Andrew

I am very interested in PLC and this is the reason why all my thesis was about it! I don’t remember if I told you already, anyway I have a few ideas and question to share:

- in the era of globalisation I think PLC should be discussed along with the theory of Product-Cycle (Vernon, 1966) in order to give companies a better chance to forecast what the success of a product will be in different parts of the world. When I compare Levitt and Vernon’s thoughts I perceive PLC as the micro framework of marketing management and PC as the macro.

- PLC is definitely shortening but, is each stage of the cycle shrinking evenly? What is the role of effective Supply Chain Management in the cycle and its shortening?

- Lastly, it is risky for companies to approach PLC only as submissive tool of marketing prediction; it would be wise to actually use it as a category of interpretation, as a powerful management tool. In other words companies should not use the cycle only to understand in which stage their product is going next but to manage the lenght of each stage according to their needs.

Ciao!

Sab

p.s. my blog is in Italian but I am working on something in English…

I just wanted you to know that I really appreciate the time that you take to prepare these articles. Your knowledge really does supercede that of any other management consulting blogger in what I have seen of cyberspace.

I must say I am still a bit stuck in my ways (going on 56 next year) but this internet thing has really opened my eyes to a wealth of information that we just didnt get access to in my younger years.

To see such a great web journal from someone which costs them time and money is a truly inspirational thing.

I really enjoyed your article on the time value of money. We used to learn about that in finance in my day; How things have changed!

Keep up the good work Thomas,

Erik Pandolonarchsky.

Thanks for the wise words! Zach De La Rocha was definitely onto something.

You make a good point about product reinvention. Richard Branson also does a good job of keeping the Virgin image young and sexy. Interestingly, the Levi Strauss brand has been on the decline for some years. The people who buy Levis today are the same people who bought them forty years ago. Kids and teenagers don’t want to wear a pair of jeans that their parents think are cool. Levis inability to ‘keep it fresh’, as you say, has led to rise of other brands like G-Star Raw, etc.

My initial thought was that the product lifecycle concept is rubbish i.e. Coca-Cola is number one and has been for 50 years. However I have realised that the important message here is to ‘keep it fresh’. Coke as a product is over 100 years old, but coke as a brand is reinvented every year with new ads, packging etc. So it is actually the brand that has the lifecycle not the ‘product’.

Often I think the lifecycle is an excuse marketers use to explain dud products. After the sales spike on launch, sales die, it has to be the ‘life-cycle’ – of course it could never be a crummy product that nobody wants or likes (ie. Sanitarium Curios – what you may ask? Yeah- it’s in the bargain bin next to ‘up and go’). For a product to be succesful it needs to capture either neccesity or the zeigest of the consumer, if this is the case then it will survive as long as these conditions remain. Otherwise it will be another victim of the ‘life-cycle’. Or in the words of Zach De La Rocha ‘just another victim of the in-house drive by, he says ‘jump’ and you say ‘how high?’ ‘