Marketing Case

Q: Select a product with which you are familiar. What stage is your selected product at in the product life cycle? Provide rationale for your answer. Based on your knowledge of the product lifecycle, what types of changes will occur to your selected product as it continues through the product life cycle? How will this affect the marketing of your selected product?

A: To answer this question I will discuss the media consoles/video games that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo sell. Their current generation of consoles by these companies have been around for five years, and they have market maturity. Their competition is established and their sales have leveled off. Customers know what each console is and what it does, and most of the customers are so brand loyal that they are very unlikely to switch. Since Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo products have reached market maturity, they have started to slash their prices. They will keep doing this in an attempt to reach late adopters of game technology, since these products are moving towards market decline. Product maturity is when firms try to establish new selling points which will show that their product is very different from what the competition has to offer. Microsoft, for example, introduced “Project Natal” which allows the Xbox360 to use motion-based interactivity. This is in response to the capabilities of the Nintendo Wii. Sony has not announced a similar improvement, which might mean that their product will become less marketable. Also, these companies are developing new games which are exclusive to their systems, developing new online content , and coming up with new features of their software to appeal to new customers. Today’s consoles will be phased out and replaced with new models. Before that, I think that the consoles will become even less expensive, as these companies try to use marketing to get as much profit from these products as possible. The Xbox360 is rumored to be released in a “slim”