Product life-cycle management (PLM) is the succession of strategies by business management as a product goes through its life-cycle. The conditions in which a product is sold (advertising, saturation) changes over time and must be managed as it moves through its succession of stages.
Maps, Directions, and Place Reviews
Goals
The goals of Product Life Cycle management (PLM) are to reduce time to market, improve product quality, reduce prototyping costs, identify potential sales opportunities and revenue contributions, and reduce environmental impacts at end-of-life. To create successful new products the company must understand its customers, markets and competitors. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) integrates people, data, processes and business systems. It provides product information for companies and their extended supply chain enterprise. PLM solutions help organizations overcome the increased complexity and engineering challenges of developing new products for the global competitive markets.
Marketing Lifecycle Video
Product life cycle
The concept of product life cycle (PLC) concerns the life of a product in the market with respect to business/commercial costs and sales measures. The product life cycle proceeds through multiple phases, involves many professional disciplines, and requires many skills, tools and processes. PLC management makes the following three assumptions:
- Products have a limited life and thus every product has a life cycle.
- Product sales pass through distinct stages, each posing different challenges, opportunities, and problems to the seller.
- Products require different marketing, financing, manufacturing, purchasing, and human resource strategies in each life cycle stage.
Once the product is designed and put into the market, the offering should be managed efficiently for the buyers to get value from it. Before entering into any market complete analysis is carried out by the industry for both external and internal factors including the laws and regulations, environment, economics, cultural values and market needs. Product life cycle is guanine concept and this term 'product life cycle' is associated with every product that exists, however, due to a limited shelf life the product has to expire. From the business perspective, as a good business, the product needs to be sold before it finishes its life. In terms of profitability, expiry may jolt the overall profitability of the business therefore there are few strategies, which are practiced to ensure that the product is sold within the defined period of maturity.
1. Extending the product life cycle.
Extending the product life cycle by improving sales, this can be done through
a. Advertising: Get the new audience and potential customers.
b. Price reduction: Everyone is attracted with price cuts and discount tags.
c. Adding new features: Adding value catch buyer's attention.
d. Exploring new markets: Selling the product to new markets to get maximum customers.
e. New Packaging: New attractive packaging influence the target customers.
f. Changing customer consumption: By appreciating more frequent use showing their own benefit.
Heightening interest: Raising interest by offering Jackpot and other offers.
Characteristics of PLC stages
There are the following major Product life cycle stages, which are defined as under:
Identifying PLC stages
Identifying the stage of a product is an art more than a science, but it's possible to find patterns in some of the general product features at each stage. Identifying product stages when the product is in transition is very difficult.
Limitations
It is important for marketing managers to understand the limitations of the PLC model. It is difficult for marketing management to gauge accurately where a product is on its life cycle. A rise in sales per se is not necessarily evidence of growth, a fall in sales per se does not typify decline and some products, e.g. Coca-Cola and Pepsi, may not experience a decline.
Differing products possess different PLC "shapes". A fad product develops as a steep sloped growth stage, a short maturity stage, and a steep sloped decline stage. Products such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi experience growth, but also a constant level of sales over a number of decades. A given product (or products collectively within an industry) may hold a unique PLC shape such that use of typical PLC models are only useful as a rough guide for marketing management.
For specific products, the duration of each PLC stage is unpredictable and it's difficult to detect when maturity or decline has begun.
Because of these limitations, strict adherence to PLC can lead a company to misleading objectives and strategy prescriptions.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
EmoticonEmoticon