Every product in the consumer market goes through four product lifecycle stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Understanding these stages can help prevent your hard work from failing prematurely.
With sound product lifecycle management, you can identify where your products are losing momentum and ensure their success at every stage. Here’s an overview of the product lifecycle stages and some tips you can learn from.
What is a product life cycle?
A product life cycle describes the journey of a product from its creation to its final exit from the market. During this journey, turkey email list a product is introduced into a target market , experiences growth, reaches peak sales, and finally enters a decline phase.
The importance of this journey to the success of a product means that large companies sometimes have their own product lifecycle management teams.
How the product life cycle works
Every product goes through a life cycle. It is launched, funnel the way to retain existing customers experiences growth spurts and peak popularity, and eventually loses relevance as it becomes obsolete.
Smart companies carefully monitor what stage their products are in. When a product is newly launched, anhui mobile phone number list they ramp up marketing efforts to build excitement. Once the product reaches its peak, they can scale back efforts and focus on maintaining excitement. And when a product loses traction, they must decide whether to gracefully retire it or revive it with new features.
By analyzing these lifecycle patterns, entrepreneurs can make informed decisions about when to invest , restructure, or move on to the next big project.
The 4 phases of the product life cycle
Each phase of the product life cycle has specific characteristics that apply to different products. Let’s look at these phases in detail:
1. Introduction
The launch phase involves introducing a new product or service to the market and identifying a target market.
During this phase, you educate potential customers about your new offering to gain market share. Profit margins may be low or even negative, as you’re likely spending more on manufacturing and marketing than you’re earning from sales.
Some entrepreneurs also call this phase the development phase, but this can be misleading. The development phase takes place at the end of the product development cycle, in which a product is developed from idea to prototype to market readiness.
2. Growth
During the growth phase, both demand and competition increase. This phase often requires higher marketing investments and increased production, but in return brings with it growing profit margins and new sales channels .
3. Maturity
The maturity phase represents the maximum sales volume of a product.
Ideally, this is the most profitable phase, when sales exceed marketing, production and personnel expenses. In well-run companies, the maturity phase can last for years, even decades. Products that are needed regularly, such as tires or tissues, or comprehensive product concepts, such as a video game series with regular sequels, are particularly advantageous here.
Companies extend the maturity phase through continuous market analysis, customer feedback and new iterations of existing products.