Explain How The Product Life Cycle Can Be Applied To An Industry Of Your Choice

The product life cycle (PLC) describes the stages a new product goes through from beginning to end.

PLC includes four major stages: market introduction, market growth, market maturity and sales decline.

I decided to take an industry of cameras production as an example. I will show an application of PLC to the period, when cameras producers introduced such new product as digital cameras.

In the market introduction stage, when this type of cameras were introduced to a market for the very first time, customers were absolutely unfamiliar with this type of product, its availability and advantages, so sales of digital cameras were extremely law. Furthermore, industry in a whole also made a loss, because there were numerous expenditures: before introducing such cameras to the market it was essential to make a profound research and development of the product (e.g. find out whether it is worth apply this innovation, whether people really need such product, cost of its production); after the digital cameras were already introduced it was necessary to spent a lot of money on the promotion, because people were unaware of their appearance and advantages of digital cameras over ordinary ones (e.g. better quality if photos, photographic film was replaced by memory stick what makes the use more comfortable and handy, compactness) needed to be proved through promotion and advertisement in order to give customers a reason to buy the new product.

In the market growth stage, sales started to grow quickly, as people realised the advantages of digital cameras and that they are already available at the market for purchase (due to huge promotion through all sources of media, electric signs advertisement, posters), therefore profits of the industry also rose significantly and even achieved a peak at this stage. However, the success was noticed by many other producers who was not the “discoverers”, so they started to replace their production of ordinary cameras into digital ones. The entrance into the market brought not only competition within the industry but also a product variety (what resulted in wide range of digital cameras producers: Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Fuji and different models). Thus, because of competition, industry profits started to decline, although people kept buying new types of cameras, so sales were still growing.

In market maturity stage total industry sales keep growing and achieve a peak, after that they start to fall. Industry profits still declining because competition continues to rise, every company struggles for its own profit and spends large amounts of money on promotion to advertise their

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