Managing the Product Life Cycle
Product life cycle
management refers to the strategies and tactics of treating the product
like a mini-business after the product is launched. In vigorously
competitive markets, characterized by compressed product life spans,
emerging categories, and brand diffusion, you need to understand how to
assess the performance of your product or service within the context of
the master product plan. In this course, you'll learn to monitor the
marketplace, the competition, and to analyze the financial health of
your product or service. Attention is paid to product capabilities,
pricing, supply chain, channel effectiveness, and promotional tactics.
You'll learn that information is a major asset to leverage as attention
turns to customer satisfaction, product usage, and buying behavior in
targeted segments.
Through the explanation
of the characteristics and behaviors of products and services, you'll
learn important strategies and imperatives for managing each stage of
the life cycle, namely growth, maturity, and decline. You'll even learn
how to engineer a graceful market exit. Using the product life cycle
model to depict unit sales, revenue, profitability, and cash flow,
you'll learn the analytical techniques, which show you how to interpret
business performance so that the appropriate strategies can be
determined, applied, and monitored. This class illustrates how marketing
strategies, which are timely and highly integrated with life cycle
activities promote greater levels of marketplace agility.
The course shows, in a
very real sense, how integral the roles of product managers and product
teams are throughout the life cycles of products and services. This
highly interactive class uses a combination of lecture, interactive
discussions, and in-class exercise. When you complete this class, you'll
have a clear understanding of the things you need to do to optimize the
performance of your products and services to sustain your competitive
advantage.
Primary
course elements include:
- The importance of gathering information, including customer
feedback and satisfaction, industry and competitive assessments, and
product quality
- Product revitalization strategies
- Effective use of a Life Cycle Action Review
- Adjusting the marketing mix for maximum advantage
- Finding new markets for existing products and services
- Maximizing effectiveness of the cross functional team as the
product evolves
- Repositioning the product
- Refining the value proposition
- The role of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Leading a cohesive product team
- The role of LCM tools, software, and product data management
- Improving customer loyalty
- Using financial tools to monitor product performance
- Creating and maintaining a durable brand
- Executing mature product strategies to maximize profits
- Understanding decline stage activities and product retirement
approaches
- Discontinuing products and exiting markets
- Maintaining and updating the master product plan
