An Apple's Life Cycle

You know that feeling when a new product hits the market and you feel like you have to have it because it’s the next big thing? Yeah, we all get that feeling. It happened recently with the release of the all new Apple iPhone 6. It’s bigger, sleeker, and despite the rumors of its gymnastic-like bending skills, it’s the hottest product on the market right now. Do you even remember what the original iPhone looked like? I sure don’t. Or what about an iPod? Do you remember those things that you had before music could be put directly on your phone? Apple has gone through major changes in their product life cycles in their years, and I’m about to bring you back a bit to the products of our past.

First off though, the Product Life Cycle is defined as the stages a new product goes through in the marketplace: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline (Kerin).

 

The Apple iPhone 6 has just been introduced into the market along with its all new Apple Pay, and therefore it was considered to be in the introduction stage. This was occurring a few months ago when the iPhone 6 had yet to really hit the market and Apple was spending money on marketing their new product and teaching consumers about Apple Pay. At this stage in the game, marketers just want to get their products out there for consumers to simply be aware that it is being produced. Companies spend heavily on advertising in this stage also. At this point, because there is little to no competition, a lot of companies, like Apple, will use Price Skimming in order to set a high initial pricing help the company recover costs of development as well as capitalize on the price insensitivity of early buyers (Kerin).

 

As of now, the iPhone 6 has just hit the second stage of the

 

product life cycle, the growth stage. The product has now been introduced into the market and there have been rapid sales. The phones were flying off the shelf so quickly that at least in my hometown, there was a one month backorder if you wanted the new phone. This is the stage where competitors will also begin to emerge into the market. We should be on the look out to see which company will be next to create something similar to Apple Pay.

The next stage is the maturity stage of a product. The iPhone 5 has now officially reached this stage in development. When the iPhone 6 came out, it meant that the iPhone 5 became second best and began to drop out of the running. Purchases are slowing down rapidly as people now want the newest innovation. Marketing attention is directed toward holding on to market share through further product differentiation and finding new buyers.

And finally, we have the decline stage. In the decline stage of the life cycle, a company can choose to take two very different courses of action. The first is called harvesting in which a company retains the product but reduces marketing costs. This is the stage that the iPhone 4 and 4S has just hit due to the introduction of the 6. The second course of action is called deletion, or when the company drops the product from the company’s product line entirely. This is what has happened now to iPhones 2G and 3, the originals.

Who knows what Apple will invent next. But the more and more they invent, the further they push their current products down the line of the Product Life Cycle.