Package Your Product to Stand a Tsunami

{ 📦 } – Why Nigerian Products Don’t Perform As Well As Their Foreign Counterparts

.Photo by Agenlaku Indonesia.

Has anyone ever wondered why Nigerian-made products don’t do well in the market compared to the imported ones? Well, let me open your eyes to the reality behind this: it comes down to packaging, because you can’t spend your money on a badly-packaged product when you can spend them on the clean and crisp ones.

The Markert Rush

The simple truth is that we often rush to launch our products into the market, skipping some fundamentals. Instead of good planning, we prefer to have our products out as soon as possible to cash in quickly and sacrifice its aesthetic qualities and feel of our products in the process.

The Outcome

In the end, the high expectations of the users are not satisfied, which in turn makes them choose foreign products instead. Many Nigerian apps have been created over the years but where are they now?

They are long gone in history, except for some innovative, young, and vibrant ones; those that did survive on the market have been the result of a thoughtful design process, and that’s why they have been able to compete with their foreign counterparts and boost our economy.

The Right Ingredients

What has been their recipe for success? Did I hear “it’s because they are lucky”? Yes, a certain amount of luck is undeniable, but it’s because they knew the value of the users’ experiences interacting with their products that they’ve thrived and stayed relevant. They followed simple rules for impressing and retaining their audience with UI/UX.

UI/UX is the big deal here. It’s just like when you want to build a house: you would have an architect design your mansion and sometimes the 3D design also comes in handy to have a clear picture of what you desire. That’s the same in UI/UX.

My Advice

My advice to our local developers and inventors is for them to follow these rules always. Yes, it will cost you money to get a good user experience designer, but it would cost you a place in the market if you skip this stage. Skipping this stage doesn’t only cost you a place in the market, but also time and money in the long run.

Conclusion

This is a wake-up call for Nigerian and African inventors to start taking packaging seriously as it goes a long way to help your products sell and establish themselves on the market. In Nigeria, there are many innovative minds with good ideas but a bad UX, and those ideas always fail and foreigners will usually take that idea, refine it to meet global standards, and before you know it the Nigerian products are forced out of business. Let’s take user experience more seriously so as to build a creative economy for Nigeria and Africa in general.


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Gilbert Umeh / UX/UI Designer @ Coralstone Capital

Gilbert Obinna Umeh, AKA BlaqMac, is a visual, UI and UX designer and currently based in Lagos, Nigeria.

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