Product Life Cycle

Human kind nowadays consistently seeking for a greater pleasure to satisfy their uplifted needs and demands. Thus, in order to assists them in achieving their desire state of satisfaction, companies unceasingly manufacture products with greater design and functions. It is easy to launch a product, but it is hard to retain it in the game. Every product has different life cycle depend on their functions, benefits and features perceived by the customers. Some product may not develop according to the sequences of the stages and none know the period that the product keep up in each stages. However it is beneficial to acknowledge the product’s position in its life cycle as it “provide valuable information of how to position your product in the market

211). According to Levitt (1965), people tend to react less elastically when the characteristic of the product is not common or habitually being expose. This is due to their risk aversion behaviour and customers hardly regard the latest invented product such as microwave as one of their requisite at the moment it was launched. Even though there are some product do not grow according to all the stages orderly, but the development of product in each stages will be describe here. Each product basically will go through four stages which are introduction, growth, maturity and decline of the product (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1). The first stage of product life cycle is introduction of product. The new product is being introduced after progress is finished at this stage. According to Dibb et al. (1997), introduction defined as the product’s new

Kolter and Armstrong (2007) claimed that maturity defined as a phase in which deal progress moderates or levels off. The one the example of maturity stage is DVD which buyers have the several characteristics such as most buyers are repeat ones. The market is more intense competition, some products become more standardized and aggressive promotional and pricing strategies to capture market or maintain the market share. The main goals of the organizations in this stage are to produce cash flow, retain market share, steal market share from competitors and attract more customer. Some weaker competitors are unable to continue with their product or they change their attentions to other products because of the vicious competition. This stage lasts longer and marketing managers need to conduct the problem of marketing the mature product compare to the previous stages. Organizations are available to take some action such as lower prices to capture more customers or market share, develop new product features to differentiate its product from competitors, lower its unit costs in order to maximize profits and use the money earned to manage research and development. Organizations can stand long lasting in this stage this type of changing because it help to extend the product’s life and with the right strategies will able to survive in the