Product Life Cycle

The graph above shows how demand increases and decreases according to time. The timescale could be in hours or years, but demand will always follow this pattern.

Effective marketing can elongate any of the four stages that a product passes through. However, decisions must be made what to do with the product before it begins to decline. A spectacular example of using the Product Life Cycle to carry out planning was done by Sony with the Play Station - whenever demand reached Maturity, changes were made either to the product or to the market targeted in order to revitalise the product.