Reconceptualising product life-cycle theory as stakeholder engagement with non-profit organisations

ABSTRACT

The paper critically re-examines product life-cycle (PLC) theory, developed over 50 years ago. Despite prevalence in marketing pedagogy and continued popularity within empirical research, PLC is seldom challenged. The paper identifies the organisation-centric construct underpinning the theory and highlights a disconnection between PLC theory and the recent academic insight around customer engagement.

It reconceptualises the life-cycle concept based on engagement between stakeholder and non-profit organisation (NPO), structured upon both the market orientation and social exchange constructs. The revised framework maps stakeholder engagement with the NPO through the five stages of incubation, interaction, involvement, immersion, and incapacitation. The paper concludes with identifying a roadmap for future empirical research to develop and validate the re-envisaged conceptual model. The methodology used is narrative literature review supported by secondary research from specialist practitioner reports.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory
• market orientation
• not for profit marketing
• customer engagement
• product life-cycle theory

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the reviewers of the Journal of Marketing Management and the British Academy of Management Conference (UK, Sept. 2017) for their supportive and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Also, thanks go to Dr. Gary Bess for sharing his original 1998 paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. www.scope.org.uk.

2. www.ageuk.org.uk.

3. www.comicrelief.com.

4. www.bbcchildreninneed.co.uk.

5. www.sigrid-rausing-trust.org.

6. www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/tower-of-london-remembers.

7. www.rspb.org.uk.

8. NPO supporting people with learning disabilities, www.hft.org.uk.

9. NPO supporting offenders, www.theclinkcharity.org.

10. Royal National Institute of Blind People, supporting blind and partially sighted people, www.rnib.org.uk.

11. NPO supporting people with mental health issues, www.mind.org.uk.

12. ‘Kids Company’ was a London based charity that specialised in supporting deprived inner-city children. Founded in 1986 by Camilla Batmanghelidjh, by 2011 it was supporting 36,000 young people each year. However, despite high profile trustees and funders, including central government, it ran into serious financial difficulty. The charity ceased operations in 2015 with significant public fallout for the trustees and founder (BBC, 2016).

13. www.gatesfoundation.org.

14. www.worldbank.org/en/what-we-do.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah-Louise Mitchell

Sarah-Louise Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She holds a PhD from Henley Business School and MBA from London Business School. Her major area of research focuses on providing academic insight for the non-profit sector, particularly understanding the role of brand for non-profit organisations through mapping stakeholder decision-making behaviour, decoding non-profit brand storytelling and exploring charity brand touch-points. Previous, she worked extensively for consumer goods, food retail and non-profit organisations, in senior roles including strategic marketing, category insight and new product development.

Moira Clark

Moira Clark is Professor of Strategic Marketing at Henley Business School and Director of The Henley Centre for Customer Management. She also serves as a consultant to a number of leading UK and international companies. Her major area of research and consulting is in Customer Management, Social Networking, Customer Retention and Internal Marketing. She has worked extensively in the area of culture and climate, its impact on retention and loyalty and the critical linkages between employee behaviour and customer retention. Moira has researched and published widely on the subject of Relationship Marketing, customer experience and service excellence. Publications include for example, the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Management Reviews and the Journal of Relationship Marketing. She is also co-author of 'Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage, Winning and Keeping Customers and Relationship Marketing: Strategy and Implementation'. Her book 'Business Success through Service Excellence' examines the crucial factors needed to achieve and maintain service excellence.