VHS: Product Life Cycle - The Master Tutors

For each product that is available on the market, there is a specific life cycle. The four stages of the cycle include the introduction of the product to the market, growth, market maturity, and decline (White, 2019). The discussion of the product life cycle will be illustrated with the help of the VHS tape example. Initially created by JVC, VHS tapes were the main format for carrying and watching video footage in the 1980s and 1990s (WDD Staff, 2010). Today, the tapes are considered outdated and inconvenient, which means that the product has already reached the decline stage of its life cycle.

At the first stage of the VHC life cycle, the product was developed. The stage was associated with the company coming up with the specific idea of creating the product. In 1971, the companys engineers, Shuzuo Takano and Yuma Shiraishi, created a team for product development, which finished their work in 1973 with a functional prototype (Ganapati, 2010). An essential step at the stage was to develop a set of objectives associated with the benefits of the tape.

The stage of market introduction implied the rolling out of VHS tapes by VHC. A relatively slow profit growth characterized the period because product development costs exceeded sales. VHS tapes were first introduced to the general public in 1975, which meant that it took VHC two years between the creation of the first prototype and the introduction to the market (C-Scott, 2016). The third stage was the products growth, which was characterized by the rising acceptance of VHS tapes by the public. This stage lasted until 1998, with the tapes being the most widespread carrier of video content. After the peak in 1998, the sales of VHS tapes matured and declined, as they were replaced by DVD carriers that were more compact and convenient to use.