Definition: Cradle to grave, or from start to finish, is a business concept that describes the development of a product, business, or a productive process throughout its life cycle. It is an illustration of the evolution of a certain element from the day it is created to the moment it ceases to exist.
It can also be used to describe a life-long consumer.
What Does Cradle to Grave Mean?
The expression from cradle to grave is commonly employed in marketing environments to describe a product’s life cycle. It is frequently used for planning purposes to establish strategies to market the product differently as it evolves from the moment it is launched throughout its mature stage up until it is taken out of the market.
Additionally, marketing experts refer to this concept as a strategy that aims to create loyalty to a brand or product in the mind of a consumer at his earlier years of age up until his death. This can be done by establishing phrases that are easy to communicate in the mind of the child who can subsequently repeat it to his parents to ask for the brand’s specific products.
Finally, a cradle to grave analysis can also be performed on a manufacturing process to understand the environmental impact of the manufacturing processes used.
Example
Eagle Tires Co. is a company that manufactures tires for industrial and consumer purposes. The company is recently evaluating the environmental impact of a new factory for its industrial product line that will be located in a populated city in the U.S.’s East Coast. As part of this analysis, the company first recognized that the raw materials employed by the business come from a petroleum company. This has a large environmental impact.
On the other hand, the toxic waste that is left after the tires are manufactured was also properly identified and the company already determined adequate processes to dispose these materials. Finally, after the end consumers use the tires the company has also developed a recycling program to guarantee that the product’s cradle to grave cycle is adequately dealt with to reduce its environmental impact as much as possible.
