Product life cycle | دورة حياة المنتج
by
Rawan
- April 29, 2017
When you launch a new product, you probably want the maxim time for your product to be alive. However, your product isn't going to sell forever! If you don't already know, products have a life cycle that we need to plan for in advance.
The above graph may seem awkward but I promise it's easy and totally a common sense theory that I wanted to introduce before jumping into May posts that will focus on products mainly.
During your product development period whether you chose to find a totally new idea or enhance an existed one, you probably didn't begin to sell .. so the sales are definitely zero. You will introduce your product to the world and that represent the Introduction stage where you slowly start to get sales and at this time you probably are trying to cover your costs so there are rarely any profits until you reach that breakdown point. Promoting and related costs goes under this stage. Your efforts and costs to grab distributors and customers are all costs and it make sense that you start your product with higher costs and no profits.
Now, if your product met the market needs and satisfied them you will move to the Growth stage where your sales start to grow quickly and you will notice that. Here comes the word of mouth where people start to buy more because they heard good reviews about the product.
When your product start to slow down in sales you probably are going through the Maturity stage. At this stage your product had acceptance of most potential buyers. So selling more doesn't make sense unless your product is a daily essential product such as bread or milk. Note that I'm not saying that milk and bread don't go under the life cycle theory. There are other reasons also that may lead to a Decline stage where your sales drop. In some cases products still generate sales in decline stage and survive for years and with some other cases sales drops to zero.
Now what I want you to know and make sure that you understand especially for readers who own small businesses. Do not wait until reaching the decline stage to start thinking of a new product. Plan a head and be ready in advance and put several plans in your hand.
I hope that you learned something new and as always Marketing isn't just about advertising. There are much more information that can help you start your business and move into the right path and grow.
Thank you for reading
See you in my next post =)