You Do Not Know Who Has Your Products
The washing machine breaks on a Tuesday evening. Not catastrophically — the drum makes a noise it did not make last month, and the rinse cycle takes twice as long as it should. The owner opens the kitchen drawer where the manual used to be. It is not there. It went in a house move two years ago, or it was thrown out with the packaging. They cannot remember.
They try the manufacturer's website. There is a support page. It asks for a serial number. The serial number is on a sticker on the back of the machine, which is plumbed into a kitchen unit. They find it eventually — crouched on a tile floor with a phone torch, reading a faded label upside down.
They enter the serial number. The website asks them to log in. They do not have an account. They create one. They enter the serial number again. The system does not recognise it. They try the model number instead. The website returns a generic FAQ page for a product range that includes fourteen different models.
They call the support line. They wait eleven minutes. They explain the problem. The agent asks for the serial number, the purchase date, and the retailer name. They know one of those three things.
This person paid for the product. They use it every day. They are the customer.
The manufacturer has never spoken to them.
The Relationship That Never Started
This is not an edge case. It is the default experience of owning a physical product from almost any manufacturer in any category.
Research consistently shows that 70% of physical products are never registered by their owners. Not because the owners do not care — because the registration process demands effort that delivers no immediate value. Fill in a form. Post a card. Create an account on a website you will never visit again. Enter a serial number you had to hunt for on the product itself.
The result: for the majority of products in the field, the manufacturer has no idea who has them. No name. No location. No purchase date confirmed by the owner. No way to reach them for a recall. No way to offer them the right spare part. No way to welcome them back when they are ready to buy again.
The manufacturer designed this product. Sourced the materials. Tested it. Shipped it. Warranted it. And they have never once communicated with the person using it.
The Scale of the Invisibility
Consider a manufacturer shipping 40,000 units per year. At a 20% registration rate — which is generous for most categories — they have 8,000 known customers from that year's production. The other 32,000 are invisible. Over five years, that is 160,000 people who bought from them, used their products, and were never acknowledged.
Those 160,000 people are not lost because they defected to a competitor. They are lost because the manufacturer never created a way to know them. The relationship was not broken. It never existed.
The Buyer Does Not Think About This
Here is what makes this problem invisible from the inside: the buyer does not complain about the absence of a relationship. They do not contact the manufacturer to say "I wish you knew I owned your product." They simply live without it.
When the product works, they use it and think nothing of the company that made it. When it breaks, they Google the problem, watch a YouTube video, order a generic part from Amazon, or call the retailer. The manufacturer is bypassed entirely — not out of spite, but because the path of least resistance does not lead to them.
What the Buyer Actually Experiences
- A product arrives with a registration card that gets thrown away with the packaging
- A warranty that exists in theory but requires proof they cannot easily produce
- A support process that starts from scratch every time — "What model? What serial number? When did you buy it?"
- Spare parts that might fit their model, or might not — they cannot tell from the listing
- No communication from the manufacturer between purchase and the next time something goes wrong
This is not a bad experience in the way a rude phone call is a bad experience. It is the absence of experience. The manufacturer simply does not exist in the customer's life after the sale.
The Manufacturer Does Not See the Cost
The gap is equally invisible from the manufacturer's side. They see support tickets, not the support tickets that never happened because the customer gave up. They see registration numbers, not the registrations that were abandoned at step four of a seven-step form.
The costs are real but diffused across departments that do not talk to each other:
Support costs: Every inbound call starts from zero. The agent does not know which product the customer has, which revision, which warranty state. The average cost of an unregistered support call is estimated at £13.50 — roughly double the cost of a call where the customer and product are already known.
Recall exposure: When a safety recall is issued, the manufacturer can only directly contact registered owners. For the 70% who never registered, the recall depends on media coverage, retailer cooperation, and chance. The legal and reputational risk of an incomplete recall is substantial, and it stems directly from not knowing who has the product.
Lost parts revenue: The customer who needs a replacement filter, a new blade, or a compatible accessory searches Amazon or eBay. The manufacturer's own parts catalogue — better quality, correct fit, full warranty — is never found because the customer has no relationship with the manufacturer. An estimated 40-60% of aftermarket parts revenue flows to third parties for exactly this reason.
Lost repeat purchases: The customer who bought a product five years ago and loved it is ready to buy again. The manufacturer has no way to reach them. No email. No record. The customer searches the category from scratch and may choose differently this time — not because the product failed, but because the manufacturer was never present.
The Question Behind the Question
When manufacturers discuss customer retention, they typically mean the customers they already know — the ones who registered, who called support, who bought directly. The conversation is about keeping those customers.
But the prior question is more important: how many of your customers do you actually know?
For a manufacturer shipping products through retail and distribution, the honest answer is usually between 15% and 30%. The rest — the majority — are people who chose your brand, paid your price, and live with your product in their home or workplace every day. You have never spoken to them. You do not know their name.
What Would Change If You Did
This is not a theoretical question. Consider what becomes possible when a manufacturer knows 75% of their owners instead of 20%:
- Recall completion rates rise from partial to near-total. You can reach the people who have your products.
- Support calls cost less because the system already knows the customer, their product, and its history before the conversation starts.
- Parts revenue shifts from third parties back to the manufacturer, because the customer has a direct line to the correct part for their exact model and revision.
- Repeat purchase rates increase because the manufacturer can reach previous buyers at the right moment — not with a generic campaign, but with relevance: "Your model is three years old. Here is what owners typically need at this stage."
- Product intelligence improves because you know where your products are, how long they last, and what goes wrong — not from warranty claims alone, but from the full installed base.
The difference between knowing 20% and 75% of your customers is not incremental. It is structural. It changes what the business can do.
Why the Gap Persists
If the cost is this high and the opportunity this large, why does the gap persist?
Because the systems that run a manufacturing business are organised around the moment of sale. ERP tracks the order. Logistics tracks the shipment. Finance tracks the invoice. CRM tracks the retailer or distributor. Everything is optimised for getting the product out the door.
Nothing is optimised for what happens next.
Post-sale has historically been a reactive function — wait for the phone to ring, process the warranty claim, ship the replacement part. The idea that the manufacturer should proactively know every owner, maintain a living relationship with them, and use that relationship to drive revenue and reduce cost is structurally new. The tools to do it at scale, without requiring the customer to do the work, have not existed until recently.
The 12-click registration process that most manufacturers still use was designed in an era when the only way to connect a customer to a product was a paper card and a postal address. The process has moved online, but the logic has not changed. The customer still does all the work. And most of them still do not bother.
The Relationship Starts With Identity
The fix is not a better registration form. It is not a shorter survey or a more persuasive email reminder. The fix is giving the product itself an identity that connects it to the person who has it — automatically, at the moment of first use, without asking the customer to do anything they would not already do.
One scan of a code on the product. The product knows what it is. The customer's phone knows who they are. The manufacturer is notified. The relationship exists.
Not a registration. Not a form. A connection — initiated by the product, completed by a single action, maintained for the life of the product through every service event, every ownership transfer, every interaction that follows.
The customers are already out there. They already bought from you. They already chose your brand. The only thing missing is the moment you acknowledged them.
BrandedMark gives every physical product a digital identity that connects it to its owner from the first scan. Registration, warranty, support, spare parts, and ownership transfer — all from a single product identity that the customer never has to search for, type in, or remember. See how it works →