Product life-cycle management (marketing)
Product life-cycle management (or PLM) is the succession of strategies used 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.
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.[1]
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.
See also
- Application lifecycle management
- Diminishing manufacturing sources and material shortages (DMSMS)
- Material selection
- New product development
- Obsolescence
- Planned obsolescence
- Product lifecycle management
- Product management
- Product teardown
- Software product management
- Technology life cycle
- Toolkits for user innovation
References
- ↑ "Arena Solutions PLM". Arena Solutions.
- Box, Jonathan Mbosia. (September 2012) Extending product lifetime Prospects and opportunities, Tanzanian Journal of Marketing
- Day, G. (1981) The product life cycle: Analysis and applications issues, Journal of Marketing, vol 45, Autumn 1981, pp 60–67.
- Levitt, T. (1965) Exploit the product life cycle, Harvard Business Review, vol 43, November–December 1965, pp 81–94.
- Dhalla, N.K., Yuspeh, S. (1976) Forget the product life cycle concept, 'Harvard Business Review', Jan–Feb 1976
- Rey F.J., Martín-Gil J., Velasco E. et al.(2004) Life Cycle Assessment and external environmental cost analysis of heat pumps, Environmental Engineering Science, vol 21, September 2004, pp 591–604
- Westkämper, E. (2000) Live Cycle Management and Assessment. Approaches and Visions Towards Sustainable Manufacturing, Annals of the CIRP, Vol. 49/2/2000, p. 501–522
- Chan, K.C. and Mills, T.M. (2015) Modeling competition over product life cycles, Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, vol 32, no. 3, DOI: 10.1142/S0217595915500219