This is a story of not being able to produce an innovation because of a peculiar supply chain problem - not having enough "fish" in the sea, literally speaking.
One of the categories I had the privilege of working on was canned meat - meat and fish, both. In one of the markets I was based in, canned fish was a large category, with our brand being the overwhelming market leader.
CONTEXT
This category has an interesting dynamic - a majority of its sales came during the religious fasting month because it was a quick, easy, filling meal to make before commencing fasting, as early as 3am in the morning. This unique consumption behavior made the fasting period a major source of business and stress. The supply chain, production, distribution and marketing needed to ensure that sales were maximized in this period, planning for which obviously begun 6 months in advance to the first sale.
The key challenge was procuring fish. Fish supply was regulated by the government (yup - you heard that right) because it was in their interest to ensure that local fish suppliers were prioritized. Why - because it was also viable to get fish supply at reasonable prices from other Asian countries. So, every year, the supply for this 2-month period created a competitive slug fest; of all key brands vying for the government's grace in securing enough supply of local fish OR permissions to import a higher quota of imported fish.
The fasting seasons were always managed. The issue was in attempting to grow the market outside of the fasting season. Canned Fish is tasty, wholesome and hence a strong argument can be made to include it in many other meal occasions. As responsible businesspeople, marketers and product developers, we worked out some specific meal occasions through which to grow the consumption of this product category. The right flavors, pack sizes were developed; tasted blind with the right food pairings and all seemed to be in a good place for us to launch "taste" variants that would help us grow the market and our share.
But there simply were not enough fish in the sea :). As we were to later realize, we were meant to use only the local fish for this initiative. Given that a majority of the fish available in the sea were used during the fasting period, there wasn't enough time for the fish to breed, well more fish. And even the local fish breeding facilities were emptied out. The innovation would need to wait 6 months to have sufficient supply of fish, at which point the fasting period supply needed to be prioritized. And so the supply chain logistics of "fish breeding" made it unviable to grow the category outside of the season.
LEARNING
Sometimes it is important to start from feasibility. If we truly understand the dynamics of the unique supply chain in this category, we would have probably recognized that inspite of our best efforts, growth in this brand needed to simply maximize the fasting period through other levers like pricing, value creation with new flavors, strong promotions and marketing vs. going after the logical but unattainable opportunity of growing consumption outside the season.
But honestly, this is probably also a case of "retrospectively self evident".
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