Change! once leading now diminishing
Leading Change…
Organizations wants improvement, they seek progressive success. The question is can you progressively achieve continuous climb? Will there be a time for equilibrium? or decline? How can you combat this line? I believe in most industry the only way to improve is to go along the trend or better be a trend setter "Pre-Think". Change is inevitable, without change your product or services will be drowned by “Life Cycle”.
Some organizations that I have experience working in continue to set-up annual budgets for growth “That’s Normal” however without any consideration on the product life cycle. Success is gauge on “To-date” performance, usually monetary. Group of managers / operators at this peak will be promoted or highly incentivize… The question is, are they directly contributing? Or its pure “Life Cycle” luck?.
There will be time that the open market sees organizations product or services differently, “The Decline” on most occasions organizations put some intense amount of pressure to the one; once they praise. Again: The question is, are they directly contributing to the decline? Or its pure “Life Cycle” Bad-luck?.
Change!
For companies interested in continued growth and profits, successful new product strategy should be viewed as a planned totality that looks ahead over some years. For its own good, new product strategy should try to predict in some measure the likelihood, character, and timing of competitive and market events. While prediction is always hazardous and seldom very accurate, it is undoubtedly far better than not trying to predict at all. In fact, every product strategy and every business decision inescapably involves making a prediction about the future, about the market, and about competitors. To be more systematically aware of the predictions one is making so that one acts on them in an offensive rather than a defensive or reactive fashion—this is the real virtue of preplanning for market stretching and product life extension. The result will be a product strategy-that includes some sort of plan for a timed sequence of conditional moves.
Even before entering the market development stage, the originator should make a judgment regarding the probable length of the product’s normal life, taking into account the possibilities of expanding its uses and users. This judgment will also help determine many things—for example, whether to price the product on a skimming or a penetration basis, or what kind of relationship the company should develop with its resellers.
These considerations are important because at each stage in a product’s life cycle each management decision must consider the competitive requirements of the next stage. Thus a decision to establish a strong branding policy during the market growth stage might help to insulate the brand against strong price competition later; a decision to establish a policy of “protected” dealers in the market development stage might facilitate point-of-sale promotions during the market growth state, and so on. In short, having a clear idea of future product development possibilities and market development opportunities should reduce the likelihood of becoming locked into forms of merchandising that might possibly prove undesirable.
This kind of advance thinking about new product strategy helps management avoid other pitfalls. For instance, advertising campaigns that look successful from a short-term view may hurt in the next stage of the life cycle. Thus at the outset Metrecal advertising used a strong medical theme. Sales boomed until imitative competitors successfully emphasized fashionable slimness. Metrecal had projected itself as the dietary for the overweight consumer, an image that proved far less appealing than that of being the dietary for people who were fashion-smart. But Metrecal’s original appeal had been so strong and so well made that it was a formidable task later on to change people’s impressions about the product. Obviously, with more careful long-range planning at the outset, a product’s image can be more carefully positioned and advertising can have more clearly defined objectives.
Recognizing the importance of an orderly series of steps in the introduction of sales-building “actions” for new products should be a central ingredient of long-term product planning. A carefully preplanned program for market expansion, even before a new product is introduced, can have powerful virtues. The establishment of a rational plan for the future can also help to guide the direction and pace of the on-going technical research in support of the product. Although departures from such a plan will surely have to be made to accommodate unexpected events and revised judgments, the plan puts the company in a better position to make things happen rather than constantly having to react to things that are happening.
It is important that the originator does not delay this long-term planning until after the product’s introduction. How the product should be introduced and the many uses for which it might be promoted at the outset should be a function of a careful consideration of the optimum sequence of suggested product appeals and product uses. Consideration must focus not just on optimum things to do, but as importantly on their optimum sequence—for instance, what the order of use of various appeals should be and what the order of suggested product uses should be. If Jell-O’s first suggested use had been as a diet food, its chances of later making a big and easy impact in the gelatin dessert market undoubtedly would have been greatly diminished. Similarly, if nylon hosiery had been promoted at the outset as a functional daytime-wear hosiery, its ability to replace silk as the acceptable high-fashion hosiery would have been greatly diminished.
To illustrate the virtue of pre-introduction planning for a product’s later life, suppose a company has developed a non-patentable new product—say, an ordinary kitchen salt shaker. Suppose that nobody now has any kind of shaker. One might say, before launching it, that (1) it has a potential market of “x” million household, institutional, and commercial consumers, (2) in two years market maturity will set in, and (3) in one year profit margins will fall because of the entry of competition. Hence one might lay out the following plan:
- End of first year: expand market among current users
Ideas—new designs, such as sterling shaker for formal use, “masculine” shaker for barbecue use, antique shaker for “Early American” households, miniature shaker for each table place setting, moisture-proof design for beach picnics.
- End of second year: expand market to new users
Ideas—designs for children, quaffer design for beer drinkers in bars, design for sadists to rub salt into open wounds.
III. End of third year: find new uses
Ideas—make identical product for use as a pepper shaker, as decorative garlic salt shaker, shaker for household scouring powder, shaker to sprinkle silicon dust on parts being machined in machine shops, and so forth.
This effort to pre-think methods of reactivating a flattening sales curve far in advance of its becoming flat enables product planners to assign priorities to each task, and to plan future production expansion and capital and marketing requirements in a systematic fashion. It prevents one’s trying to do too many things at once, results in priorities being determined rationally instead of as accidental consequences of the timing of new ideas, and disciplines both the product development effort that is launched in support of a product’s growth and the marketing effort that is required for its continued success…