Product Life-Cycle Assessment Tool
The Product Life-cycle (PLC) Assessment Tool is a tool that will help you quickly assess key characteristics of a product's life-cycle, which stage it is in, and produce marketing objectives and strategies for that stage. The four stages in a product's life-cycle after the product development stage are introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. They are defined as follows:
- Introduction: the period of introduction to the marketplace, characterized by slow sales growth, non existent profits, and heavy expenses.
- Growth: the period of rapid market acceptance, fast sales growth and increasing market share, and increasing profits.
- Maturity: the period when sales growth starts to slow because the product has achieve maximum market acceptance and there is increasing competition slowing or decreasing both profits and sales growth, forcing the company to increase marketing expenses to defend the product's position.
- Decline: the period when both sales and profits have begun their decline.
This tool helps you validate which stage of its life-cycle a product is in, based on the selections you make for each of the life-cycle characteristics: sales, costs, profits, customers, and competitors. Based on your selection from the drop down menu for each characteristic, the tool will identify the stage of the product's life-cycle, the marketing objectives for this stage, and possible product, pricing, distribution, advertising, and sales promotion strategies to pursue. (The tool is based on source data from Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control, 8th edition, written by Philip Kotler.)
