Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words - 2

Marketing - Essay Example The framework of the product life cycle assists in managing a product through the processes involved from birth to its demise. It is possible to look at the product life cycle in the management of a product, as providing the guidelines that a good parent would like to have in the bringing up of a baby and sending it out face the challenges of a competitive world and providing input to meet these challenges. However in recent times the validity of the relevance of the product life cycle to the modern marketers is facing a challenge. Groucutt, 2005, p. 198, suggests that the product life cycle may be taken as a concept that â€Å"is used to predict the strategic needs associated with products as they age within the market place. It allows for the development of strategies appropriate to the life cycle stage and anticipate the need for changes in strategy as progression from one stage to another occurs† (1). Even though the origins of the product life cycle concept are rooted in economic theory as shown by Schumpeter in 1934, the credit of the origin of the product life cycle is normally attributed to Dean in 1950. It was however Levitt, T., who popularized the product life cycle concept from the early to the mid-1960’s, from where it came to be an established framework to assist in the analysis of the product portfolio of an organization. (1). The theory behind the product life cycle was presented in a simple manner by Kotler in 1967 as a classical model in marketing management for the explanation of the life of a product in the market. The classical model of the product life cycle is an S – shaped curve, as seen in Figure -1 consisting of four stages namely the introduction phase, the growth phase, the maturity phase and the decline phase, showing the four stages of a product in a market. A saturation element was later added on to the maturity phase making the third phase consist of maturity and saturation. The classical model of the product life