Ipod
The Prouct Life Cycle (PLC) signifies 4 common factors products have in common; 1. They have a limited lifespan; 2. Their sales pass through a number of distinct stages, each of which has different characteristics, challenges, and opportunities; 3 Their profits are not static but increase and decrease through these stages; and 4. The financial, human resource, manufacturing, marketing and purchasing strategies that products require at each stage in the life cycle varies (Kotler and Keller, 2006). A products life cycle follows a common structure, with 5 standard stages; introduction, growth, maturity, saturation and decline. Although realistically, most product don't follow such a prescriptive style. To know what stage in the PLC a products' in, a marketer should analyse the; sales, profits, customers, competitors and costs. Apples highly succesful and innovative iPod took the world by storm for many years, although new advances in technology and media devices are changing the stage in the PLC that iPod may be experiancing after years of succecess. The PLC allows marketers to determine revenue earned and helps contribute to strategic marketing planning by helping a company identify when a product may need support, reinvigorating, or redesign, and is a helpful tool in regard to forcasting and managing cashflow. However the PLC paradigm can over-emphasise new product release due to products reaching maturity, but the reality is more profitability can be created through mature products as they already have an established market, and do not need such investment levels for promotion or advertising as a new product would.
Since the release of the iconic iPod by Apple in 2001, sales of the Ipod Classic, Nano, Shuffle and Touch have sky rocketed, (appendix 1,) Thus allowing iPod to own