Product Life Cycle in Action - The Bill gets The Chop

I’m always on the lookout for alternative ways of illustrating and explaining the product life cycle. A golden example is plastered all over the news - the decision of ITV to end long-running police soap The Bill

Lots of good coverage on the decision here in the Daily Mail and here in Media Guardian.

If we’re thinking of The Bill as a product (why not?) then the proxy for sales when drawing the product life cycle is viewer ratings - the average number of people watching each episode and series.

For a well-established and long-running show like The Bill, the sales/ratings curve is likely to have shown a fairly steady decline once it began to enter the decline phase. ITV have tried many extension strategies to maintain the show, but the decline in ratings has accelerated recently, suggesting that time is finally up.

As the Mail explains:

“The broadcaster has decided to drop the show in the autumn after last year’s revamp and new 9pm slot failing to stop falling ratings. The changes saw The Bill moved from a twice weekly 8pm slot on the channel to a single hour long show on Thursdays.”

In 2002 the series got more than 7million viewers, but in recent times that audiences have been in the region of 3.5million.

So ITV now needs to get its product innovation dept hard at work to find a long-term replacement for The Bill. It needs to be something that will capture the imagination of the evening viewing public. Something that will generate a substantial number of hard-hitting, fresh and exciting storylines. How about a new soap based in an accountant’s office?