Course: SLF 125 Business Planning and Startup

Reading

The Product Life Cycle
The Product Life Cycle
Credits
Adapted from Marketing, Boundless Marketing Open Textbook, Chapter 9 Products
www.boundless.com/marketing
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

The product life cycle (PLC) is a way of examining the “stage” of a product in terms of its attractiveness to markets and its timeliness. PLC also describes the life of a product in the market with respect to sales potential and profitability.

It is important to look at a product or service and evaluate at what stage it occupies in the marketplace at a given time. If an entrepreneur finds that there are many competitors with established brands, with similar benefits, in the marketplace, then the timing may not be right for an introduction of a “me-too” product or service. This is not to say that product lives cannot be extended - there are many good examples of this - but rather, each product has a 'natural' life through which it is expected to pass.

The stages of the product life cycle are:

PLC management makes these three assumptions:

1. Products have a limited life and, thus, every product has a life cycle.
2. Product sales pass through distinct stages, each of which poses different challenges, problems and opportunities to its parent company.
3. Products will have different marketing, financing, manufacturing, purchasing and human resource requirements at the various stages of its life cycle.