Product life cycle guide: stages and examples (2024)

Your marketing plan should include strategies to make the most out of each stage of your product life cycle. But before you can start formulating strategies, you need a clear understanding of the product life cycle stages, how to determine what stage your product is in, and how to use market research to inform your efforts throughout the life cycle.

There are five stages in a product life cycle (PLC): development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

The product life cycle is the time from the product concept through its eventual withdrawal from the market. The product life cycle is used for decision-making and strategy development throughout each stage.

The concept was developed by German economist Theodore Levitt, who published his Product Life Cycle model in the Harvard Business Review in 1965. We still use this model today.

Marketers use the product life cycle to customize messaging for each stage, using market research to guide their efforts. The maturity of a product in the PLC allows marketing teams to determine what marketing efforts they should focus on and how they should promote a product. This results in better strategy and enhanced product marketing efforts.

Managers use the product life cycle to make strategic decisions about pricing, expansion into new markets, packaging design, and more. The product life cycle helps to align company strategy with a product’s current stage of development. Managers use this alignment to pinpoint new opportunities and improve the market performance of a product over its lifetime.

Market research plays an integral role in each stage of the product life cycle. Use the ultimate guide to market research developed by SurveyMonkey to help you understand how research is key in managing the life cycle of a product.

Every product spends a different amount of time in each stage, meaning there is no definitive timeline to reference. Each stage has its own costs, risks, and opportunities, and you’ll have to adapt your strategies depending on where you are in the life cycle.

The first stage in the product life cycle is development. The development stage of the product life cycle is about refining your concept, testing your product, and creating a launch strategy.

Concept testing with real potential users is an important part of the development step. With concept testing, you’ll know your target market’s reaction to your concept and make changes according to their feedback—before you’ve even begun to create.

During this initial phase, you’ll encounter a lot of costs without producing any income from this new product. You may be funding this stage yourself or you may be seeking investors. Either way, the risk is high and outside funding is often limited.

Market development can encompass anything from a brief sketch to a prototype of your product. All you need is enough to show potential investors and customers. Validate your market potential early, so you can begin raising funds to launch.

Here are three tips to improve the development stage of the product life cycle:

The introduction phase of the product life cycle is when you launch your product. Your marketing team will be focused on building product awareness and reaching your target market. Typically, all content marketing and inbound marketing are based on promoting the product.

Depending on the complexity of your product, the competition, how new and innovative it is, and other factors, you may spend more time than you expected at this stage. The good news is that if your marketing is successful, you’ll move on to the next stage of growth.

Here are three tips to improve the introduction stage of the product life cycle:

The introduction phase of the product life cycle is when your customers are familiar with your products and buy into your marketing. Demand and profits are growing, and the competition is looking to interrupt your success.

Marketing in this stage moves from getting consumers' attention to establishing a brand presence. Show them why they should choose you over the competition. As your company grows, you may add new features to your product, beef up your support services, and open new distribution channels. All of these efforts will be solidly featured in your marketing.

Here are three tips to improve the growth stage of the product life cycle:

When sales begin to level off from rapid growth, you’re entering the maturity stage. You may have to reduce prices to stay competitive.

Now, your marketing campaigns focus on differentiation instead of awareness, pointing out your superior product features. During this stage, production costs decline, and sales are steady. It’s tempting to sit back and enjoy the steady sales, but you must make ongoing improvements to your product and let consumers know that it’s continuing to get better.

At this point, market saturation can occur. Competitors have begun taking a portion of the market. Although many consumers are using the product, there are too many competitors. To become the brand of choice, the only way out of this dilemma is to focus on your strengths—differentiation, features, brand awareness, price, and customer service. If not, you'll decline.

Here are three tips to improve the maturity stage of the product life cycle:

If your brand experiences fierce competition or loses market share, you may experience the decline stage of the product life cycle. Sales will typically decrease in the face of rising competition.

Market decline may be related to:

When a company sees market decline, leadership may discontinue the product, sell the company, or innovate the existing product. In the meantime, your marketing may try to foster nostalgia or the superiority of your product to extend the life cycle.

Here are five strategies a company in decline can use to attempt to move out of this product life cycle stage:

There are many benefits to product life cycle management. Your position in the cycle impacts everything from marketing strategy to profitability.

Product life cycle management allows you to:

Effective product life cycle management helps to pinpoint strategies to boost customer engagement with a product and then sustain it across the product’s entire lifetime.

Businesses that don’t adequately manage a product life cycle will encounter consequences.

Without the structure and direction that the product life cycle offers, companies may run into the following problems:

Understanding and adapting to each new stage of the product life cycle will create successful products with the longevity to exist within a market for several years, or more.

Internally, you can control your concept, positioning, and marketing efforts. Nonetheless, external factors can influence your product’s life cycle despite your strategy.

Are you entering a very competitive market? The competition can directly affect your product’s success. If entering a market is easy due to minimal competition, low costs, a small market size, and few other barriers, the product's life cycle might be short because many competitors can quickly enter and saturate the market. If these factors are higher, your entry may be more difficult, but your lifecycle will probably be longer.

For example, if you were to launch a new product in a market that is relatively new, it may be easy to rapidly gain a sizable market share. However, every company that launches a similar product will benefit from this ease, rapidly diluting its total market share.

Compare this to an industry that is already hyper-competitive. While it could take years to develop a product that enters into a market, establishing yourself with a unique value proposition may ensure you have a longer product life cycle on the market.

If your product is in an industry that has fast tech advancement, such as cell phones, tablets, or computers, your product’s life cycle could be short. To stay relevant for as long as possible, you need to understand how fast tech evolves, what changes your target market is looking for, and when you need to make improvements to your product to remain competitive.

The Canadian smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry had nearly a 20% market share in 2009. Yet, with the release of the iPhone and innovations from Apple and Samsung, their cell phone quickly fell behind the times. Unable to keep up with the rapid evolution of mobile technology, BlackBerry left the mobile phone market and now specializes in security software.

The rate at which consumers accept your product is another factor that influences life cycle. Look at life cycles of similar products to estimate what your acceptance rate might be. Market research will help you predict how quickly your product will be adopted and accepted.

For example, the cell phone market is one that reached acceptance and maturity rapidly. Due to this, cell phone businesses have to innovate to constantly impress customers and maintain their market shares.

On the other hand, voice assistants experienced a slow rate of acceptance. With privacy concerns and the slow development of effective natural language processing, this industry took years to get off the ground. However, this gave products like Alexa and Google Home years to establish themselves, increasing longevity.

The state of the economy can directly impact a product's life cycle. Throughout history, recessions have impacted consumer spending habits from the total percentage of income spent to the products that are favored or abandoned during these economic downturns.

Research by the Bank of America demonstrates that in the months leading up to a recession and during one, furniture spending radically declines. For furniture companies, economic forces could be one of the most significant contributors to changes in their product life cycle.

A good economy can shorten the introductory phase and extend the growth phase due to increased spending. The effect of economic forces hinges on your product, target market, and industry.

While all products go through the life cycle, some have already gone the entire cycle and fallen by the wayside. Here are a few examples of products that are either currently in their product life cycle or have been discontinued.

When you’re ready to embark on your product life cycle, start with our Concept Testing solution to test your product concepts, features, and ideas. As your product’s life cycle progresses, our agile market research platform will help you make better strategic decisions and drive positive results.