The 6 Stages of the Product Life Cycle [+Examples]

When I was 12 years old, I used to be confused about my cousin's CD collection. Why have CDs when I could go on iTunes and listen to all my favorite songs? This is a perfect example of a product life cycle (PLC) in action.

没有人希望他们的产品变得“过时”并达到其产品生命周期的结束。这就是为什么重要的是要了解您的产品的哪个阶段，以便您可以做出更好的营销和业务决策。

Below, we’ll learn about the product life cycle inside and out. If you’re in a pinch, use the links below to jump straight to what you need:

• What is the product life cycle?
• 分解产品生命周期理论
• 产品生命周期的阶段是什么？
• 产品生命周期的例子
• 国际产品生命周期
• When to Use the Product Life Cycle

在营销行业,典型的描述f the product life cycle only has four main stages — Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. At HubSpot, we agree that these are vital for a product, but the two stages “Development” and “Decline” aren’t nearly covered enough.

作为营销人员，重要的是要了解您的战术和策略如何根据产品所在的舞台而变化。让我们分解产品生命周期的六个阶段中的每个阶段。

1.发展

The development stage of the product life cycle is the research phase before a product is introduced to the marketplace. This is when companies bring in investors, develop prototypes, test product effectiveness, and strategize their launch.

In this stage, companies typically spend a lot of money without bringing in any revenue because the product isn't being sold yet.

这个阶段可以持续很长时间，具体取决于产品的复杂性，它的新功能以及竞争。对于全新产品，开发阶段特别困难，因为产品的第一个先驱并不总是像以后的迭代那样成功。

发展Stage Marketing Strategy

虽然营销通常从引言阶段开始，但您可以通过确保对行业中既定的声音的认可开始围绕产品的“嗡嗡声”。

您也可以提早发布（且有利的）消费者研究或推荐。您在此阶段的营销目标是建立您的品牌知名度，并确立自己的创新公司。bob全站app

2. Introduction

The introduction stage happens when a product is launched in the marketplace. This is when marketing teams begin building product awareness and targeting potential customers. Typically, when a product is introduced, sales are low and demand builds slowly.

在此阶段,营销人员关注广告和marketing campaigns. They also work on testing distribution channels and building product and brand awareness.

Introduction Stage Marketing Strategy

这是乐趣开始的地方。现在推出了产品，您实际上可以使用入站营销and内容营销.

Education is vital in this stage. If your marketing strategies are successful, the product goes into the next stage — growth.

3. Growth

在增长阶段，消费者已经接受了市场中的产品，并且客户开始真正购买。这意味着需求和利润正在增长，希望以稳步快速的速度。

增长阶段是产品的市场不断扩展，竞争开始发展。潜在的竞争对手会看到您的成功并希望进入。

Growth Stage Marketing Strategy

在此阶段，营销活动通常从获得客户的买入转变为建立品牌存在，因此消费者选择他们而不是发展竞争对手。此外，随着公司成长，他们将开始开放新的分销渠道，并添加更多功能和支持服务。在您的策略中，您也会做广告。

4. Maturity

到期阶段是销售从快速增长时期开始升级的时候。在这一点上，公司开始降低价格，以便在不断增长的竞争中保持竞争力。

这是公司开始变得更加高效的阶段，并从引言和增长阶段中bob全站app的错误中学习。营销活动通常专注于差异化而不是意识。这意味着产品功能可能会增强，价格可能会降低，并且分销变得更加密集。

During the maturity stage, products begin to enter the most profitable stage. The cost of production declines while the sales are increasing.

Maturity Stage Marketing Strategy

当您的产品已成为成熟产品时，您可能会觉得自己在“航行”，因为销售稳定并且已经建立了产品。但这是建立自己的领导者并区分您的品牌的关键的地方。

随着采用的增长，不断改进产品，并让消费者在您的营销策略中知道他们喜欢的产品比以前更好。这将在下一个阶段保护您 - 饱和。

5. Saturation

During the product saturation stage, competitors have begun to take a portion of the market and products will experience neither growth nor decline in sales.

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.

饱和Stage Marketing Strategy

When the market has become saturated, you’ll need to focus on differentiation in features, brand awareness, price, and customer service. Competition is highest at this stage, so it’s critical to leave no doubt regarding the superiority of your product.

如果无法在产品级别进行创新（因为此时产品仅需要次要调整），请投资您的客户服务并在营销中使用客户证明。

6.下降

不幸的是，如果您的产品没有成为市场上的首选品牌，则通常会遇到下降。在竞争激烈的情况下，销售将减少，这很难克服。

Additionally, new trends emerge as time goes on, just like the CD example I mentioned earlier. If a company is at this stage, it'll either discontinue its product, sell the company, or innovate and iterate on its product in some way.

