The 6 Stages of the Product Life Cycle +Examples

If you want to expand your reach in your current market, aim to add more users. You can increase your user base by targeting new user segments in the same market, or by gaining more of the types of users you already have. For example, a small detergent manufacturer may extend the life of the brand by selling to emerging markets, such as India. The company could also potentially extend the life of the brand by marketing the detergent in car washes, hotels, schools and even hospitals. Ultimately, a brand may need to be sold or gradually discontinued if it is no longer profitable.

Now that the product is launched, you can actually promote it using inbound marketing and content marketing. Here is when the product needs to be competitive, whether through price cuts or product differentiation, such as a why. 76 Perspective-Broadening Stats About Diversity & Inclusion in Marketing for 2023 Get equipped and inspired to make meaningful change in society through your marketing efforts. Measure how many influencers are open to recommending your brand or are organically recommending it on social media. Reactivation is when you’re converting a churned client into an active one. This metric finds the number of churned customers who came back.

These strategies, when implemented effectively, can be the difference between successful products and those that never even break even. The goal is to have as much market penetration as possible to reach full sales potential. Collecting customer feedback and implementing it is crucial to further improve the product and meet this goal. The tool has wide-reaching implications in marketing and sales but it can also aid in the design and decision-making process for the product. Before you leap into growth, reflect on where you’ve come from.

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Typically, this is the point when most consumers are using a product, but there are many competing companies. At this point, you want your product to become the brand preference so you don’t enter the decline stage. While marketing typically begins in the introduction stage, you can begin to build “buzz” around your product by securing the endorsement of established voices in the industry. In the marketing industry, the typical depiction of the product life cycle only has four main stages — Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline.

No one wants their product to become “obsolete” and reach the end of its product life cycle. That’s why it’s important to understand what stage your product is in so you can make better marketing and business decisions. An important theory that business schools teach is the life cycle of products and services.

Ziploc bags were introduced in the 1960s, for example, but didn’t really take off until the early 70s. Once established, this is the stage when a product can typically command its highest price while it’s new on the market and has that “wow factor” working in its favor. In my opinion, I suggest that the newspaper companies in America come to terms that their audience has shifted to newer technology. At some point in a product’s life cycle, it reaches a maturity stage, wherein there.

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I do — and they feel distinctly like something of the past. While cable TV is still around, wave accounting safe to say that it’s nearing the decline stage. When your product has become a mature offering, you may feel like you’re “sailing by” because sales are steady and the product has been established. But this is where it’s critical to establish yourself as a leader and differentiate your brand. In this stage, companies typically spend a lot of money without bringing in any revenue because the product isn’t being sold yet.

How to measure product-led growth

For example, many coffee shops and fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s now offer specialty coffee that competes with Starbucks. As a result, Starbucks’ managers decided it was time to change the company’s strategy. Over the years, Starbucks had added lunch offerings and moved away from grinding coffee in the stores to provide faster service for its customers. However, customers missed the coffee shop atmosphere and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee and didn’t like the smell of all the lunch items.

Growth marketing strategies and metrics span across the entire lifetime of the customer, not just the campaigns used to acquire them. Growth marketing is a strategy-based, data-driven approach to achieving sustainable success and improving revenue. A big part of customer retention is making them feel special. Reward your loyal customers and express gratitude by sending special discounts and offers, early access to sales, a freebie, thank you notes, or new products tailored to them.

What is a product growth strategy? (And how to tell when you need one)

By keeping the life cycle stages in mind, you can create a strategy that keeps you ahead of the curve as you reach the saturation and decline stages. Your product life cycle stage will determine which strategy to pursue. Maturity and audience knowledgeability play a big role in the type of content you publish on your site and social media profiles. During the growth stage, consumers have accepted the product in the market and customers are beginning to truly buy in. That means demand and profits are growing, hopefully at a steadily rapid pace. Your product growth strategy should also align with your company values.

Offering them something they need will naturally increase their interest in your product or service. Build something useful—like Hubspot’s set of free tools ideal for different segments of its user base, or WordStream’s free Google Ads Performance Grader. Growth hacking involves hands-on tactics with testing and tweaking, while growth marketing involves automated and algorithmic processes with periodic adjustments. Let’s say your ecommerce business is not making enough money because customers only buy one or two products. The order value is low and the profit doesn’t cover the acquisition costs. Traditional marketing focuses on campaign-oriented short-term goals.

Other McDonald’s restaurants kept their original design, which customers still like. The package sizes of their products or the amount of the product in the packages to save money and keep prices from rising too much. Demand for the Nintendo Wii increased sharply after the product’s introduction. Explain how managing an offering may be different in international markets. At every stage, it is important to keep an eye out for customer feedback to maintain the relevancy and profitability of the product throughout the different stages.

“Sales-led growth” was driven by field sales reps who schmoozed with the buyer over dinner and on the golf course. The key decision-making criteria of this era was simple IT compatibility. Start by evaluating if it makes sense for your team to have a growth PM. Hotjar Session Recordings allow you to trace the full customer journey—from entry to exit, you can reliably map the user’s full experience. It’s not hard to understand why a core PM could get protective or dismiss the short-term focus of a growth PM. This friction between growth and core PMs can become a real challenge in many organizations.

• Unfortunately for the firm, the growth stage attracts competitors who enter the market very quickly.
• Their feelings will naturally reflect in how they talk to your customers and ultimately drive retention rates.
• When it comes to growth, a good accountant is a flexible accountant, so work out .
• Typically, this is the point when most consumers are using a product, but there are many competing companies.
• In these companies, the product itself is a primary lever for growth, so it makes sense for the product team to take on growth responsibilities.

You’ll have to manage and weigh users’ wishes and business requirements—what’s great for the user doesn’t always work for the company. For example, if your company focuses on customer retention, it doesn’t make sense to invest time in entering a new market segment before hitting retention goals . You can also grow your product by encouraging customers to use it more often. Boosting product usage is a quickly-accessible growth strategy since you don’t need a new product or new customers. Instead, you can adjust the pricing or bundled features, work to increase engagement, or upsell current accounts.

Something else needs to happen between when a user signs up for your product and when they enter their credit card information. Namely, users must realize your product’s value for themselves. We’re seeing users move closer to software with condition-setting interfaces, smart forms, and API-based connections. Even users in traditionally non-technical roles are becoming developers, with the help of no-code/low-code technology becoming mainstream. That’s why a growth PM shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement for an existing PM—nor should a core PM take on more growth-oriented responsibilities.

A growth PM should be viewed as different from, and a further specialization of, core product managers. These companies evolve by creating a great user experience—so customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty are a top priority for them. Explain the difference between harvesting and a divesting when a firm enters the decline stage.

• Tracking growth metrics for your framework shows you what is and isn’t working.
• Growth product management focuses on monitoring user behavior and making data-driven suggestions for improving products to meet core business initiatives and goals.
• Sales in Japan increased even more rapidly due to a lower price.
• AARRR is one of the most popular frameworks for growth marketing and includes acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.

Keep an eye on whether they feel satisfied with your brand through these metrics. Evaluating this data will allow you to take timely action and reduce churn. Customer support is one of the most important aspects of user experience. Automating the sales and support process allows you to optimize communication with your leads and customers.

Maybe it’s in a Google search, in a Discord channel, or at an industry event. Within your customers’ companies, there are product champions who drive internal adoption of your product and facilitate expansion. The user is able to realize significant, ongoing value quickly and easily with little to no help from company personnel. This is achieved by having a product that is easy to understand, evaluate, adopt, and integrate into existing workflows. Can identify whether a business can drive efficient growth via the product itself. Of course, no list of product-led growth companies would be complete without the paragon of PLG, Slack.