Marketing

Komal Dharani 

MondayOct 12 at 10:28amManage Discussion EntryThe Business Product Life Cycle of a Vehicle in Marketing

M.T. Wroblewski- September 29, 2020

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/business-product-life-cycle-vehicle-marketing-21158.htmlLinks to an external site. 

The article goes over what the product life cycle is, and it also discusses what each step means, along with using an example of cars to further explain the product life cycle. The author had gone over in the article about how each step in the cycle is crucial to understanding how long the product, in this case, the car, can last in the market. The article had mentioned the 4 major steps of the product life cycle: introduction stage, growth stage, maturity stage, and decline stage. In each of these stages, the author had gone over what that specific stage means and an example of a vehicle that would be going through that stage currently along with how it affects the product. The author also explained, in his example of cars, that not all cars go into decline because of the fact that they are not wanted anymore, but sometimes due to certain circumstances, such as recalls, that can also have a product go into the decline stage. In the end, the author had also mentioned, just because a product has come to the decline stage, it doesn’t mean that the product is gone forever, there are still ways to bring it back. 

The product life cycle can help a company understand the stages a product or a service can go through once it is launched into the market. I chose this article because it closely relates to module two because in chapter 7, “Developing and Managing Offerings”, it had gone over the steps of the product life cycle and it gave a closer look at what each of the steps mean, and thats what this article was doing by relating cars to each of the steps in the product life cycle. In this article and in the module, it had mentioned how there were many companies that have multiple products and each of them go through the cycle in a different way, and the number along with the length of each stage can differ. Both the article and the module had given a description of what each of the steps were, the introduction stage is when the product is initially introduced or commercialized, and when the product tries differentiate itself from the rest of the market. Next is the growth stage in which the company has to show why their product is different from the other products in the market and try to persuade customers to choose their product. The third stage is the maturity stage, this is the main stage that most products are in. The maturity stage is when the product reaches its peak and there is a lot of competition in the market, so the company change around the 4 P’s (product, place, price, and promotion) that they had initially used to launch the product. The last stage is the decline stage is when profits start to go down, and it’s the time when the company must decide what they want to do with the product. The article and the module had both mentioned, that even though a product reaches to the decline stage it doesn’t mean that the product is gone forever, either it will be limited, or it can be revived in a different way. The product life cycle can allow the company to have a successful product because it can help the marketers understand if they need to invest more into advertising, reduce prices, change the way it looks, or even introduce the products into new markets, thus increasing the profits for the company. 

Question:

         1) Out of the 4 stages in the product life cycle, which of the steps do you think is the most important and why?

Minimum 250 words replying her post.