Lifecycle Stage One: Confusion

This is where every new consumer tech category begins. The product exists and the tech works. Company founders understand the value proposition with perfect clarity, but the market doesn't. Journalists don't know which beat it belongs on. Retailers don't know which shelf it goes on. Most importantly, consumers can't figure out whether they need it or not.

Our client Keychron was here not that long ago. A mechanical keyboard is an extraordinary product. But why does anyone really need one when regular keyboards work fine? When we started working on this account, the category required a lot of patient explanation before coverage could land meaningfully. Other categories such as earbuds and e-bikes went through similar periods before enthusiasts gave them cultural legitimacy.

What PR Looks Like at Stage One

You are trying to get people to understand and be aware. That means media outreach is coverage should answer the question: what is this, and why does it matter?

It also means that the journalists who matter most at this stage are not always the ones who matter most later. Certain parts of the tech press, niche enthusiast communities, and YouTube reviewers who go deep on new categories are often more important at Stage One than legacy mainstream media, who are likely not even going to care at this point. Dreams of the Washington Post need to be put on hold.

The early groups create the foundation of credibility that mass market coverage later builds on.

Common PR Mistakes at Stage One

There are several big dangers:

• Betting too heavily on demand before the market is educated.
• Pitching product features to journalists who haven't yet grasped the category.
• Treating Stage One media outreach like Stage Two media outreach.
• Spending so much energy on education that you fail to plant your flag.

Stage One is when you can claim the category definition. Whatever language you use to describe the product, whatever frame you put around the problem it solves, that language is what the market adopts. If you don't define the category, someone else will.

Read more about Share of Explanation, where category definition starts.

Lifecycle Stage Two: Excitement

Stage Two is the most important stage for PR. Early adopters are engaged. The press is genuinely interested, and you can still rely on novelty to do a lot of the work. Coverage is relatively easy to get. And crucially, there are not yet enough competitors to make differentiation feel urgent.

This is exactly why it is the most dangerous stage to sleep through.

Keychron caught the mechanical keyboard wave at precisely this moment. When they entered the market, mechanical keyboards were understood by enthusiasts but had not yet crossed into mainstream culture. The category was real and growing, but the dominant brand position was still open. By the time the category became crowded, Keychron had already established itself as the reference point. They became the category definition. That positioning is now extraordinarily difficult for any competitor to dislodge.

Read the Keychron case study.

"First mover brands often enjoy more desirable market positioning and larger, more sustained market shares than later entrants."

Source: Robinson & Fornell, Journal of Marketing Research

What PR Looks Like at Stage Two

Stage Two is where you should invest in category leadership. That means securing coverage in the outlets that define the category for mainstream consumers, not just the enthusiast press. It means building a brand narrative that positions you as the original and best, not just one option among many. It means influencer partnerships that bring the product to audiences who haven't yet encountered the category.

It also means AI search visibility, or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). When consumers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity about the best product in your category, the brands that get recommended at Stage Two are the ones that dominate. We helped make Keychron the most recommended mechanical keyboard by AI. That kind of embedded recommendation does not happen by accident, and it does not happen easily once the category is crowded.

Download our GEO Guide: A Holistic Blueprint

Common PR Mistakes at Stage Two

Brands with big sales sometimes underinvest in PR at this stage because things feel like they're working without it. Revenue is growing. The product is getting organic coverage. Why spend more?

The answer is that Stage Three is coming, and the brands that coasted through Stage Two arrive at Stage Three without the brand equity they need to compete on anything other than price. The window to claim category leadership is open for one to three years in most consumer tech categories. After that, positions are largely set.

See the data on why top-of-funnel investment at this stage pays.

Lifecycle Stage Three: Crowding

Stage Three is when the real fight starts. The revenue opportunity is visible, and competitors arrive in volume. Coverage becomes harder to get because journalists are tired of the category and the differentiation between products narrows. Feature parity starts to emerge. Price pressure begins.

This is the stage where brand narrative does its heaviest lifting. When every product has similar specs and similar pricing, the brand with the most compelling story wins. Not because the story is a substitute for product quality, but because it is what consumers use to make sense of the choice in front of them. Those who already have mindshare see significant benefits accrue.

Consumers typically compare at least three brands before making a high-ticket electronics purchase. In a crowded category, three brands often means three products that look nearly identical on a spec sheet. The differentiation that wins the sale is almost always at the brand level.

Source: Criteo

What PR Looks Like at Stage Three

Performance PR becomes critical at Stage Three. With so many competing products in the market, buying guide placements and affiliate-driven editorial coverage are the mechanisms that drive purchase decisions. A single placement in a well-ranked best-of roundup on a high-authority publication can drive consistent sales for months or years.

Traffic from earned media coverage is 56% more likely to result in a conversion than traffic from other sources. At Stage Three, the brands that have been included in longer form product reviews and built relationships with the editors running those affiliate roundups are the ones that get included in the valuable listicles and buying guides media write and revamp through the year.

See how Performance PR worked for Urevo

Influencer relations also shifts at this stage. In Stage Two, influencer partnerships were about introducing a new category to new audiences. In Stage Three, they are about defending and reinforcing a brand position against a sea of look-alike alternatives.

Learn about our Influencer Relations service

Common PR Mistakes at Stage Three

Brands that arrive at Stage Three without strong brand equity built in Stage Two have essentially one lever left: price. That is a race to the bottom, and it is a race that brands from lower-cost manufacturing markets will almost always win. The only alternative is to build the brand equity you should have built earlier, at a much higher cost and with much lower returns, because you are now fighting for attention in a crowded room instead of walking into an empty one.

Lifecycle Stage Four: Maturity / Commodity

Stage Four is the category in its mature form. Growth has flattened. The category is defined, the competitors are known, and the primary battlegrounds are brand and value. At this stage, innovation cycles are focused on incremental improvement rather than category-defining leaps.

The brands that survive Stage Four with healthy margins are almost exclusively the ones that built genuine brand equity in Stages Two and Three. 92% of consumers trust earned media more than any other form of advertising. The brands that accumulated that trust over years of consistent media presence, influencer relationships, and AI search visibility have a structural advantage that cannot be bought.

Televisions are a useful example. Consumer Technology Association research found that TVs have the longest expected lifespan of any consumer tech product at 6.5 years. In 2011, consumers expected them to last nearly nine years. That compression of expected lifespan reflects what happens to a category as it matures: consumers become more sophisticated, more price-sensitive, and more willing to upgrade when something better comes along. The only brands that can sustain premium pricing in that environment are the ones with real brand loyalty.

What PR Looks Like at Stage Four

At Stage Four, PR is primarily defensive. The goal is to maintain the brand equity you built earlier, hold your position in AI search results and buying guide rankings, and protect your relevance as the category matures around you.

This is also the stage where executive thought leadership becomes important. When the product category is commoditized, the brand that is seen as the expert voice on the category, the one that journalists call for comment, the one that AI models cite as the authority, maintains a visibility advantage that the product alone can no longer provide.

Read about how Proper Propaganda approaches thought leadership

Common PR Mistakes at Stage Four

Cutting PR spend precisely when brand equity is what separates you from the competition. It is a very common mistake. Revenue is under pressure, the board wants to reduce costs, and PR feels like a soft spend. The brands that cut at Stage Four discover at Stage Five that they have nothing left to reinvent from.

See the data on the cost of pulling back top-of-funnel spend

Lifecycle Stage Five: Stability and Evolution

Stage Five is where most people misread the map. They assume that a mature category is a dying one. It isn't. Laptops are mature. Smartphones are mature. Neither of these are facing death. They are enormous, stable, and competitive precisely because the revenue opportunity is so well established.

What changes at Stage Five is the nature of competition. A category is no longer growing fast enough to carry weak brands along with it. Growth comes from taking share rather than riding the wave. Those who thrive built defensible positions in Stages Two and Three and have continued to invest in maintaining them.

This is also the stage where some brands find new angles that effectively restart the lifecycle arc within the broader category. The laptop category matured years ago, but gaming laptops, ultrabooks, and creator-focused machines each went through their own mini versions of the five stages within it. The e-bike category is mature in some markets and still at Stage Two in others. Wearables as a category are mature, but some health-monitoring wearables are still in earlier stages. A mature category has established positions that can still be challenged by brands willing to carve out a specific corner and own it.

What PR Looks Like at Stage Five

At Stage Five, PR is about sustained category authority and/or pushing new angles into mature spaces.

The brands that treat Stage Five PR as an expense to be managed down are the ones that find themselves invisible five years later when a new competitor with a sharper story comes for their position.

Download our GEO Guide for AI search visibility at any stage

Common PR Mistakes at Stage Five

Assuming the position you built is permanent. Brand equity erodes without maintenance. Buying guide rankings change. AI search engines loves recency, and so results shift as new content enters the pool. A competitor that invests aggressively in PR at Stage Three of a subcategory you haven't noticed can take meaningful share before you see it coming.

The other danger is the reverse of the Stage Three mistake: assuming the category is still growing when it has actually entered genuine decline. Some categories do decline. DVDs declined. MP3 players declined. The diagnostic question is whether consumers are still entering the category or whether the installed base is simply cycling through replacement purchases. Those are very different market dynamics and require different strategies.