HBR article-exploit the product life cycle

Exploit the Product Life Cycle
Nylon’s Life
How this might work for a product can be illustrated by looking at the history of nylon. The way
in which nylon’s booming sales life has been repeatedly and systematically extended and stretched
can serve as a model for other products. What has happened in nylon may not have been purposely
planned that way at the outset, but the results are quite as if they had been planned.
The first nylon end-uses were primarily military—parachutes, thread, rope. This was followed by
nylon’s entry into the circular knit market and its consequent domination of the women’s hosiery
business. Here it developed the kind of steadily rising growth and profit curves that every executive
dreams about. After some years these curves began to flatten out. But before they flattened very
noticeably, Du Pont had already developed measures designed to revitalize sales and profits. It did
several things, each of which is demonstrated graphically in Exhibit IV. This exhibit and the
explanation which follows take some liberties with the actual facts of the nylon situation in order
to highlight the points I wish to make. But they take no liberties with the essential requisites of
product strategy.
Exhibit IV Hypothetical Life Cycle—Nylon

Point A of Exhibit IV shows the hypothetical point at which the nylon curve (dominated at this
point by hosiery) flattened out. If nothing further had been done, the sales curve would have
continued along the flattened pace indicated by the dotted line at Point A. This is also the
hypothetical point at which the first systematic effort was made to extend the product’s life. Du
Pont, in effect, took certain “actions” which pushed hosiery sales upward rather than continuing
the path implied by the dotted line extension of the curve at Point A. At Point A action #1 pushed
an otherwise flat curve upward.
At points B, C, and D still other new sales and profit expansion “actions” (#2, #3, #4, and so forth)
were taken. What were these actions? Or, more usefully, what was their strategic content? What
did they try to do? They involved strategies that tried to expand sales via four different routes:
1. Promoting more frequent usage of the product among current users.
2. Developing more varied usage of the product among current users.
3. Creating new users for the product by expanding the market.
4. Finding new uses for the basic material.
Frequent Usage.
Du Pont studies had shown an increasing trend toward “bareleggedness” among women. This was
coincident with the trend toward more casual living and a declining perception among teenagers
of what might be called the “social necessity” of wearing stockings. In the light of those findings,
one approach to propping up the flattening sales curves might have been to reiterate the social
necessity of wearing stockings at all times. That would have been a sales-building action, though
obviously difficult and exceedingly costly. But it could clearly have fulfilled the strategy of
promoting more frequent usage among current users as a means of extending the product’s life.
Varied Usage.
For Du Pont, this strategy took the form of an attempt to promote the “fashion smartness” of tinted
hose and later of patterned and highly textured hosiery. The idea was to raise each woman’s
inventory of hosiery by obsolescing the perception of hosiery as a fashion staple that came only in
a narrow range of browns and pinks. Hosiery was to be converted from a “neutral” accessory to a
central ingredient of fashion, with a “suitable” tint and pattern for each outer garment in the lady’s
wardrobe.
This not only would raise sales by expanding women’s hosiery wardrobes and stores’ inventories,
but would open the door for annual tint and pattern obsolescence much the same as there is an
annual color obsolescence in outer garments. Beyond that, the use of color and pattern to focus
attention on the leg would help arrest the decline of the leg as an element of sex appeal—a trend
which some researchers had discerned and which, they claimed, damaged hosiery sales.
New Users.

Creating new users for nylon hosiery might conceivably have taken the form of attempting to
legitimize the necessity of wearing hosiery among early teenagers and subteenagers. Advertising,
public relations, and merchandising of youthful social and style leaders would have been called
for.
New Uses.
For nylon, this tactic has had many triumphs—from varied types of hosiery, such as stretch
stockings and stretch socks, to new uses, such as rugs, tires, bearings, and so forth. Indeed, if there
had been no further product innovations designed to create new uses for nylon after the original
military, miscellaneous, and circular knit uses, nylon consumption in 1962 would have reached a
saturation level at approximately 50 million pounds annually.
Instead, in 1962 consumption exceeded 500 million pounds. Exhibit V demonstrates how the
continuous development of new uses for the basic material constantly produced new waves of
sales. The exhibit shows that in spite of the growth of the women’s stocking market, the cumulative
result of the military, circular knit, and miscellaneous grouping would have been a flattened sales
curve by 1958. (Nylon’s entry into the broadwoven market in 1944 substantially raised sales above
what they would have been. Even so, the sales of broadwoven, circular knit, and military and
miscellaneous groupings peaked in 1957.)

