Product Life Cycle

Product Lifecycle

We define a product as "anything that is capable of satisfying customer needs. This definition includes both physical products (e.g. cars, washing machines, DVD players) as well as services (e.g. insurance, banking, private health care).
Businesses should manage their products carefully over time to ensure that they deliver products that continue to meet customer wants. The process of managing groups of brands and product lines is called portfolio planning.
The stages through which individual products develop over time is called commonly known as the "Product Life Cycle".
The classic product life cycle has four stages namely Introduction; growth; maturity and decline stage.

Introduction Stage
At the Introduction (or development) Stage market size and growth is slight. It is possible that substantial research and development costs have been incurred in getting the product to this stage. In addition, marketing costs may be high in order to test the market, u...