Do you know about Product life Cycle?

We all know something or the other about the Product Life Cycle.It is a four stage cycle starting with the Introduction stage and then the Growth Stage followed by Maturity Stage and finally the decline stage,

At its core, the PLM process aims to establish and protect information defining the product. This information is then shared with stakeholders to ensure that the product remains in focus and a priority proactively to ensure it is managed in the best possible way. The three core principles therefore are:
Provision of secure and managed access of the product information
Maintenance of information integrity throughout the life of the product
Management of business processes that will use, share and build on this information

But have we ever thought that the product life cycle have significance apart from just a diagram .Yes,Product life Cycle has Strategic importance to the company.

The actual story begins after the product life cycle is constructed.

Many questions arises like:

Given a proposed new product or service, how and to what extent can the shape and duration of each stage be predicted?
Given an existing product, how can one determine what stage it is in?


Given all this knowledge, how can it be effectively used?

Each of the above question needs to be strategically dealt with.


INTRODUCTION STAGE

All depends upon the product’s complexity, its degree of newness, its fit into consumer needs, and the presence of competitive substitutes of one form or another.


Few products don't need to be marketed. They are so essential and needed in the market that the automatically make their space in the market. Eg. Medicines of some fatal disease.


Customer-oriented new product development is one of the primary conditions of sales and profit growth.


And being a new product we cannot even say whether they will have any life cycle or not.It may not have growth at all.Instead they may be falling continuously . The fact is, most new products don’t have any sort of classical life cycle curve at all and may completely go the negative way.



GROWTH STAGE


In this stage the product is accepted in the market and sales begins to boom and enters the growth stage. Potential competitors who got a hint of the market growth come into play and design similar products by bringing in either a photocopy of it or some product with some development or some change in the specifications and at this point product and brand differentiation begin to develop.


there is a fight for customer patronage which brings in new set of problems.. But the policies and tactics now adopted will be neither freely the sole choice of the originating producer, nor as experimental as they might have been during Stage I.


Some of these will begin to charge lower prices because of later advances in technology, production shortcuts, the need to take lower margins in order to get distribution, and the like.








MATURITY STAGE


In this stage all the requirements are fulfilled and the product is well accepted in the market .Only production needs to be fulfilled as per the population need.Not much investment is needed in this stage.However the price war is prominent in this stage and the companies fight for minute specifications differentiation and customers build in brand preferences in this stage.


Retailers and distributors will now frequently have been reduced largely to being merchandise-displayers and order-takers. In the case of branded products in particular, the originator must now, more than ever, communicate directly with the consumer.


DECLINE STAGE


When the product comes to the decline stage the industry gets transformed.As it is the decline stage the companies tries its best to make the product to survive and may take many aggressive decisions. Consumers get bored. The only cases where there is any relief from this boredom and gradual euthanasia are where styling and fashion play some constantly revivifying role.

All the products in the market goes through these stage.It just depends upon when and which product is in which stage.The companies try to keep its product in the growth or maturity stage which are cash generators.But if there are many products which are in different stages then a proper balance of investment,product extension,newer technology etc has to be maintained otherwise the product will reach the last stage very soon and those in the last stage will get removed from the market without any notice.

So, we should always keep a keen eye on,in which stage is our product/products are.