![]() ![]() While it has been demonstrated time after time that properly customer-oriented new product development is one of the primary conditions of sales and profit growth, what have been demonstrated even more conclusively are the ravaging costs and frequent fatalities associated with launching new products. An alleged superior substitute for the lost-wax process of sculpture casting would take lots longer. A proved cancer cure would require virtually no market development it would get immediate massive support. How long this takes depends on the product’s complexity, its degree of newness, its fit into consumer needs, and the presence of competitive substitutes of one form or another. Generally, demand has to be “created” during the product’s initial market development stage. Development Stage.īringing a new product to market is fraught with unknowns, uncertainties, and frequently unknowable risks. Given all this knowledge, how can it be effectively used?Ī brief further elaboration of each stage will be useful before dealing with these questions in detail.Given an existing product, how can one determine what stage it is in?.Given a proposed new product or service, how and to what extent can the shape and duration of each stage be predicted?.Three operating questions will quickly occur to the alert executive: Market Decline: The product begins to lose consumer appeal and sales drift downward, such as when buggy whips lost out with the advent of automobiles and when silk lost out to nylon. Market Maturity: Demand levels off and grows, for the most part, only at the replacement and new family-formation rate. It might also be called the “Takeoff Stage.” Market Growth: Demand begins to accelerate and the size of the total market expands rapidly. Market Development: This is when a new product is first brought to market, before there is a proved demand for it, and often before it has been fully proved out technically in all respects. These are shown in Exhibit I and occur in the following order: The life story of most successful products is a history of their passing through certain recognizable stages. Since the concept has been presented somewhat differently by different authors and for different audiences, it is useful to review it briefly here so that every reader has the same background for the discussion which follows later in this article. The object of this article is to suggest some ways of using the concept effectively and of turning the knowledge of its existence into a managerial instrument of competitive power. Now that so many people know and in some fashion understand the product life cycle, it seems time to put it to work. The concept of the product life cycle is today at about the stage that the Copernican view of the universe was 300 years ago: a lot of people knew about it, but hardly anybody seemed to use it in any effective or productive way. There is, furthermore, a persistent feeling that the life cycle concept adds luster and believability to the insistent claim in certain circles that marketing is close to being some sort of science. It has remained-as have so many fascinating theories in economics, physics, and sex-a remarkably durable but almost totally unemployed and seemingly unemployable piece of professional baggage whose presence in the rhetoric of professional discussions adds a much coveted but apparently unattainable legitimacy to the idea that marketing management is somehow a profession. Yet a recent survey I took of such executives found none who used the concept in any strategic way whatever, and pitifully few who used it in any kind of tactical way. Even a handful of uniquely cosmopolitan and up-to-date corporate presidents have familiarized themselves with this tantalizing concept. Most alert and thoughtful senior marketing executives are by now familiar with the concept of the product life cycle. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |