Market saturation

We just don't know what it is until we launch it, distribute it, and promote it for a generation's time (20 years or more) after which further investment to expand the universe beyond normal limits can be a futile exercise."

—Thomas G. Osenton, economist Osenton introduced the theory in his 2004 book, The Death of Demand: Finding Growth in a Saturated Global Economy;[2] it states that every product or service has a natural consumption level that is determined after a number of years of sales- and marketing-investment (usually around 20 to 25 years).

With some estimates of up to 100 million sports-fans in the United States, many[quantify] at Time Inc. believed that the Sports Illustrated subscription-base could have increased much more.

To give another example, in advanced western households (and depending on the economy), the number of automobiles per family is greater than 1.

Future sales depend on several factors including the rate of obsolescence (at what age cars are replaced), population growth, societal changes such as the spread of multi-car families, and the creation of new niche markets such as sports cars or camper vans.

Logistic growth is an example for a bounded growth which is limited by saturation: The graph shows an imaginary market with logistic growth. In that example, the blue curve depicts the development of the size of that market. The red curve describes the growth of such a market as the first derivative of the market volume. The yellow curve illustrates the growth weighted by the size of the market. As for logistic growth, the yellow curve shows that even a large market size cannot strengthen growth when approaching saturation. Logistic growth never is negative, but in the saturation area, the growth is as small as before the market took off. (In the example all curves are scaled to cover the range between 0 and 1.)