下降阶段营销策略

While companies would want to avoid the decline stage, sometimes there’s no helping it — especially if the entire market reached a decline. In your marketing strategy, you can emphasize the superiority of your solution to successfully get out of this stage.

To extend the product life cycle, successful companies can also implement new advertising strategies, reduce prices, add new features to increase their value proposition, explore new markets, or adjust brand packaging.

The best companies will usually have products at several points in the product life cycle at any given time. Some companies look to other countries to begin the cycle anew.

Importance of the Product Life Cycle

The product life cycle is important because it informs an organization’s management and decision-makers how well a product is performing and what strategic actions it will take to succeed. This helps companies allocate resources like staff, budgets, shows which products should be prioritized, and where the company should innovate next.

使用产品生命周期的其他好处包括：

• 做出更好的营销投资和决策
• 更容易制定长期计划
• 通过有关性能的准确信息，可以做出更好的决策
• Easier to streamline current processes within your company

Product Life Cycle Limitations

While using the PLC method certainly helps stakeholders plan, it does have limitations. The cycle breaks down performance over several stages, but unfortunately there is no way to tell how long each stage will last.

Complicating things further, not all products will move through these stages at the same pace. For example, a product may take longer to decline than others. Plus product managers run the risk of not dedicating enough effort and resources into a particular product if they think the product will decline, creating planned obsolescence – even if customers still use it.

分解产品生命周期理论

在60年代后期，哈佛商学院教授雷蒙德·弗农（Raymond Vernon）开发了这种营销理论，以回应未能说明国际贸易中存在的趋势的经济模型 - 这就是为什么它最初被称为国际产品生命周期理论的原因。

它指出，在国际市场上开发的产品有三个阶段：

• New product
• Maturing product
• Standardized product

Here’s a quick breakdown of his theory.

Vernon theorized a new product would perform best in its country of origin to keep manufacturing and production costs low. Once the product gained demand, companies could begin exporting to other countries and continue building local production plants in each new location.

Having these local plants would offer the flexibility to make changes to the product without incurring huge costs.

The standardized phase would involve an influx of competitors, which would lead the company to focus on driving down production and manufacturing costs to remain competitive. As the market becomes saturated and a new product gets introduced, the company loses its relevance in its home country and shifts gears to create something new, with the cycle beginning again.

从那时起，产品生命周期理论就已经发展为减少地理位置，而更多地关注市场营销。接下来让我们深入研究。

You can usethis template绘制自己的产品的生命周期阶段。

下载免费的产品生命周期模板

Now that we’ve gone through stages and history, let’s review some real-life examples of them in action.

让我们遵循自那以后达到下降阶段的流行产品的产品生命周期。

1.打字机

The typewriter was the first mechanical writing tool — a worthy successor to pen and paper. Ultimately, however, other technologies gained traction and replaced it.

• 发展: Before the first commercial打字机被介绍给市场，总体想法已经开发了几个世纪，从1575年开始。
• Introduction: In the late 1800s, the first commercial typewriters were introduced.
• Growtht:打字机迅速成为不可或缺的ool for all forms of writing, becoming widely used in offices, businesses, and private homes.
• Maturity: Typewriters were in the maturity phase for nearly 80 years, because this was the preferred product for typing communications up until the 1980s.
• 饱和：在饱和阶段，打字机在1990年代开始与计算机面临激烈的竞争。
• Decline: Overall, the typewriter couldn't withstand the competition of new emerging technologies, and eventually the product was discontinued.

2. Vine

Skipping forward to the 21st century, we see the rise and fall of Vine, a short-form video-sharing app that was the source for many memes at its peak but eventually declined due to other platforms.

• 发展: Vine was founded in June 2012 and mainly competed with Instagram.
• Introduction：该应用程序于2013年向公众介绍。其不同的因素是其短形式的视频格式 - 用户只有7秒即可拍摄有趣，荒谬或两者混合的东西。
• Growth：释放仅两年后，Vine拥有超过2亿活跃的用户。它的受欢迎程度导致“为葡萄藤做它”一词的出现。
• Maturity：因为仅在市场上持续了几年，所以Vine从未达到到期阶段。虽然收养很高，但它仍然是一个相当新的应用程序。
• 饱和：Vine在已经饱和的市场上竞争。Instagram，Snapchat和YouTube是其类别中的杰出名称，Vine很快开始使用。
• Decline: When Musical.ly was introduced, Vine lost a large amount of its user base and shut down. It was succeeded by Byte, a similar short-form video-sharing platform, but none of these have been able to surpass Tik Tok, which launched months after Vine’s end in 2016.

