Product life cycle

At this point in your product's life cycle, you should be putting your efforts into:

• increasing your product's market share
• creating a brand preference for your customers

Product growth stage

This should be a period of rapid growth in both sales and profits for your product or service. Your profits should rise through an increase in output and more competitive pricing.

You should also consider:

• maintaining product quality and adding features or support services for the product
• maintaining pricing to increase demand for the product
• increasing distribution channels to cope with demand
• aiming promotion at a wider audience

If your profits are still low, consider reducing the price of the product or service to increase the volume of sales. See how to price your product or service.

Remember that different marketing strategies work better at different stages of the product's life cycle. You may want to tailor your strategies to your product's changing marketing position.

Read more about product life cycle strategies and product life cycle management.

Product maturity stage

If your product or service makes it to the maturity stage, this should be the longest part of its product life cycle.

At this stage, you will probably notice that:

• you may need to enhance product features to make it more appealing than competitors'
• you may need to lower your pricing due to increased competition
• distribution is becoming more intensive and you may need to offer incentives
• you may need to focus your promotion on the difference between existing products

At this point, the market has often reached saturation as a result of competitors releasing their own version of your product. Your product or service may experience a decreasing rate of sales, which should eventually stabilise.

To prolong their life span, you should aim to differentiate your product or service from others that your competitors offer. You can do this by focusing on and highlighting any branding, trademarks, or customer testimonials that may give you an advantage.

Keep in mind that the sales of most products will decline at some stage and the product will come to its natural end. Find out more about this in product life cycles - decline stage.