Product Life Cycle Brief

Individual Portfolio
Assignment 1: Product
Marketing & Business Operations Module
This assignment is one of four assignments that forms part of the individual portfolio and should be completed independently.
Moodle publication date: TBC
Deadline: 12:00pm Noon 15/11/2010 submitted hard copy by hand to Undergraduate Administration Galton Level 2
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Any questions for this element of the portfolio should be raised via the Portfolio Forum on the Marketing and Business Operations Moodle site.

The Brief
For this assignment you must research and identify the product life cycle of a technological product of your choice (Mobile Phone, SatNav, Games console etc.). The product must be widely adopted by consumers in the UK marketplace. Discuss your choice of product with your tutor if you are unsure as to its suitability.
As part of this assignment you must fulfil the following tasks: (1) Identify the product life cycle using a diagram to demonstrate the shape of the product life cycle curve (2) Substantiate the shape of the lifecycle curve using evidence from your research and Product Life Cycle theory, referenced using the Harvard referencing system (3) Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using the Product Life Cycle as a way of predicting future sales of the product.

Assessment Criteria
Product Life Cycle curve identified and appropriately evidenced 40% using secondary research sources.
Product Life Cycle theory applied and referenced. 15%
Advantages and disadvantages are identified and discussed. 20%
Assignment contains no spelling or grammatical errors and is 25% presented in a professional manner.

Ensure each page of your assignment is labelled with the title of the assignment, your name, ID no. and Lecture group no.
Max Words 1000 excluding diagrams and tables. Please state the word count at the end of your assignment.
Use the Harvard referencing system.
No appendices are allowed.
The Individual portfolio is worth 50% of the overall mark for the Module. Each of the four assignments is worth 25% of the individual portfolio mark.
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Each assignment should be submitted on single sided A4 sheets with 1.5 line spacing in a bound folder by hand to Undergraduate Administration on Level 2, Galton by the deadline.

If I use your product as an example, the advice below can be applied to any choice of technological product.

If you are struggling to find information on a specific product (sales data for instance) then for practical reasons it is completely acceptable to look at the Product Life Cycle (PLC) of mobile phones as a category of products. There will be consolidated or aggregated market research on mobile phone use in the UK if you look in the library or on the internet for evidence.

When did mobile phones start being sold in the UK? How quickly were they adopted in the UK? Have mobile phones changed? What is the situation now? Create a time line and a picture of sales growth (the PLC) backed up with evidence that is referenced to support your opinion.

You could narrow your focus of research further. The Nokia X6 has a touchscreen, so you could just look at the product category of mobile phones with touchscreens. Or you could define your PLC by just researching mobile phones with multi-media functions as a product category. For practical reasons, how you choose your product/product category may come down to what information you can find.

How a product is marketed at a specific point in time can give some limited insight into the stage of its PLC. Read marketing text books in the library about the PLC and the suggested marketing activities at different stages and you will find clues which may help you estimate the PLC of your product and/or product category. It will be an estimate, but hopefully an informed one based on your research.

Once you have established the PLC for the category (the 'bigger picture'), you might find that it is possible to identify the PLC of the individual product.

So your choices are - an individual product, a category of products or both - depending on the evidence you can find.