Product Life Cycle

After launching the new product, management wants the product to enjoy a long and happy life. Although it does not expect huge product to sell over, the company wants to farm a decent profit to cover all the effort and risk that went into launching it.
It involves five distinct stages. They are as follows:
• Product development
• Introduction
• Growth
• Maturity
• Decline
The product revenue and profits
can be plotted as a function of
the life-cycle stages as shown in
the graph below: /We can represent these stages through the figure in below way:
Management is aware that each product will have a life cycle, although the exact shape and length is not known in advance. So product life cycle is the course of a product's sales and profits over its life time.
*Product Life Cycle Diagram
• Product developement: Product Developement begins when company finds and develops a new product idea. During product development sales are zero and the company's investment costs mount.
• Introduction: Introduction is a period of slow sales growth as the product is introduced in the market. Profits are non existent in this stage because of heavy expenspes of product introduction.
• Growth: Growth is a period of market acceptance and increasing profit.
• Maturity: Maturity is a period of slow down in sales growth because the product has recieved acceptance by most potential buyers. Profit level off or decline because of increasing against competition.
• Decline: Decline is the period when sales fall off and profit drop.