Product and Service Management - Actions for Product Life Cycle Stages

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Understanding Product Life Cycle
Understanding the product life cycle is an important step in formulating a successful product strategy. Operations management is responsible for the majority of the stages in the life cycle, with marketing handling the remainder.
But it's essential that for each stage of the product life cycle, both operations and marketing are aligned and communicate in an effective manner with each other. This relationship is extremely important – it can determine whether a product strategy is successful or not.
Stages of the Product Life Cycle
The product life cycle has four stages:
1 - introduction.
2 - growth.
3 - maturity, and
4 - decline.
Introduction
The first stage involves the product being introduced to a new market. Product awareness and development are key aspects of this process. Branding and quality levels are established and issues relating to intellectual property, patents, and trademarks are addressed.
At this point in a product's life cycle, its target audience includes innovators and early adopters. It isn't heavily distributed at this stage, as the organization wants to wait until there is significant consumer acceptance of the product.
Growth
The second stage is the growth stage. The organization tries to build brand preference to retain a loyal customer base. The aim is to increase the product's market share. Quality and price become very important factors at this stage. Additional features may be added to the product to ensure consumer interest is maintained.
The promotion of the product is widened and the target audience broadens. The product is more widely distributed in response to increasing demand and customer acceptance.
Maturity
In the third stage, maturity, it is common for sales to plateau, partly in response to increased competition. The volume of production stabilizes and the product begins to show significant return on investment.

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