Length of Product Life Cycle

Product Life Cycle

No matter the product, every product goes through what is known as the product life cycle. The stage of the cycle that a product is in dictates how much of a focus the product gets and what will happen going forward in terms of that product being added to, updated or even entirely replaced. The author of this report will speak of a fictional company with a fictional product. The marketing and business strategies for each stage of the product life cycle will be assessed. The organization itself will be assessed as well. While the length, depth and breadth of the product life cycle will vary a bit from product to product and from company to company, every company needs to know where their products are in the cycle and react accordingly.

Analysis

The fictional company that will be covered in this report is in the consumer electronics part of industry and has several products. Each of the products are in a different stage of the product life cycle and thus how they are treated and planned for should vary (Kotler, 2013). This report shall cover the products one-by-one and each product will be labeled based on where in the product life cycle that it happens to be. The products will be compared to real products in the consumer electronics or other spheres so as to show real-world examples. This will help provide a proper overall perspective. The four stages in the product life cycle are introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Stated another way, the product is newly introduce, it gains acceptance, it keeps a presence and then starts to fade away in terms of sales and/or modernity (Quick MBA, 2015).

The consumer electronics company in this report has a television that is in the introduction stage. It is new to the market and is starting to gain a following in terms of sales and industry buzz. A good real-world example of this would be the 4k televisions that have curved screens rather than the flat and non-curved ones that are normally seen. Indeed, even 4k resolution televisions are fairly new to the market but the curved iterations of those models are even newer and fresher. This is a product that has just been released and hopefully will get the proper amount of sales at the price point that exists. This is a product that should be in the beginning stages of its applicability in the market but just how long the product life cycle lasts depends on the product. Some products can last a long time while others are literally updated one or twice a year. When it comes to LED/4k televisions, the product life cycle would be the latter. While the updates from year to year are usually fairly incremental, using the same model from year to year will not be accepted by the market because new features and trends are always coming and the company in question for this report has to know that. Even so, once a television is bought, its useful life is actually fairly long. However, it is also common for people to sell their sets or put them in another room of the house and buy a newer one (Fowler, 2015).

Another product that the fictional company in this report has is an MP3 player. Unlike the televisions just mentioned, they have a much longer useful life because the feature list and trends are much slower than televisions. This has been typified by Apple's iPod lineup. For example, the iPod Classic had a very long useful life. It came out in 2007 and it remained in basically the same form into September 2014. The major thing that varied from year to year was the size of the hard drive in the unit. People clamored and complained when the Classic was cancelled but the product was clearly beyond its useful life due to things like streaming music and newer models finally pushing it out. Even so, the amount of storage on the devices far eclipses anything else Apple puts out and the secondary market for the iPod Classics has mushroomed since the cancellation of the product. That being said, Apple needed to move on because five to ten years is an eternity in consumer electronics and the Classic was clearly in the decline stage of its life cycle (Lendino, 2014).

Finally, there is a product of the fictional company that is in between and that would be a 4k upscaling DVD player. This product is fairly new but will have a fairly good life cycle. This is true for a number of reasons. Of example, 4k players are fairly new. Second, 4k is very close to the upper end of what people can see with the naked eye and thus this would limit the marketability of devices that go beyond that. As such, the useful life cycle of a 4k player is going to be rather long. Unless or until there are Blu-Rays (or whatever the 4k discs would be called) that are 4k by default rather than being up-scaled, the current players will do the job. There is a chance those type of discs will never come given that streaming is taking off in a stratospheric way. However, the player in question has that as well so it is fairly future-proof in two different ways (Alexander, 2015). This would be a product with a fairly long time horizon when it comes to introduction, growth and maturity, much like the iPod Classic but without the need for as many incremental updates (Kokemuller, 2015)