3. Cable TV

Remember the days of switching TV channels to find what to watch? I do — and they feel distinctly like something of the past. While cable TV is still around, it’s safe to say that it’s nearing the decline stage.

• 发展：有线电视是在20世纪上半叶开发的。John Walsonhas been credited with its invention.
• Introduction: The first commercial television system was introduced in 1950, and by 1962, the technology saw the first hints of growth.
• Growth: After a decades-long freeze on cable TV’s development (due to regulatory restrictions), the technology began gaining traction, and by 1980, more than 15 million households had cable.
• Maturity: Cable TV matured around the 1990s. Around seven in ten households had cable.
• 饱和: The start of the 21st century saw an oversaturation of this technology, and it also started to compete with other modern developments such as on-demand services and high-definition TV (HDTV). While the internet was still in its nascent stages, it would soon gain on cable TV as well.
• Decline：从2015年开始，有线电视经历了明显下降. Online video streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have taken precedence — and this trend is set to continue.

4. Floppy Disk

This relic was once a popular and convenient way to store and share data between computers. I barely understood what they were growing up, and it astounds me to think of the very existence of cloud data sharing and other mass memory storage means.

• 发展: The first floppy disk was developed in 1970 by IBM engineers. It was an 8-inch flexible magnetic disk in a square case with 2MB storage capacity.
• Introduction: It was introduced in 1971 and largely became known as the only way to transfer or store data.
• Growth：软盘主要在1980年代1990年代使用。
• Maturity：在1990年代在市场上销售良好。随着时间的推移，它可以容纳200MB的存储空间。
• 饱和: Major competitors emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. The invention of USB cables, external hard disks, and CDs gave people options to store their data.
• Decline：软盘磁盘在2009年停止磁盘的生产之前面临着大幅下降。市场上其他产品的存储能力越来越有效。

Not all products need to face the decline stage. Companies can extend the product life cycle with new iterations and stay afloat as long as they have several products at various points of the product life cycle.

国际产品生命周期

国际产品生命周期（IPL）是产品在国际市场中经历的周期。随着产品开始成熟，公司希望避免下降阶段，它们通常会开始在全球范围内探索新市场。

When products reach mass production, manufacturing and production shift to other countries as well.

The international product life cycle stages are identical to that of a normal product life cycle. The development stage looks different, however, because local customs and regulations can affect how long it takes to bring the product to a new marketplace.

However, once you lay the groundwork in a new marketplace, your competitors will be sure to follow, and the life cycle stages will continue up until saturation and eventually decline. Your option is to either expand into another market or learn from prior mistakes and innovate before the decline stage rolls around.

Next, we’ll look at when you should use the product life cycle.

When to Use the Product Life Cycle

企业使用产品生命周期来实现以下各种：

• Establish competitive authority.If your product is new and recently introduced to the market, you can advertise it as a new and improved alternative to an existing product. If the product is established, you can vouch for its long history of use in your branding.
• Decide on a定价策略.Depending on the life cycle stage your product is in, you’ll choose how to price the product. A new product may be priced lower to entice more buyers, while a product in the growth stage can be priced higher.

• Create a市场策略.您的产品生命周期阶段将确定要采取的策略。成熟度和受众知识态度在您在网站和社交媒体资料上发布的内容类型中起着重要作用。
• Respond before the product begins its decline.没有比观看您的产品慢慢过时或被竞争产品所取代的感觉更糟糕的感觉了。通过牢记生命周期阶段，您可以创建一种策略，使您在达到饱和并降低阶段时保持领先地位。

The product life cycle benefits businesses because they can shift their wording and positioning to best market the product at the stage it is in. If your product has recently been introduced and you try to market it as a long-established solution, consumers will see right through it and trust you less as a result.

Keep Your Product’s Life Cycle in Mind

无论您是开发全新产品还是与成熟，成熟的品牌合作，都可以使用产品生命周期阶段作为营销活动的指南。

Each stage will dictate how you inform your audience about the product, how you position your brand in the marketplace, and how you decide to move forward after the decline stage.

By keeping your product’s life cycle in mind, you can invest in better marketing campaigns that result in a higher ROI.

编者注：该帖子最初于2020年1月发表，并已更新以进行全面性。