Product Identity Over Time and the Concept of Product Life Cycle

Abstract

Since the introduction of the concept of the product life cycle (PLC) to the marketing literature almost 67 years ago, a plethora of literature regarding this concept has appeared in the academic as well as trade journals. In spite of an extensive body of research related to PLC, several critical questions related to the product identity and changes in the identity of product over time are completely ignored by the researchers. This study is an attempt to fill this gap in the marketing literature. After defining the concept of product identity, we provide answers to the following questions: How do products stay the same even after they change? At what point does a product become different? When we talk about a certain product and say that “it changed,” what exactly is “it”?