Product Life Cycle

Every product or service available in the market goes through its life cycle which broadly entails four stages: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. The PLC concept can be used to analyze a product category, a product form, a product or a brand. Depending upon the current demand for a product in the market & its future growth potential along with many other micro & macroeconomic changes that take place during a product’s evolution  & the ability of the producers, marketers & the sellers of the product to continue to adapt & innovate at every stage of that evolution, each product goes through its unique life cycle.

             The producers/providers, the marketeers as well as the marketers must adapt with changing times & find new ways to keep their businesses profitable & stay relevant in the market. At every stage of the evolution of a product, it’s the unique value propositions, offerings & positioning that can differentiate a particular brand from its competitors. As this blog is dedicated to illustrating & understanding various aspects of marketing  by relating them to various marketing & other strategies adopted to promote & sell a particular product/service, which in this case is Vodafone, we will now focus on various strategies adopted by Vodafone at different stages of its evolution as a brand to prove how Vodafone as a brand has managed not only to evolve & change but also to continuously progress through innovation and implementation.

             Here, I am going to use the deductive reasoning method to prove my point where I would propose a hypothesis & move forward by providing all the relevant information & data to prove my hypothesis, so my hypothesis is that as a brand Vodafone’s life cycle is going to be a one with scalloped pattern. Before I move forward, I must explain in brief what a scalloped pattern of a PLC is & what it looks like.

                              

                 Shown above is a scalloped patterned growth trajectory of a product. Here, sales pass through a succession of life cycles based on the discovery of new product characteristics, uses or users. My hypothesis is that Vodafone as a brand will go through such a growth trajectory as it continues to innovate & reinvent itself by not only recognizing the opportunities available in the market but also by continuing to build its brand value by delivering a superior, consistent & differentiated customer experience.

                 Before I talk about various strategies adopted by Vodafone, lets first define what a strategy is. As per Johnson’s and Scoles’ definition, strategy is the direction and scope of an organization over the long term which achieves advantage for the organization through its configuration of resources within changing environments to meet the needs of the markets and to fulfil stakeholders’ expectations. Now let’s see what strategies Vodafone has adopted over the years & what others it is planning to adopt in the future & check whether all those strategies fit in the definition mentioned above.

                 The first thing which differentiates Vodafone from its competitors is its method of segmentation. The main categories in which Vodafone has segmented its customers are Geographic (Circle A, Circle B, Circle C), Demographic (Income, Age, Nature of the customer), Psychographic (Lifestyle & personality), Behavioral (Benefits sought, usage rate, Types of services required). Thus, Vodafone provides customized services to the customers as per their requirements & usage patterns. For example they offer prepaid plans ranging from INR 10 to INR 200.

                  The next part of their unique strategy is their marketing & advertising. A new Marketing Framework has been developed and implemented across the business, which includes a new vision of expanding the Group’s category from mobile only to total communications. Their aim is to be the communications leader in an increasingly connected world. Through their various creative advertising & promotion campaigns they have demonstrated that great ideas executed with a vision & passion make more of a difference than  other clichéd promotion techniques. Even though Vodafone has not hired a known face toendorse itself, it has still managed to establish a very high “emotional connect” with its customers through its brilliantly conceived marketing strategies. For example Zoozoos Vs Shahrukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, M.S. Dhoni & Abhishek Bachhan.

           Another very crucial factor is brand experience. Vodafone continues to implement Vodafone’s promise of “helping customers make the most of their time”. Their communication strategy has always focused on “Happy to help” which tends to strike an emotional chord with the customer. Vodafone continues to use a customer measurement system called “customer delight” to monitor and drive customer satisfaction in the Group’s controlled markets at a local and global level which identifies areas for improvement and focus. 2006: 69.9%, 2007: 70.6%, 2008: 73.1%.

                  The most important factors of Vodafone’s strategy are product development & diversification. It’s 3G service in India which would be a quantum leap for browsing and internet based mobile applications and services. 3G would also result in improved connectivity and clearer reception as it provides a greater network capacity which is achieved through improved spectral efficiency. In order to diversify its current market portfolio, Vodafone is launching a global Machine to Machine (M2M) service platform for helping companies to deploy and manage large, wireless M2M projects for applications in customer service enhancement and central control and automation of projects. In the Indian context, M2M is an untapped sector with enormous potential for growth. WiBRO (Wireless Broadband) ,has the capacity to overcome data rate of limitation of mobile phones by providing a staggering 30 to 50 MB/s speed. As in the case of M2M platforms, WiBRO is a very promising market in India. Providing these two services in India would open new avenues of growth for Vodafone and would help it diversify into different market verticals.