28 Mar Product Life Cycle Analysis
New products are the lifeblood of any successful business, but often due to time or focus you can get caught up in the here and now and forget to take a step back and review if your offer is as good as it should be. It is only when a competitor launches something new, exciting and fresh do you go into panic mode and ask how should I react?
Knowledge Is Power
The starting point when looking across your products to understand what is working and what isn’t, key statistics like sales numbers or customer reorder patterns across the various years provide a valuable insight into where your various products are in their lifecycle of introduction – growth – maturity – saturation or decline?
Analyse, Analyse and Analyse
A deep dive into the numbers will help form the framework of what action a business needs to take, are the various product categories in growth or decline? if its the latter why is that? is ? is it too expensive? are their modern day improvements that need to be made ? is the packaging not communicating what it does or does it simply lack some focus and communication out to the market. What is the distribution of the product like? are customer numbers falling ? why is that? Is the product margin too low due to cost increases or a change of supplier or excessively high because it has not been looked at in a while?
Time For Action
Understanding where the product is in its lifecycle from an audit of its sales and distribution may raise further project work in terms of sourcing new suppliers for new or improved products, promotional plans may need to be drawn up, packaging or point of sale improvements may be required, additional field research to shape new ideas or sometimes even product obsolescence.
PMF Marketing has a number of marketing tools which can help businesses shape their future product development plans, from carrying out a basic range review to full feasibility documentation including research, supplier sourcing, product forecasting and the production of new product launch collateral.
If you would like to understand more how I can help your business, please call me today for a FREE 30 minute call and lets get building your business back to growth together.
