A stakeholder is defined as 'an independent party with an interest or concern in something'. Stakeholder groups are not all alike and therefore will want different things from a business. As each stakeholder deals with the business in different ways these needs are likely to conflict. With all of these differing needs it will be difficult for the business to satisfy all stakeholders at the same time as it is likely that acting to satisfy one stakeholder's needs will end up conflicting with another's meaning that the second stakeholder will not be satisfied. Examples of stakeholders include the shareholders, employees, suppliers and customers of a business.
The Product Life Cycle is a theory used by management to understand where one of its products is in terms of its eventual life expectancy. It involves identifying if the product is in one of four phases: the introduction, growth, mature or decline stage. By identifying which stage of the cycle a product is in management can change its strategies to realise the potential success of a product. It is however, often difficult for management to see where the product is in the cycle as a rise or fall in sales most of the time will not necessarily mean that a product is growing or beginning to decline. It is also very hard, if not impossible, to accurately predict when the product will go into the next part of its life cycle. A business will find it very hard to tell when a market will reach saturation and will only know it while it is happening or in, some cases, after it has happened. While using the product life cycle model it is assumed that all products have a limit to how long they will be used, in practise this may not be the case.
The mature stage of the product life cycle is when a product market has finished growing, sales start to slow down and there is no more significant growth. At some point the