Strategic management has taken a quantum leap with innovation and disruption of industries. The more Disruption happens the more product life cycles will change faster creating either opportunity or death of an industry. Product life cycles are becoming short as margins are falling and new industries and process are coming up to replace traditional models. As an economist and business strategist, I find that product life cycles should be used as triggers for rebranding an organization.
Yes, every organization is now looking aggressively for rebranding their business but they don’t know when they should take up the initiative of rebranding their organization starting from product to person. Well in this respect I find that product life cycle which is an in-house metric can be used extensively for making a turnaround of an organization. The best few examples of failed product life cycle identification are Nokia the one I can remember at the earliest.
When does the rebranding and Life cycle of the product come into Play? How I identify when the act and how to act to improve the cash cows of yesterday? This is the most common question in every business mind. I need a trigger alert along with immediate strategy, brainstorm before it is too late. ROI on investments and profit are two different subjects to play. We chase profit, do we chase ROI? When we chase ROI we get into each product life cycle and then improvise the whole strategy. ROI is an important tool more than the profit of a product. The cash cow of a product and ROI both are linked together. The success of a product is the path to a healthy ROI.
Hence product life cycle plays an important role in an organization at every step to identify the pattern of the industry, consumer behaviour and most important to identify the phase of death of an organization or industry. The organization which identifies the changing pattern of the product life cycle and its process of distribution will remain always on the growth path. The reason is that the organization can identify the consumer consumption pattern, taste, belief an, more importantly, the future outlook towards the demand.
One of the best solutions adopted is to kill the products which have a low revenue. It is one of the finest, dumbest strategies. Well, low revenue is a bait to maximize returns since the cost is also less through adopting the strategy of technology.
We often notice the introduction of new products is the measurement yardstick for business success. What about the existing ones? Rebranding of old ones is one of the important parts of the organization which is now ignored. Redefining products improves the product life cycles.
The life cycle of Business and Product are very short-lived in changing dynamics of Business. Technology changes the gears of the game and hence Trigger system for business strategy alert should be in place and it should be monitored.
Rebranding not only improves product life cycles but creates a competitive advantage when others are losing hopes or changing gears. A losing product can gain its growth once a trigger is identified and acted upon.
Products which are cash cow may not be the same in the near term. New teams, shifting of resources, falling revenue margins, disconnect or rather communication gap, wrong sales of products are few but not the exhaustive list of falling revenue. Hence rebranding, creating a composition in products improves the product life cycles.
- When does rebranding or change in strategy should be adopted is a massive question. Even a substantial jump is a trigger alert. Miss selling of products can be a massive success story for the short term and long term poison for the organization.
- A step of rebranding a product which has falling revenue is another strategy.
- Its not necessary to drop a product which has falling revenue. Falling revenue can be a bait to gain market share for other products.
- The concept which lies here is developing the right strategy to gain market share where once every one flocked together.
- Rebranding based on the Life cycle of products and getting triggers alert from the product life cycle is a massive alert game.
- Falling revenues of a product lead to loss of service since the latter is linked with a cost. Rebranding the product creates a new product and increases the life cycle of the product for another ride of cash flow.
- Linking Branding strategies with the life cycle of the product is the best combination of developing long term consistent revenue even when others are losing.
- Product life cycles improvisation creates a competitive advantage.
- Quantum Jump in revenues should also be taken alert to identify the loopholes of miss-selling.
- People will come, people will go but the goodwill remains at its place.
Conclusion:
There are many metrics to identify the point of starting the journey of rebranding. Among all these sales metric, the big data analytics applied to product life cycle is a big tool to identify that point. Industries are changing fast and hence new business models are getting identified much faster. This disruption can be monitored through the use of analytics on the product life cycle. The changing pattern of the product life cycle is an early indication of identifying the path to innovation and new product. Bundling of products can be of great help to create new products or offerings. It is now always wise to kill the product where revenue is falling. Different Combination of products can help to create significant quantum jump for organisation performance. Remember that the speed of disruption is a faster and hence deep eye on analytics of products pattern is the key to survive and evolve.
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