The life-cycle concept is an attempt to describe what happens to products and industries over time.

Thus, the term “life cycle” in this regard, is used to observe and categorize the stages of business (existence) that a product and/ or an industry is at.

And given that all living things go through a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and death; the inspiration for the concepts of product life cycle and industry life cycle is derived from Biology.

For most (or every) industry and even products, they also go through 4 stages. These stages signify the position they are on their lifecycle.

Industry is a much broader classification than products; an industry consists of many similar groups of products.

For example, in the music industry, a musician is a “product.” In the Nigerian Beverage industry, we’ve soft drinks, tea, coffee, wine, beer etc. We can of course further break down each of the beverage stated above.

There are 4 stages of an industry/ product lifecycle. They are as follows:
introduction, growth, maturity and decline.

While products can come to the end of their lifecycle and “die off,” an industry rarely die off.

Industries have longer lifecycles than products. Though, it can happen that an industry “dies,” but it’s not as common as the decline/ total elimination of a product.

Instead of a decline and total elimination of an industry, what usually happens to an industry is a reinvention of how things are done e.g. from gramophone to cassette player to CD i.e. Compact Disc (to USB) to digital downloads.

So at what stage of the lifecycle is the spoken word poetry industry?

Well, it seems to still be at the introduction stage.

The introduction stage is a season of idea generation, planning, planting, research and development.

It’s a season of low intensity of competition, high emphasis on process design, and a strong drive to increase market awareness.

Few people/ corporates are ready to invest at this stage. They don’t see the big picture, so they wait for those who do to show them the way.

For most (or all) industries, the bulk of the money and profit, is in the growth stage. That is where the music and comedy industry in Nigeria are in right now.

How can spoken word poetry break into the growth stage of its lifecycle?

In my opinion, I think 4 things are needed:

1. Platforms
2. Distribution channels
3. Training outlets.
4. Investors/ funders.

Lemme take a pause here for now.

But what do you think?

Yea or nay.

Cheers.

Signed
King Olulu
2021 and beyond

Twitter @olulu4ever, Instagram @olulutheking,