A product has to go through different stages, which is common to the entire products. These stages of product which are five in number are popularly known as product life cycle. It shows the products sale and profit over its life time.

Stage I Product development stage: This stage begins when the company develops a new product. Which involves the process of Idea generation, Idea screening, Concept development, Market strategy development, Business analysis, Product development, Test marketing and Commercialization.

Stage II Introduction stage: this stage starts with the launching of the product. At this stage the sale of the product is low and due to low sale there are heavy promotion expenses and profits are negative. At this level or stage the marketer can himself decide the product pricing policy which he want to opt. there are different product pricing policy shown below:-

Stage III Growth stage: in this stage the sale of the product start increasing and consumer start liking the product. Profit of the company also increases. But in this stage company is required to use different strategies to be in the market. Like the company have to do proper advertising, improve product quality, its features etc.

Stage IV Maturity stage: with this stage the product enters the stage of maturity. This stage has last longer than the previous stages. This stage has three phases:

Ø      Growth maturity: the growth starts decline because of distribution saturation.

• Stable maturity: the growth starts decline because of market saturation.
• Decaying maturity: here consumers start moving towards other products.

Stage V Decline stage: at the end sale of all the products start declining. Decline in sale may be due to many reasons like competition, consumer change in liking, technology changes etc. so it better to reduce or stop the production of those products.

Therefore all these are the different stages through which the product goes.