Conversely, where you have moderate strength in a highly attractive category, you want to invest to strengthen your brand. Where you have high competitive strength but in a moderately attractive category, it might be worth your while to invest to grow the category. Each of the 9 boxes has a recommendation for either increasing the market attractiveness or increasing your own brand power.įrom the grid, you can see three green investment boxes.

Your competitive strength could be a combination of growth, size, aligned resources and assets, competitive advantage (technology, patents, positioning), brand loyalty and strength of the connection to consumers.

Market Attractiveness can be a combination of growth, size, profitability, ease of servicing, future growth, manageable barriers to entry. If you want to go deep, I’d encourage you to come up with 3-5 criteria for what each axes can mean. Plus calling it market attractiveness goes beyond just growth and competitive strength goes beyond just market share. The simplicity of the grid works: how healthy is where you play and what is the opportunity to win where you play? Stars are where you want to invest and dogs are you want to divest.Ī very simple improvement on this grid was to go to a 3×3 version of the grid that gives you more flexibility in choices. First Look Externally at the Marketįor decades, people used the BCG priority grid, a simple two by two matrix with market growth on one axis and market share on the other. Here’s the rule: Focus your resources on those brands that can offer the fastest growth and allow them to outpace those that are slower growth. But hedging your bet just means you never fully realize the full potential of those high performers. Some leaders would see that situation and want to spread their resources to that bottom performing brands, just in case the high performing brands didn’t come through. To win in the market, and hit my plan, I had to make sure the third that did amazing out-paced the third that struggled. No matter how good the year was, a third of the brands would do amazing, a third would do ok and a third would struggle. As I managed 15 brands at Johnson and Johnson, I finally came up with a very simple rule that I affectionately called “a third, a third, a third”. When you have a group of brands and you need to sort through the focus, the temptation is to try to hedge your bets and spread a little love to each brand.

General mills bcg matrix