The Product Life Cycle describes the life path of a product, somewhat like the life stages of a human life. All products go through four stages, namely the Introduction, Growth, Maturity & Decline stages . Every product has a life cycle.

The Product Life Cycle helps you to identify the current life stages of your products. As a marketer, you need to thoroughly understand your product life cycle for purpose of planning to phase their life-stage.

For multiple products life cycles , the marketer’s task is more complex as he or she needs to map the various life stages of each of the products to stagger and phase them across the product universe in order that each product life cycle is fully optimize for cash generation across the business horizon.

This analysis is a fluid document which needs to be revisited annually for planning purpose. The reason being that most product life cycles do not follow a straight line path throughout . Unforeseen factors namely sudden changes in need of your product increasing your business risks could shorten the cycle, or even force the product to skip its stages. Conversely, favorable circumstance such as changes in government regulations as could also lengthen the cycle and extend the various stages.

Hence, certain life cycles have potential of being extended and if you truly believe that your product has other potential uses not maximized currently, and particularly so for Cash Cow products as in BCG Matrix , you should pro-actively look to rejuvenating the life cycles of such products at their matured and declining stages.

Product development is an absolute critical tool in rejuvenating the life cycle. Ideas could be generated from the various components of the product development process namely from enhancing or changing the product features, adding new usages for the product, enhancing the product manufacturing process, product packaging technological innovation, creative and unique channel delivery process etc.

An example is baking soda, which is traditionally used for baking cakes and facing decline stage in the product life cycle. The innovative product development and marketing departments worked together to discover a creative and very practical new usage of utilizing baking soda as an odor-removing agent. This has since enhanced sales leap and bounds.

The eventual success of Product Life Cycle Rejuvenation largely depends on various factors namely the level of innovation, extent of re-positioning of the rejuvenated product, degree of penetration into new market segments.

As a smart marketer, you must carefully weigh the pros and cons of product rejuvenation. The ultimate decisions whether to rejuvenate a product and extend its life cycle depend largely on costs associated with the process as well as the ability of your company to successfully re-position the rejuvenated product and convince potential existing and new customers of your new product usages and value add.