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Do Products Really Have Life Cycles?
Field, George A.
14/1  (Fall 1971): 92-95

The article presents information on product life cycle. For more than a decade now we have been talking about product life cycles and a cursory examination of a dozen marketing texts documents the penetration of the concept into the core of marketing education. The extensive discussion of the product life cycle is a concomitant of the growing interest in product planning and product management by marketing specialists, an interest stimulated at least in part by the expanded scope of marketing under the marketing concept. An unexamined product life cycle is not worth limning. Do products really have life cycles? Marketers have noted that a product may be in various stages of the life cycle simultaneously in different market segments; in one segment, it may not yet be born, while in another, it is nearing maturity and in yet another, it may have passed on. Thus from the standpoint of total sales the product life cycle at any given time represents a composite which is actually a mosaic compounded of all the relevant market segments, a blending of a number of different life cycles whose variation is masked by the calculus of totality.

 

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