Slump in PC sales - Product Life Cycle extension strategy teaching resource

Worldwide sales figures recently released have shown that sales for PCs is in a long-term decline. The primary reason for this would appear to be that customers are purchasing tablets and smartphones in preference to laptops and desktops.

The activity that you can download from this link gives some details of this downturn in sales, reminds students of the product life-cycle diagram and then challenges students to quickly devise a strategy to combat the downturn - either a new advertising campaign, aiming the PC at a new market or devising a change to the PC to enliven interest. I would use this resource by giving the 3 possible strategies to individual groups (if you have enough students to create more than 3 groups then I would allow 2 groups to look at the same strategy), allowing them the 5 minutes on the timer to come up with a suitable suggestion and then present this suggestion back to the whole class at the end. In total, this activity would take between 15 and 25 minutes. The final 3 slides on the Powerpoint file are the worksheets that can be given to the groups.

You can see the original story by following this link.