Unfortunately, most of those work in the Parks segment of the business, which could have strategic implications for the company. To give you a better idea of how the BCG matrix is applied to a real-life setting, let’s take a look at a couple of examples https://1investing.in/ of modern-day businesses. For example, imagine year one market size is valued at $100 million, but year two saw an increase to $110m. For example, imagine your product line accounted for 20% of the market revenue and your leading competitor 45%.

• Being a student herself, she knows what matters and what is important.
• A Strategic Business Unit (SBU) is considered a question mark when it has high market growth and low market share.
• It is a useful tool for analyzing a diversified company’s business portfolio.

For instance, if a dog has a negative cash flow or a negative contribution margin, you can pursue a divestment strategy to sell or discontinue it and free up your resources for other products. These products generally generate returns that are higher than the market’s growth rate and sustain itself from a cash flow perspective. These products should be taken advantage of for as long as possible.

Question Marks: Low-Share Business Units inHigh-Growth Markets

For example, if SBU Y has a market share of 40 percent and its largest rival has a market share of 10 percent, then SBU Y’s relative market shareis40/l0 or 4 0. If SBU X has a market share of 10 percent and its largest rival has a market share of 30 percent, SBU X’s relative market share is 10/30 or 0.3. When all the measurements and calculations are complete, add them to the BCG matrix.

The portfolio has to be balanced in terms of those businesses that generate revenue and are likely to generate revenue versus their resource consumption. Question marks lie in the high business growth rate segment with a weak competitive position. Management has to think hard about which question marks it should try to build into stars and which should be phased out. If more cash is poured down into this SBU and properly nurtured, it may become a star Strategic Business Unit (SBU). A business portfolio approach is commonly followed in a diversified company for corporate strategic analysis.

• Now that you understand what a BCG matrix is and some of its pros and cons, let’s look at how you can set up your own matrix.
• In this article, we’ll explain the basics of the BCG matrix, how to apply it to your business, and how to deal with the different types of business units.
• Further, the organization can develop a functional strategy to support its options and sub-options.
• An erroneously defined market will make way for an erroneous classification of the unit.

By using relative market share, it helps measure a company’s competitiveness. Meanwhile, strategy failure left the product stuck in the Dog category. When the market has matured, the question mark will eventually burden the company’s finances.

What does Question mark symbolize in BCG matrix?

The Apple Macbook sits at the head of a maturing market and can therefore be considered a cash cow. The best way to calculate market growth is to subtract the overall market size from year one from the market size for year two. In this situation, the primary source of growth came from the acquisition of new customers. Anytime you’re considering making a pivot in your business, it’s helpful to also perform a SWOT analysis.

Read More: MCQ Type Questions and Answers

Question marks have low market share and high growth rate, and they are risky and uncertain products that require high investment to increase their market share. Dogs have low market share and low growth rate, and they are weak and unprofitable products with little or no potential, requiring low investment and may be candidates for divestment or elimination. To use the BCG matrix, you need to identify your business units, calculate their relative market share and market growth rate, plot them on the matrix, and analyze their strategic implications. You can define your business units by product, service, brand, division, or any other meaningful way that reflects your strategic goals and market segments.

Calculation of Relative Market Share

BCG Matrix is a useful tool for companies looking to analyze and manage their product portfolio or business unit. The Boston Consulting Group Matrix (BCG Matrix), also referred to as the product portfolio matrix, is a business planning tool used to evaluate the strategic position of a firm’s brand portfolio. The BCG Matrix is one of the most popular portfolio analysis methods. It classifies a firm’s product and/or services into a two-by-two matrix. Each quadrant is classified as low or high performance, depending on the relative market share and market growth rate.

Formal planning approaches can also lead the company to place too much emphasis on market-share growth or growth through entry into attractive new markets. Many companies plunged into unrelated and new high-growth businesses using these approaches that they did not know how to manage—with very bad results. They may generate enough cash to maintain themselves but do not promise to be large sources of cash. This means that the organization has to develop some competencies to make the best use of high growth rates.

Bruce Henderson, who founded BCG, created the concept of the growth matrix in 1970. Success not only depends on internal resources and capabilities but also on other aspects beyond its control. This article will discuss important points about operating systems and will as mention multiple choice questions on operating systems. The article will further explain the answers to each question in brief.

To achieve this, you can make a circle around each brand or company within the entire firm. Note the size of the ring should drop a line to revenue raised by the brands. The focus should be redirected towards experimentation increasingly in new products, markets, and business models – echoing the ideas of lean startup methodology. Despite significant investment being made into new movies and shows for their streaming service, Apple TV+ holds just a meager 3% market share. Each new iPhone launch is kicked off by an aggressive marketing campaign, with a lot of investment poured into R&D to ensure the products stave off threats from competitors such as Samsung, Sony, and Google. The iPad, Apple’s sole representative in the tablet industry, is currently transitioning from star status into a cash cow.

It produces milk, butter, and other dairy-related products and successfully caters to the Indian population. However, unlike former strategic-planning efforts, which rested mostly in senior managers’ hands, today’s strategic planning has been decentralized. At the same time, these companies were often too quick to abandon, sell, or milk to death their healthy mature businesses. Overall, as is the case with other strategic management aspects, a strategic choice is an analytical process backed by managerial foresight, commitment, and vision. This explains how different organizations can follow widely differing strategies leading to varying profitability in the same industry, other conditions being equal. There is no fixed manner in which an organization decides upon strategies.

Like a product, SBUs have a life cycle starting with question marks, becoming stars, turning to cash cows, and end up as dogs. That is why companies should examine the businesses’ future positions side by side with the current position analysis. Dogs, the least attractive products in your BCG matrix, have low market share and low growth rate, and they often drain your resources and profits. To deal with them, you can use the Ansoff matrix to decide whether to divest, reposition, or keep them.