Marketing Product Life Cycle: Birthing and Growing Your Product
Your product’s marketing product life cycle is similar to a child’s life. Getting either off to a good begin makes a difference in how far they go in life and how much reward you reap.
For a small business owner, extra rewards mean more sales, greater profits, and a more successful business.
Getting off to a good begin in the marketing product life cycle requires marketing to breathe life into your product.
Introduction or Birth Stage of Marketing Product Life Cycle
A new-born baby demands almost all of your time and much of your money. It needs your constant attention. A new product differs tiny. It needs constant marketing.
Just as you send birth announcements to let all your friends and family know about your new baby, you should send marketing messages to let everyone in your target market know about your new product.
Even though demand is often low at this stage of your marketing product life cycle, you need to recover some of your product development expenses. Thus, many business owners charge more at this stage. This limits demand even further.
You may want to delay recovery of development expenses in order to attract more customers. If you offer incentives to purchase and promotions to attract new customers while keeping prices low, you can attract more potential customers from your target market.
Write and time messages announcing your new product. Direct those messages to your target market and concentrate those messages on the greatest benefits that your product offers target market members. You’ll reap far more profits that way than if you send marketing messages to everyone.
After you have christened and promoted your baby product to the world, it’s time to nurture your product’s growth through childhood with a marketing growth spurt.
Growth (Child) Stage of Marketing Product Life Cycle
As your marketing grows, you must continue to win more customers, retailers, and distribution avenues.
Continued marketing growth is required at this stage. Just as you support a child with lots of attention, love and care during childhood, you must support your product with enhanced marketing now.
Marketing during this stage should grow and expand to saturate your target market with knowledge of your product and a desire for its benefits.
To assure consistent and continued growth through this second stage of the marketing product life cycle, use market segmentation. It helps your product grow by:
expanding your customer base to include new target markets, determining which retailers provide the ideal match with your product, and researching which geographic locations offer the most new growth opportunities and which distributors best reach those locations.
Conclusion
Even though this article and many marketing experts present the marketing product life cycle as though it is definite and concrete, in reality products move through the marketing product life cycle differently, just as kids mature differently.
The difference between a child and your product is that you want your product to spend as much time as possible in the growth stage of the marketing product life cycle. The longer it is in this and following stages, the longer its life becomes.
You can use market segmentation to find ways to extend the life of your product.
Information revealed through market segmentation, improves your marketing through each stage of the marketing product life cycle.
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