The Life Cycle of Iphone
All product categories have a specific life span called the product life cycle. Many factors, such as competition and technology, affect brands and their product life cycle. Nevertheless, brands or products typically go through five stages of growth: development, introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Characteristics for each stage differ and in response to the different needs of the product as it moves through its life cycle, the market mix used during these stages differ as well. Understanding the product life cycle can help business owners and marketing managers plan a marketing mix to address each stage fully. If a curve is drawn showing product revenue over time, it may take one of many different shapes, an example of which is shown bellow:
In this work I would like to take a look at the product life cycle of one of the most popular smartphones on the market today, the Apple iPhone. If we draw a product life cycle curve of iPhone (not a curve of a particular model of iPhone), it will look different from the curve above. iPhone’s forecasting behaves in a different manner than most electronic devices. Generally, people are slow to adopt the new technology or product, which is depicted by the stretched introduction and growth phase. Once technology has been tried and tested, the mass adoption occurs, which gradually comes to a plateau.
On the contrary, with iPhone, the initial hype is such that their majority of sales happen during initial 1-2 years, and then immediately dry up. This whole distortion can be attributed to the huge fan following of Apple, who are not only loyal, but also want to experience the new product before others. Also, Apple constantly innovate the product and launch a totally revised version of the product (iPhone 5 is the last example), that greatly increase the product life cycle of the Apple iPhone.
Let’s examine every stage of a product life cycle with focusing on characteristics of each stage for the Apple iPhone.
Development
In this work I would like to take a look at the product life cycle of one of the most popular smartphones on the market today, the Apple iPhone. If we draw a product life cycle curve of iPhone (not a curve of a particular model of iPhone), it will look different from the curve above. iPhone’s forecasting behaves in a different manner than most electronic devices. Generally, people are slow to adopt the new technology or product, which is depicted by the stretched introduction and growth phase. Once technology has been tried and tested, the mass adoption occurs, which gradually comes to a plateau.
On the contrary, with iPhone, the initial hype is such that their majority of sales happen during initial 1-2 years, and then immediately dry up. This whole distortion can be attributed to the huge fan following of Apple, who are not only loyal, but also want to experience the new product before others. Also, Apple constantly innovate the product and launch a totally revised version of the product (iPhone 5 is the last example), that greatly increase the product life cycle of the Apple iPhone.
Let’s examine every stage of a product life cycle with focusing on characteristics of each stage for the Apple iPhone.
Development
References: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/brands-product-life-cycle-785.html http://smallbusiness.chron.com/would-marketing-mix-change-different-stages-product-life-cycle-3283.html http://hbsbusiness.net/Unit%205.pdf http://sameerduggal.wordpress.com/tag/technology-forecasting/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone