Product Life Cycles

1. A fad that only lasted in the year of 1975 till Christmas that same year. This fad was "My Pet Rock."  My Pet Rock sold for $3.95, and creator Gary Dahl unloaded more than five million of the "pets" in six months. He walked away with a significant $15 million.  Popularity for the rock thinned out after the 1975 Christmas season.
 

2. A long lasting product that has been around for more than 20 years is Advil. Advil has been on the market since 1984. Advil is able to produce 32,400,000 tablets per year. This product is very popular and is usually the best seller when it comes to NSAID (non-sterodial anti-inflammatory drug).
 

3. A technological product that has only lasted about 3-5 years would be the CD walkman. When they first came out they were very popular and everyone had one. But about 5 years later technology was starting to build and MP3's were just starting to come out and everyone was getting rid of their CD walkmans.

Product Development

Example of a product mix would be the company Coca Cola. Not only does Coca Cola make Coke, they make Fanta, Sprite, Powerade, Fuze, Vitamin Water, Full Throttle, Odwalla and all the Simply Juices.

Coca Cola's product line, Vitamin Water, includes 17 different flavours from Dragon Fruit to Lemon Tea.



Coca Cola's product item, Coca Cola, has many different kinds and sizes of soft drinks.
 
Coca Cola's product width includes 500 brands. Within these 500 brands there are over 3500 different types of drinks.

Limitless Luxury: Ferrari

Ferrari is an Italian sports car manufacturer based in Maranello, Italy. Founded by Enzo Ferrari in 1929, as Scuderia Ferrari, the company sponsored drivers and manufactured race cars before moving into production of street-legal vehicles as Ferrari in 1947.


The range of prices for a Ferrari can vary from $100,000-$500,000. Ferrari sells their products online, and in their own stores around the world. The intended target is wealthier middle aged men because they are fast and luxurious cars. Wyclef Jean drives a Ferrari 360 Spyder, Robinson Cano of the New York Yankees drives a Ferrari and Lebron James drives a Ferrari F430 Spyder. This product appeals to me because it is a very fast and luxurious car and many guys my age dream of owning a Ferrari. I would splurge on a product like this because it is a good investment if you want to be known for the car you drive.

Gatorade-High Demand Because Of Marketing



This shows pro football quarter back Payton Manning enjoying Gatorade after a hard workout.


Gatorade is the official sports drink of NASCAR, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, Women's National Basketball Association, USA Basketball, National Hockey League, Association of Volleyball Professionals, US Soccer Federation, Major League Soccer. This alone is a great way for a company like Gatorade to market their product because they are supporting some of the best athletes in the world by supporting all these different types of sports.

Yahoo! or Google?

By the end of the 20th century Yahoo! reigned superior to all other search engines including Google.

In 2000, the site had 56% of search engine referrals (Lycos, Excite, AskJeeves), six times times its closest competitor. In 2001, Yahoo! began using Google’s search algorithm. And as Google began competing for share, Yahoo! began to quickly lose steam. By the year of 2002 the popularity of Google's efficient search engine grew exponentially. It referred 31.8% of all searches, compared to Yahoo!'s 36.3%. During the next 8 years Google blew past Yahoo! and had 65% of the market share compared to the cloeset competitor Yahoo! which had 16.1%.

Today, Google faces competition form YouTube, Yahoo, Bing, etc. but they are still able to stay out on top and be the best search engine on the Internet because of their easy to use search engine and popularity.

Netflix's Marketing System

Netflix is a company that has grown to be a very popular organization over the past few years. They have been able to create television commercials to promote their product and use gaming systems to advertise.

Netflix is a company that lets you rent movies or TV shows for a low price of $ 8.00 per month. They are able to draw in customers by making it available to game systems such as PlayStation, Xbox and Wii. Netflix is also available on the Internet and customers are able to have movies mailed if that is was they want. It began in 1999 and exploded in 2009 offering 100,000 titles on DVD and surpassed 10 subscribers. Today, Netflix is a company that grows everyday because of the attractive prices and variety of movies.

Google's SWOT Analysis

Strengths:

The basic look and feel of Google search engine which every single user can access and gain useful information is the main strength of Google. The speed of the search engine is fantastic and can gain any information within seconds. Google has the provision to integrate with various languages and its localized searching is added features compared to other search engines. Google’s products are its major strength which has created a huge user base. This has enhanced the trust to its customers and shareholders. Furthermore, the development work going on at Google supports innovation thereby always keeping the company in a moving state.

Weaknesses:

Even Google has acknowledged that its becoming really difficult to differentiate between real good content, good content and average content as a search engine can’t check for credibility of all the information. There are a lot of search engine strategies coming up. Even if a businessman is credible, his counterpart who might be more knowledgeable about Google’s system might receive more business. Google is just a search engine and it maintains its information in a organized manner and provide it to the user. Many products of Google like Google maps, finance, news, book search, picnic etc are not known to all the users.

Opportunities:

With emerging trends of technology and increase in internet users, a revolution has been created in the 21st century for the common man to quest for information and knowledge.”Adwords” which is pay per click program offered by Google and “Adsense” a program in which the website publishers earn a portion of the advertising revenue for placing Google sponsored links on their site are major revenue generation programs and customer attraction programs respectively. Google’s major revenue comes from advertising 99.9% of its revenue is gained from ads. Google is constantly involved in acquisition programs like acquiring YouTube, Android, Picasa which comes to nearly 90 companies in its list. More importantly, Google has such a huge user base that any additions it adds, it immediately becomes more popular than even the original idea.

Threats:

It faces competition from other search engines like Yahoo, Bing etc. Baidu and Yandex in China and Russia are the market winners in that environment. These can also be emerging threats to Google. Changing user preferences has resulted in expectation of more quality results, which Yahoo focuses as its major agenda. Google is more than 10 yrs old. In this area Google might fail or take time to migrate its existing technology which is a serious threat. Most important is that Google does not lose its focus with competitors like Facebook and Yahoo. With its search engine, it has a tremendous sustainable advantage on the internet and moving away from that would be the biggest threat Google can face.