Maintenance Strategy - Definition & Meaning
What is Maintenance Strategy?
Maintenance Strategy is an approach which aims at maintaining the current market share of a product or brand, with continuous but limited investment in marketing, especially in low share or stagnant markets.
When is a maintenance strategy employed?
• Early Maturity Stage: A maintenance strategy is normally employed during the maturity phase of a product. In maturity, sales growth slows down, stabilizes and declines. In early maturity, a maintenance strategy is employed where a firm holds or maintains a stable marketing mix.
• Target market habituated to a product: It is also used when the target market is habituated to a particular brand or a product. Here, the goal of the brand is to maintain the market share by maintaining that behaviour. This requires continuous attention to product quality, distribution and advertising. Thus, a maintenance strategy is adopted.
• Decline Stage: A maintenance strategy might also be adopted in the decline stage of the product life cycle (PLC) if the brand is a market leader. In this case, the company continues its maintenance strategy from the maturity stage, till the time when the declining market becomes obvious. In this case, to maintain the market share, either the price of the product has to be reduced or advertising expenditure has to be increased.
For example, brands like Del Monte, Budweiser have a large number of repeat purchasers and it is important to maintain this segment of consumers. For this purpose, they employ maintenance strategies.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Maintenance Strategy along with its overview.
This article has been researched & authored by the Business Concepts Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.
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