Describe the life cycle of a product and explain profitability and sales volume at each stage

Product Life Cycle: Overview

The product life cycle (PLC) describes a product's life in the market with respect to business/commercial costs and sales measures. It proceeds through multiple phases, involves many professional disciplines and requires many skills, tools and processes.

This is not to say that product lives cannot be extended – there are many good examples of this – but rather, each product has a ‘natural’ life through which it is expected to pass.

The stages of the product life cycle are:

Introduction

Growth

Maturity

Decline

PLC management makes these three assumptions:

Products have a limited life and, thus, every product has a life cycle.

Product sales pass through distinct stages, each of which poses different challenges, problems and opportunities to its parent company.

Products will have different marketing, financing, manufacturing, purchasing and human resource requirements at the various stages of its life cycle.

The product life cycle begins with the introduction stage (see ). Just because a product successfully completes the launch stage and starts its life cycle, the company cannot take its success for granted.

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Product Development and Product Life Cycle: The Product Life Cycle follows directly after new product development.

A company must succeed at both developing new products and managing them in the face of changing tastes, technologies and competition. A good product manager should find new products to replace those that are in the declining stage of their life cycles; learning how to manage products optimally as they move from one stage to the next.

Product Lifecycle Management Stage 1: Market Introduction

This stage is characterized by a low growth rate of sales as the product is newly launched and consumers may not know much about it. Traditionally, a company usually incurs losses rather than profits during this phase. Especially if the product is new on the market, users may not be aware of its true potential, necessitating widespread information and advertising campaigns through various media.

However, this stage also offers its share of opportunities. For example, there may be less competition. In some instances, a monopoly may be created if the product proves very effective and is in great demand.

Characteristics of the introduction stage are:

High costs due to initial marketing, advertising, distribution and so on.

Sales volumes are low, increasing slowly

There may be little to no competition

Demand must be created through promotion and awareness campaigns

Customers must be prompted to try the product.

Little or no profit is made owing to high costs and low sales volumes

Growth

During the growth stage, the public becomes more aware of the product; as sales and revenues start to increase, profits begin to accrue.

Explanation: