Life- Span Concept -Modern Marketing Technique

Introduction

The global competition has forced the marketers to divert their attention towards the prime factor as user life span. The Users' Life Span (ULS) is the psychological situation and circumstances when consumers make the important purchase of a specific product. The principal underlying the ULS is that when the time span of both i.e. product and the users matches each other, only then the final decision to purchase the product by a consumer will be materialized. Therefore, it is vital for the global marketers to identify the stage that is going through the generic category of the product.

The manufacturer should try to find new uses for old products, or improve them in terms of functionality and aesthetics. The product should deliver the expected benefits to the customer without any defects. These can be various types of features, such as ease of use, durability, aesthetic appearance, manner of operation, ease of repair and so on. These and other features make up the quality of the product that marketers need to constantly improve, because the competition is doing the same thing. In each product strategy, in addition to modification of products, consider the problem of innovation. Innovation strategies, with relative stability and strength of competitive advantage, are the most spectacular product strategies (Sahoo, pp. 1).

The initial 4 P's (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) along with the additional 3 P's (People, Process, Physical Evidence), no doubt, played an important role in establishing the marketing mix concept useful and practical for global enterprises. Moreover, 4 C's (Customer solution, Customer cost, Customer convenience, Customer communication) also consider about the aspect of consumers. These approaches stressed prime consideration to marketer and secondary consideration to user (Francois, pp. 1).

Implications of Users'Life Cycle of a Product

The course of the product life cycle determines the nature of the product, technical progress, product acceptance by the market, the ease of entering a competitive market for new products. Many products, such as clothing, is sometimes placed on the market, knowing that their life cycle will last a relatively short time, i.e. one year or just one season.

The Product Life Cycle (PLC) and the Users Life Cycle (ULC) are important fro the marketers such they are comprised of the four stages. The life span of the user has four sections such as Idea, Thinking, Decision and Purchasing. Therefore, we can say that the ULC of the product is the longer while the mark is shorter (Immonen, pp. 3).

The ULC is very crucial for the marketers as it us about the consumers decision making factors which the customers keep in mind while choosing or purchasing any certain product. The evaluation of the ULC strongly considers the sales and profits. The duration of the life span cycle is not stable, so it may vary in any phase. The internal and the external competitive factors also affect the ULC followed by firms competing in the market. Additionally, it has been observed across the globe by various marketers that the ...