Product Life Cycle in Business - Essay Example

INTRODUCTION: It is a stage where the product is launched in the market. This is a very important stage as the product is new in the market and takes time to settle in the market. The sales are lower in the introduction stage and the expenses are very high because there is a lot of marketing expenses through advertising and promotion. Profits are zero or negative due to higher expenses to introduce a product to the target audience (Keegan & Moriarty, 1998).

GROWTH STAGE: It is a stage of Product Development in which the product starts selling and profits are higher as compared to the initial stage. Sales start climbing quickly and the expenses are lower because the product has been catered in the minds of the target audience and everyone is familiar with the product. It is the stage where the company doesn’t do any type of marketing and promotion expenses and tries to cover all the expenses that have been done in the Introduction stage (Kotler & Armstrong, 2001).

MATURITY STAGE: It is a PLC stage where the product sales slow and eventually become zero. It is a stage where the product is matured and the consumers want some new product to be catered to them. Companies apply certain strategies to their product to cater to the changing needs of consumers and try to save their products from going into the decline stage. There are three strategies that managers apply in the maturity stage: (Keegan & Moriarty, 1998).

- Modifying The Market: It is a strategy in which a company tries to modify its target Market by catering to different types of consumers according to their needs. The company can also reposition its product to appeal to different segments of the market (Keegan & Moriarty, 1998).

- Modifying The Product: It is a strategy in which the company tries to modify its product by changing its characteristics such as features, quality, packaging, or changing the style of a product. Doing this can attract consumers as they will see a different picture of that product. It can also improve product performance as well as reliability (Keegan & Moriarty, 1998).

- Modifying The Marketing Mix: It is a strategy in which a company changes one or more elements of the Marketing Mix such as price, the product packaging, the place of product, etc. It can also do new marketing techniques to appeal to its target audience (Keegan & Moriarty,1998).

Example: For Example, Pepsi Cola has changed its marketing campaign during the Football world cup by associating Pepsi with the Football players to attract their consumers (Perreault & McCarthy, 1996).

Another example for the secondary sector is Heinz Ketchup when it introduces a variety of ketchup for different consumers and they specially catered to children by introducing awesome colored Ketchup (Orange, Green, Blue, etc) to cater to different segments (Kotler & Armstrong, 2001).

DECLINE STAGE: It is a stage where the company sales decline and eventually the product is dip off in the market. In this stage, the company decides whether to maintain, harvest, or drop each of the declining products (Perreault & McCarthy, 1996).

CONCLUSION: Companies should try to be innovative and they should apply the strategies to save their product from going into the decline stage because no product lasts forever it has a certain maturity and upon that companies should try to modify their product so that it will appeal to the target audience.

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