Exhibit V Innovation of New Products Postpones the Time of Total Maturity—Nylon Industry
Source: Modern Textiles Magazine, February 1964, p. 33. © 1962 by Jordan P. Yale
Had it not been for the addition of new uses for the same basic material—such as warp knits in
1945, tire cord in 1948, textured yarns in 1955, carpet yarns in 1959, and so forth—nylon would
not have had the spectacularly rising consumption curve it has so clearly had. At various stages it
would have exhausted its existing markets or been forced into decline by competing materials. The
systematic search for new uses for the basic (and improved) material extended and stretched the
product’s life.
Conclusion
For companies interested in continued growth and profits, successful new product strategy should
be viewed as a planned totality that looks ahead over some years. For its own good, new product
strategy should try to predict in some measure the likelihood, character, and timing of competitive
and market events.
Even before entering the market development stage, the originator should make a judgment
regarding the probable length of the product’s normal life, taking into account the possibilities of
expanding its uses and users. This judgment will also help determine many things—for example,
whether to price the product on a skimming or a penetration basis, or what kind of relationship the
company should develop with its resellers.
These considerations are important because at each stage in a product’s life cycle each
management decision must consider the competitive requirements of the next stage. Thus a
decision to establish a strong branding policy during the market growth stage might help to insulate
the brand against strong price competition later; a decision to establish a policy of “protected”
dealers in the market development stage might facilitate point-of-sale promotions during the
market growth state, and so on. In short, having a clear idea of future product development
possibilities and market development opportunities should reduce the likelihood of becoming
locked into forms of merchandising that might possibly prove undesirable.
This kind of advance thinking about new product strategy helps management avoid other pitfalls.
For instance, advertising campaigns that look successful from a short-term view may hurt in the
next stage of the life cycle. Thus at the outset Metrecal advertising used a strong medical theme.
Sales boomed until imitative competitors successfully emphasized fashionable slimness. Metrecal
had projected itself as the dietary for the overweight consumer, an image that proved far less
appealing than that of being the dietary for people who were fashion-smart. But Metrecal’s original
appeal had been so strong and so well made that it was a formidable task later on to change people’s
impressions about the product. Obviously, with more careful long-range planning at the outset, a
product’s image can be more carefully positioned and advertising can have more clearly defined
objectives.
Recognizing the importance of an orderly series of steps in the introduction of sales-building
“actions” for new products should be a central ingredient of long-term product planning. A
carefully preplanned program for market expansion, even before a new product is introduced, can

have powerful virtues. The establishment of a rational plan for the future can also help to guide
the direction and pace of the on-going technical research in support of the product. Although
departures from such a plan will surely have to be made to accommodate unexpected events and
revised judgments, the plan puts the company in a better position to make things happen rather
than constantly having to react to things that are happening.
It is important that the originator doesnot delay this long-term planning until after the product’s
introduction. How the product should be introduced and the many uses for which it might be
promoted at the outset should be a function of a careful consideration of the optimum sequence of
suggested product appeals and product uses. Consideration must focus not just on optimum things
to do, but as importantly on their optimum sequence—for instance, what the order of use of various
appeals should be and what the order of suggested product uses should be. If Jell-O’s first
suggested use had been as a diet food, its chances of later making a big and easy impact in the
gelatin dessert market undoubtedly would have been greatly diminished. Similarly, if nylon
hosiery had been promoted at the outset as a functional daytime-wear hosiery, its ability to replace
silk as the acceptable high-fashion hosiery would have been greatly diminished.
To illustrate the virtue of pre-introduction planning for a product’s later life, suppose a company
has developed a nonpatentable new product—say, an ordinary kitchen salt shaker. Suppose that
nobody now has any kind of shaker. One might say, before launching it, that (1) it has a potential
market of “x” million household, institutional, and commercial consumers, (2) in two years market
maturity will set in, and (3) in one year profit margins will fall because of the entry of competition.
Hence one might lay out the following plan:
I. End of first year: expand market among current users
Ideas—new designs, such as sterling shaker for formal use, “masculine” shaker for barbecue use,
antique shaker for “Early American” households, miniature shaker for each table place setting,
moisture-proof design for beach picnics.
II. End of second year: expand market to new users
Ideas—designs for children, quaffer design for beer drinkers in bars, design for sadists to rub salt
into open wounds.
III. End of third year: find new uses
Ideas—make identical product for use as a pepper shaker, as decorative garlic salt shaker, shaker
for household scouring powder, shaker to sprinkle silicon dust on parts being machined in machine
shops, and so forth.
This effort to prethink methods of reactivating a flattening sales curve far in advance of its
becoming flat enables product planners to assign priorities to each task, and to plan future
production expansion and capital and marketing requirements in a systematic fashion. It prevents
one’s trying to do too many things at once, results in priorities being determined rationally instead
of as accidental consequences of the timing of new ideas, and disciplines both the product

development effort that is launched in support of a product’s growth and the marketing effort that
is required for its continued success.

HBR article-exploit the product life cycle

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HBR article-exploit the product life cycle