their energy building the thing — and 5% figuring out how to actually sell it.

That ratio should be reversed. Here's why.

Building is not the hard part anymore

Today, building something — a product, an app, a formulation, a service — is faster and cheaper than it has ever been. What separates the brands that win from the brands that quietly disappear is not what they built. It's what they knew before they built it.

Who is actually going to buy this, and why would they switch from what they use today?

Which channel will they discover it in, and is that channel ready to stock or support it?

What will the competitor do the week after launch, and do we have an answer ready?

What does success look like in month one, month three, and month twelve — and who is accountable for each?

If a launch team cannot answer these before the first unit ships, they haven't built a go-to-market plan. They've built a hope.

A pattern I've seen repeat itself

In FMCG especially, I've watched capable teams pour their best thinking into formulation, packaging, and production timelines — and then treat distribution, pricing logic, and retailer buy-in as an afterthought to be solved "closer to launch."

By the time launch week arrives, there's no room left to course-correct. The trade hasn't been briefed properly. The sales force is pushing a product they don't fully understand. The consumer promise on the pack doesn't match what's being said in the market. Momentum gets mistaken for progress, right up until the sales numbers arrive.

None of this is a failure of effort. It's a failure of sequencing.

What a real GTM roadmap actually protects against

A go-to-market roadmap isn't a document you write to satisfy a template. It's the thing that forces five uncomfortable conversations before money is spent instead of after:

Market reality check — is there proof of demand, or only enthusiasm inside the building?

Channel readiness — does distribution, retail, or the sales team actually have the capacity and incentive to push this?

Competitive response — what happens when a rival reacts, and is our pricing or positioning built to survive that?

Internal alignment — do sales, marketing, and supply chain agree on the same numbers and the same story?

Kill criteria — what result, by what date, tells us to pivot rather than push harder?

Most launch failures I've seen trace back to skipping one of these five, not to a weak product.

The uncomfortable truth for ambitious teams

Nobody gets excited about a GTM roadmap the way they get excited about a product demo. It doesn't feel like progress. It feels like paperwork standing between you and the exciting part.

But history — and plenty of market data — keeps teaching the same lesson: momentum without a plan doesn't create success, it just creates expensive failure faster.

The teams that win aren't the ones who moved first. They're the ones who knew exactly where they were moving to, and had already thought through what could go wrong on the way there.