Reprinted Articles

Extending your product through each stage of its marketing product life cycle increases your sales and profits.

For a small business owner, extra rewards mean more sales, greater profits, and a more successful business.

The first two stages breathe the most life into your profit potential and are the focus of this article.

Introduction (Birth) Stage of Marketing Product Life Cycle

Just as a new born baby needs your constant attention, your new product needs constant marketing. It also demands time and money without returning much but dependence.

You have to market hard to nurture your baby product. You have to show it off and emphasize how it benefits potential customers.

Your primary marketing goal at this stage of your marketing product life cycle is to build demand for your baby product and to recoup your research and development costs. But because your product is so young, it is not popular yet. Demand is low, while prices are usually at their highest in this stage.

But you may want to keep prices low to encourage more people to discover your new product. Keeping prices low and offering promotions and incentives to attract initial customers helps you to attract your new product’s greatest admirers and potential buyers. It separates them from everybody else and determines to whom you should direct your product’s birth announcements.

By limiting your marketing (birth announcements) to people that your research indicates are most likely to buy your new product, you will save money that it would cost to send your announcements to everybody.

Now that you have introduced you new product to your target market, it’s time to move to the second stage of the marketing product life cycle.

Child or Growth of Marketing Product Life Cycle

In this second stage, your product grows quickly because you market it to more distributors, retailers and customers.

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.

You want your marketing at this stage of the marketing product life cycle, to enlarge your product’s support system. It needs to saturate your target market and assure that everyone in your target market knows about your product and how it can benefit them.

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 best match with your product, and researching which geographic locations offer the most new growth opportunities and which distributors best reach those locations.

Recommendations

Although 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 children mature differently.

But unlike a child, you want your product to spend as much time as possible in the growth and following stages.

You can use market segmentation to find ways to extend the life of your product.

It provides research to successfully market your product through all stages of the marketing product life cycle.

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Tags: Business