This past class we learned about the “Product Life Cycle” as well as the decisions management has to make when introducing a new product.  A company usually has many strategy options on how to go about offering a new product, but overall the main goal is to “meet the consumer’s wants and needs.”    Not only that, but they also want to be sustainable and create a competitive advantage.  Well, in the past couple of years Apple has done a great job doing just that with its innovative products.  The technology that has recently been receiving a lot of attention is their tablet, the iPad.

Apple’s introduction of the iPad was clearly a successful one, and this then began the tablet phenomenon.  All of a sudden, it became a necessity in the eyes of many consumers.    Upon seeing Apple’s success many companies followed and created their own tablets.  For many of these “followers”, this was not even the right market for them, but upon seeing Apple’s success they felt compelled to.

I was one of the many individuals that decided to go with the “inexpensive option” and buy a “follower’s” tablet.  At the time it looked like a great idea because I would have something similar to the iPad, but at a much cheaper price.  What I did not know at the time was that the price mirrored the quality.  This specific tablet turned out to be a “low performance, low cost” product, hence why it was cheap on the market.  It seemed as if it was put together without any proper research—simply created just to compete with Apple.  The issues were endless; everything from the actual hardware to the software and I was left unsatisfied.

Typically in a PLC, the introduction stage is the most important stage for a product.  The reason being is because the growth stage depends on it; the phase where you actually begin to profit.  If you succeed in your introduction stage which includes proper research and development, constant quality tests, good marketing, etc., you are able to enter the growth stage and go beyond.  It seemed as though this specific tablet company literally crashed every path in the process of their introduction phase just so that they could get their tablet out on the market.  The consequence of that was that this product ended up being a loss for the company because it never went past the introduction stage.

This article I found on KnowThis.com breaks the introduction stage into two parts—an early and a late stage.  It talks about the basics of what it takes to get past the introduction phase and the challenges faced by many companies when introducing a new product, similar to what this tablet creator was faced with.  Read the complete article at: http://www.knowthis.com/principles-of-marketing-tutorials/planning-with-the-product-life-cycle/introduction-stage-of-the-plc/

My question is:  why do these major companies set themselves up for failure like that, even though there have been plenty of examples in the past where a similar mistake was made and it led to nothing but disappointment?