The Seed Becomes a Big Tree

In the Maturity Stage of the product life cycle, your product is at its peak of its life. Cost of the product continues to lower as a result of production volumes increasing and experience increasing efficiency of manufacturer. As more competitors are seeing that your product has the big slice in the market they too will produce a similar product. (Different enough to bypass any patents you may have, to stay legal but still directly compete.)

Product Life Cycle- Maturity

At this point, market saturation is reached and prices tend to drop due to the proliferation of competing products. It is important to maintain or increase market share at this stage of the life cycle through brand differentiation and feature diversification (how can you be different in a way that the end use consumer cares). Maybe some features like this picture?

Lipstick with features of a Swiss Army Knife

Now, let’s use the same product from the last blog entry about Product Life Cycle: the lipstick that is both a moisturizer and sunscreen that changes color depending on the wearer’s body temperature. The lipstick is in every woman’s purse and becomes a household name.

All major cosmetic companies are about to start or have started to introduce similar lipsticks. And this has prompted you to further drop the price to keep your customers and attract even more. To keep customers loyal to your brand/product you add new features to the lipstick like being waterproof or bundling the lipstick with matching eye shadow or blush. Is all this enough?

Help Your Product Mature and Not Die,
Samuel Carrara