This final post on the marketing product life cycle covers the decline stage.

If you missed my articles on the first three stages, you can access them by clicking the links below:

Birth and Growth Stages

Mature Stage

Marketing Product Life Cycle
Decline Stage Introduction

Sales always decline in this stage. Understanding the decline stage will help you to keep your product producing sales longer.

In the decline stage of the marketing product development cycle, product owners lower or discontinue marketing efforts and expenses. The trick is for you to lower your marketing efforts while your competitors discontinue theirs.

Similarly, if you continue to sell your product while your competitors pull their products from the market, you can squeeze out the last few sales for your product.

Marketing Product Life Cycle
Why Sales Decline

Sales decline during this stage of the marketing product life cycle because:

• the market has become saturated,
• the technology has become obsolete, or
• the trend creating the demand has ended.

The result is that unless your product is perishable or consumable, few customers still want or need your product. Market segmentation can enable you to find those few customers and to out-market your competitors to get those customers’ purchases.

Marketing Product Life Cycle
Using Marketing Research
Can Slow Decline

To continue making enough sales to earn a profit, you need to use market research to determine:

• how much you need to lower prices,
• which distribution outlets you should use at this stage, and
• how your other products can benefit from brand marketing from your declining product.

Just as you want your child to have a long life and live well into senior years, you want your product to extend its life through the decline stage of the marketing product life cycle.

Market segmentation can provide extended life to your product by revealing the last remnants of customers needing the product and by discovering new uses for your product. So you can increase your profits through this final stage of the marketing product life cycle.

To read more about how Marketing Strategies Change During Products Life Cycle, click the link in this sentence.

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Posted 4-25-08: Decline Stage Of
Marketing Product Life Cycle

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 8:20 am and is filed under Marketing Mix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.