Understanding Marketing and Development
Understanding Marketing and Development
Understanding Marketing and Development
Planned Obsolescence
The flip side of innovation, however, is a phenomenon known as "planned obsolescence."
Because life cycle management effectively demands that products be replaced by new ones,
companies build in the terminal stages of the life cycle artificially. For example, a widget
manufacturer may introduce a product for the new model year whose plugs are incompatible
with the previous year's widgets, or a software company may explicitly decide to stop
supporting a product just because it's old. This leads to waste, as consumers are forced to
upgrade, discarding products that in all other regards may have worked just fine.
Benefits and limitations of Product life
cycle
By Hitesh Bhasin December 2, 2016
Benefits Of The Product life cycle Model Managers are always in need of predictive tools to
help them navigate a seemingly chaotic market, and the Product life cycle model gives managers
the ability to forecast product directions on a macro level, and plan for timely execution of
relevant competitive moves. Coupled with actual sales data, the Product life cycle model can also
be used as an explanatory tool in facilitating an understanding of past and future sales
progression.
The Product life cycle model aids in making sense of past events as part of any extrapolatory and
interpretive approach to building strategy. Once a product strategy or product line strategy has
been formulated, the Product life cycle model can be used as part of an ongoing strategy
validation process since it reflects on market trends, customer issues and technological
advancement. Companies always anticipate the emergence of new competitors and therefore,
must prepare in advance to battle the competition and strengthen their products position.
The PLC model is advantages in planning long-term offensive marketing strategies, particularly
when markets and economies are stable. Nevertheless, most products die and once products are
dead they hold no substantial revenue potential and are a toll on a companys resources. By
combining the elements of time, sales volume and notion of evolutionary stages, the Product life
cycle model helps determine when reasonable to eliminate dead products.
Limitations Of The Product life cycle Model It is difficult to foresee transitions in Product
life cycle stages since the key indicator are sales, which are always calculated with some lag.
Therefore, the realization a stage transition has occurred is nearly always in retrospect. In
addition, fluctuations in sales will produce erroneous conclusions, so slowing sales do not
necessary mean the product has reached the Decline phase and the resulting conclusion to retire
the product and divert resources is wrong.
Products, companies and markets are different, so not all products or services go through every
stage of the Product life cycle. There have been many cases where products have gone straight
from introduction to decline, usually because of bad marketing, misconceived features, lack of
value to the consumer or simply a lack of need for such a product.
However, even if products would go through every stage of the Product life cycle, not all
products/services spend the same length of time at each stage. This adds another level of
complexity in determining which Product life cycle stage the product is in and consequently,
which strategy to apply.
REFERENCE THIS
Introduction:
Marketing is a process which is based on communication and whereby individuals obtain what they need
through others creating or exchanging products and value with them. For companies to sell their products,
marketing is the most important factor to reach out to customers as Kotler & Armstrong, (2008) define. This
essay presents the product life cycle and focuses on its strength and weakness points.
Weakness of PLC.
Even with using the PLC diagrams, there is no way to predict the length of each phase that the product is
going to stagnate at. Furthermore, neither can it be used in forecasting accurately. These are the main
failures and weakness points of the PLC model (Know this, 2004 & mind tools, 2009).
Evaluation
Simply, an analogy to the PLC is the life of a being. The living being starts developing from the moment it is
born. Next step comes the stage of growth when it becomes a youth through towards maturity when it
becomes adult. Finally, it dies which is similar to the withdrawal of a product from the market but before that
it gets old; its sales show a decline. Having stated that, it shall be clear as to why be it that not all the
products come through the lifecycle phases in the same pattern!
As figure number 1 shows: The above plot shows the general typical life cycle that virtually every product
should go through if no obstacles were on the way but the pattern differs. As expected in the research and
development stage, the sales are zero since the product is not introduced to the market yet. Then, once it
is introduced, the sales will begin and this is shown on the graph as sudden rise forming a curvature
upwards shape. The rise continues until the stage of decline is reached and this is represented as a
downward curvature shape indicated that the sales have fallen.
In the development stage, small firms and big firms are not equal in terms of the precautions and the
initiatives they take and so for the new and old companies. New Companies are more vulnerable to suffer
from the consequences that the old ones and the reason for that is that the old have far more experience
than the new firms. Big companies have a strong finical base which allows them to fight in the market with
no fear.
As have been stated above, in the introduction phase section, that the awareness and sales
encouragement and more importantly the advertising is done actively at this stage. Doing the same kind of
comparison between small and big firms, the latter have a variety of products in its production line which, in
turn, adds a huge space for marketing activities such as, making ads about two or more products of their
own, in other words, promotional effect dominates more than in the small firms.
After passing the first two stages and the product reaches the growth stage safely, competitors reaction
did not exist, both of the small and big firms are equal.
However, if their reaction was catalyzed and competition was prevalent, they are not similar in the sense
that the potential of each differs. As result, the course of action of each will be different and each will reap
the harvest of competitors' reaction differently, in accordance to their potential.
Some products, although reach their decline stage, do not believe in what is called the decline phase and
getting old. As a result, they overcome this problem and regain their position and popularity after taking the
necessary strategies. This normally occurs when a little innovative tweak, be it a promotion, or an
additional feature that is applied to the existing product.
To reinforce the point of weakness mentioned earlier about the model that it fails to predict the exact time a
product will spend at a certain stage, a set of examples are presented and exposed to evaluation. One of
the examples is clothing. Cloths cannot be handled, to some extent, somehow to extend its life cycle as it is
down to the fashion of the year. So, normally this kind of product lasts for no longer than a couple of
months up to a year. (Know this, 2004)
On the contrary, products like cars or bells live longer and can be trusted for at least five years or even
more than that. These products' life cycle, unlike the cloths, can be extended
Products in between are prone to societies. A typical example is mobile phones. In some communities,
people consider the mobile phone as fashionable item that is changeable each time a better, newer one is
launched to the market. Others are fulfilled with it as being merely a mean of communication and that it is
hard to do its job.
Internal and external factors are equally as important. It has been seen in the example above how
exceeded legal limit of bromate of a bottle of water has led Coca-Cola's product towards death directly from
the introduction phase; internal phase. Similarly with Nutri-Grain, Realistic snackers interest in healthy food,
and it being the only healthy product have forced Kellog's to revitalize Nutri-Grain, external factor.
Conclusion:
PLC is a brief description or representation of a life cycle of a product in terms of graph. It is one of the
powerful analysis tools in business generally and in marketing specifically. PLC mode can imply the
possible strategies to be pursued in order to extend the life cycle of the product having known the stage at
which the product is at standing.
It can be concluded that in order to overcome this external factor, a marketer needs to play with the
elements of decision-making process.
By the death of the product, a complete description of the whole life of the product will be provided by the
PLC model that can be used later on in the research and development stage of a new product.
Unreliability
On the downside, a product life cycle is not always a reliable indicator of the true lifespan of a product and adhering
to the concept may lead to mistakes. For example, a dip in sales during the growth stage may only be a temporary lull
instead of a sign the product is reaching maturity. If the dip causes a company to reduce its promotional efforts too
quickly, it may limit the product's growth and prevent it from becoming a true success.
False Assumptions
Another possible drawback is that unlike the inevitable life cycle of a human being, the occurrence of a product life
cycle is not a certainty. Changes in market conditions or consumer tastes or the introduction of a similar product by
the competition can render planning based on a predicted product life cycle totally useless. There is no guarantee that
a product will even make it out of the introduction stage, or it may move through the cycle more rapidly or slowly
than anticipated.