PLC 1.1???

The first thing an MBA must know and must master is the Product Life Cycle. As we enter B-Schools to graduate to be Masters in Business Administration. We yearn to become a Business Owner pretty soon, having been equipped with an MBA. As we envisage to roll out products for the world, we must always at the back of our minds calculate what phase of the life cycle my products are in, and what does my portfolio speak of my company.

It would be a mistake, if we ever gave up on products as themselves! Dint get it?! I mean to say that Products have an evolution. No product is the same product when it becomes a Brand. Branding enlivens a dead product, and opens up avenues for it to foray into roads it would have never dreamt to have traversed. Sometimes, we call this the reinvention of product, or sometimes innovation. But the point to be driven home is that if you are a brand, you need not worry! No matter how many nadirs your product faces, it would sure rise back to the zeniths.

To make sense of what I am trying to say, look at Disney. They made toys, comics, films, and one could think that’s it, the show is over. The innovation, vis-a-vis Disney, was held to be only newer comics, newer characters, but that was as per the conventional Product Life Cycle, which we could say PLC 1.0. PLC 1.0 never took into consideration Branding, and never did it give any leeway for a curve to emerge out mid-way as a fallout of Branding.

So, lets welcome PLC 1.1. In the example of Disney, when we thought Snow White, Ariel, Belle and Jasmine went out of the scene making their share of limelight on mugs, cups and towels, Kidada Jones has rediscovered the. She has created haute couture out of these names, and the reason behind this??? It is precisely because these names are BIG BRANDS.

Does the bottomline then become that if your product is a Brand, there is no death to it???

~ by Naresh on September 6, 2007.