Product Life Cycle

The Product Life cycle is a fundamental concept for planning, strategy, product development, marketing, and manufacturing. Product Life Cycle refers here to a category of products like personal computers or workstations, not to the life cycle for an individual product like the Lenovo ThinkPad Individual products ascend and decline but more insight is gained from looking at the category as a whole. Vertical axis below is Sales Volume (in arbitrary units).

Product Life Cycle Chart

Market timing

Small

Market size

Large

There are five stages and correspondingly five customer types. Varying customer needs and a basis for competition are linked to each stage.

	Introduction	Early Growth	Late Growth	Maturity	Decline
Customer type	Innovators	Early adopters and opinion leaders	Early Majority	Late majority	Laggards
Customer need	Features	Product capability	Price/performance education and capability	Service/support price and assurance of quality	Cheapest solution
Basis for competition	First to market and real benefit	Capability	Price/performance education on how to use	Price and unique fit to their needs (segmentation)	Market share gains
Number of competitors	Few/none	Some but little contention due to expanding market	Several competing head to head	Many players Competition kills some off and consolidation begins	Poor profitability so only the largest survive
Profitability	Uncertain	High	Declining	Declining	Minimal
Risks	High	Lower	Higher	Higher	Highest

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