5 Stages of Product Life Cycle

When marketing your hotel, an amenity or any other product — smart marketers and team leaders — know what stage of the product life cycle they’re in. *You can interchange the words “Product/Market” as it fits your goal.

The 5 stages of product life cycle can inform:

• Marketing Strategy
• Advertising Channels
• Next Steps to Grow Revenue
• SDR’s

The product life cycle also applies to market conditions. An example would be COVID and how it’s changed hospitality for the long term. Primarily, knowing where you’re at in the marketing/product life cycle will tell you how to best market your hotel.

The Five (5) Stages of Product Life Cycle

• New Markets
• Where You Can Be First (examples right now, Alexa Skills, Voice Marketing, UV light disinfectors)
• Newer Markets and You’re Second
• (examples right now, Digital Marketing, Paid Ads, Retargeting)
• Sophistication
• Your market and prospects have now heard all the claims from the benign to the extreme. (Example. Lose 39 pounds in 4 weeks or get $40 back, Miracle Pill Floats Fat out of Your Body, Best Vacation You’ve Ever Had, Pretty soon it will be about how clean each room is.)
• Saturation and Sophistication.
• Competitors begin honing in on mechanism rather than the promise. (Example. First No-Exercise, Muscle Building Wonder Drug, UV Light Scanners in Every Room, Safe Seal and Disinfected Rooms, Limited Housekeeping etc.)
• Dead Market Stage.
• It’s not as bad as it sounds 🙂 Here, the market no longer believes your claims and has seen it all before. Prospects no longer wish to be aware of your product or service. Represents a shift from benefits to mechanism and finally to identification with the prospect themselves. We see this now with the heavy emphasis on personalization. Identification allows for companies to open up new markets in a dead space. An example would be the push from cigarette manufacturers in the 50’s to normalize the idea of women smoking, which at the time was considered taboo.