9. Product Life Cycle Analysis
Description and Purpose
Product life cycle (PLC) analysis describes how sales of a product evolve as a function of time. This model states that, similar to all living organisms, products pass through four stages during their life: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Taken together, these four stages provide a framework that recommends specific marketing strategies for each PLC stage to maximize profitability over the product’s lifetime.
The PLC theory has been around for decades. It is generally attributed to the work of Joel Dean, who wrote about the concept in a 1950 article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Pricing policies for new products.”1
The product life cycle provides an invaluable perspective ...
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