To be successful, a company should have a portfolio of products with different
growth rates and different market shares. The portfolio composition is
a function of the balance between cash flows. High-growth products require
cash inputs to grow. Low-growth products should generate excess
cash. Both kinds are needed simultaneously.
Four rules determine the cash flow of a product:
• Margins and cash generated are a function of market share. High margins
and high market share go together. This is a matter of common observation,
explained by the experience curve effect.
• Growth requires cash input to finance added assets. The added cash required
to hold share is a function of growth rates.
• High market share must be earned or bought. Buying market share requires
additional investment.
THE POSITIONING SCHOOL 95
FIGURE 4-1
BCG GROWTH-SHARE MATRIX
Source: From Henderson (1979).
No product market can grow indefinitely. The payoff from growth must
come when the growth slows, or it will not come at all. The payoff is cash
that cannot be reinvested in that product.
Products with high market share and slow growth are "cash cows." [See
Figure 4-1.] Characteristically, they generate large amounts of cash, in excess
of the reinvestment required to maintain share. This excess need not,
and should not, be reinvested in those products. In fact, if the rate of return
exceeds growth rate, the cash cannot be reinvested indefinitely, except by
depressing returns.
Products with low market share and slow growth are "dogs." They may
show an accounting profit, but the profit must be reinvested to maintain
share, leaving no cash throwoff. The product is essentially worthless, except
in liquidation.
All products eventually become either a "cash cow" or a "dog." The
96 STRATEGY SAFARI
value of a product is completely dependent upon obtaining a leading share
of its market before the growth slows.
Low-market-share, high-growth products are the "problem children."
, They almost always require far more cash than they can generate. If cash is
not supplied, they fall behind and die. Even when the cash is supplied, if
they only hold their share, they are still dogs when the growth stops. The
"problem children" require large added cash investment for market share
to be purchased. The low-market-share, high-growth product is a liability
unless it becomes a leader. It requires very large cash inputs that it cannot
generate itself.
The high-share, high-growth product is the "star." It nearly always
shows reported profits, but it may or may not generate all of its own
cash. If it stays a leader, however, it will become a large cash generator
when growth slows and its reinvestment requirements diminish. The
star eventually becomes the cash cow—providing high volume, high
margin, high stability, security—and cash throwoff for reinvestment
elsewhere....
The need for a portfolio of businesses becomes obvious. Every company
needs products in which to invest cash. Every company needs products
that generate cash. And every product should eventually be a cash generator;
otherwise, it is worthless.
Only a diversified company with a balanced portfolio can use its
strengths to truly capitalize on its growth opportunities. [See success sequence
in Figure 4-1.] The balanced portfolio has
• "stars," whose high share and high growth assure the future.
• "cash cows," that supply funds for that future growth.
• "problem children," to be converted into "stars" with the added funds.
• "Dogs" are not necessary; they are evidence of failure either to obtain a
leadership position during the growth phase, or to get out and cut the
losses. (Henderson, 1979:163-166)
Note the reductionist nature of this technique. BCG took the two
major categories of the classic design school model (external environment
and internal capabilities), selected one key dimension for each
(market growth and relative market share), arranged these along the
two axes of a matrix, divided into high and low, and then inserted into
THE POSITIONING SCHOOL 97
each of the boxes labels for the four resulting generic strategies. Then,
presumably, all a company had to do was plot its condition and select
its strategy, or, at least, sequence its strategies as it went around the matrix,
passing money from one business to another in the prescribed way.
Really rather simple—better even than a cookbook, which usually requires
many different ingredients.
As John Seeger (1984) pointed out in a colorful article, however,
not terribly friendly to all this, what looks like a star might already be a
black hole, while a dog can be a corporation's best friend. And cows
can give new products called calves as well as the old one called
milk—but, in both cases, only so long as the farmer is willing to invest
the attention of a bull periodically. To extend its own mixture of
metaphors, the BCG of those heady days may have mixed up the ordinary
milk cow with the goose that laid the golden eggs.
BCG: Exploiting Experience
The experience curve dates back to some research done in 1936 (see
Yelle, 1979) that suggested that as the cumulative production of a
product doubles, the cost of producing it seems to decrease by a constant
percentage (generally 10 to 30 percent). In other words, if the
first widget ever made cost $10 to produce, then the second (assuming
20 percent) should cost about $8, the fourth $6.40, etc., and the ten
millionth, 20 percent less than the five millionth. In brief, firms learn
from experience—at a constant rate. Figure 4-2 shows an example
from a BCG publication.
The idea is interesting. It suggests that, all other things being equal,
the first firm in a new market can rev up its volume quickly to gain a
cost advantage over its competitors. Of course, the essence of strategy
is that all other things are rarely equal. In fact, the widespread application
of the experience curve often led to an emphasis on volume as an
end in itself. Scale became all important: firms were encouraged to
manage experience directly—for example, by cutting prices to grab
market share early, so as to ride down the experience curve ahead of
everyone else. As a result of the popularity of this technique as well as
the growth-share matrix, being the market leader became an obsession
in American business for a time.
98 STRATEGY SAFARI
FIGURE 4-2
EXPERIENCE CURVE FOR STEAM TURBINE GENERATORS (1946-1963)
Source: From the Boston Consulting Group, 1975.
PIMS: From Data to Dicta
PIMS stands for Profit Impact of Market Strategies. Developed in 1972
for General Electric, later to become a stand-alone data base for sale,
the PIMS model identified a number of strategy variables—such as investment
intensity, market position, and quality of products and service—
and used them to estimate expected return on investment,
market share, and profits (see Schoeffler et a l , 1974; Schoeffler, 1980;
Buzzell et al., 1975). PIMS developed a data base of several thousand
businesses that paid in, provided data, and in return could compare
their positions with samples of others.
PIMS founder Sidney Schoeffler stated that "All business situations
are basically alike in obeying the same laws of the marketplace," so
that "a trained strategist can usefully function in any business." In
other words "product characteristics don't matter" (1980:2, 5). From
here, Schoeffler went on to identify the good guys and the bad guys of
strategy. Investment intensity "generally produces a negative impact
on percentage measures of profitability or net cash flow" (it "depresses
ROI"), while market share "has a positive impact."
But finding a correlation between variables (such as market share
THE POSITIONING SCHOOL 99
and profit, not "profitability"]) is one thing; assuming causation, and
turning that into an imperative, is quite another. Data are not dicta.
Does high market share bring profit, or does high profit bring market
share (since big firms can afford to "buy" market share)? Or, more
likely, does something else (such as serving customers well) bring both?
Market share is a reward, not a strategy!
With their obvious biases toward the big established firms (which
had the money to buy into the data bases and pay the consulting contracts),
both PIMS and BCG seemed unable to distinguish "getting
there" from "being there" (or "staying there"). Perhaps the young, aggressive
firms, which were pursuing rather different strategies of rapid
growth, may have been too busy to fill out the PIMS forms, while those
in the emerging industries, with a messy collection of new products
coming and going, may have been unable to tell BCG which firms had
which market shares, or even what their "businesses" really were.
The overall result of much of this was that, like that proverbial
swimmer who drowned in a lake that averaged six inches in depth, a
number of companies went down following the simple imperatives of
the positioning school's second wave (see Hamermesh, 1986).
THE THIRD WAVE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMPIRICAL
PROPOSITIONS
What we are calling the third wave of the positioning school, which
began as a trickle in the mid-1970s, exploded into prominence after
1980, dominating the whole literature and practice of strategic management.
This wave consisted of the systematic empirical search for relationships
between external conditions and internal strategies. Gone
was the faith in homilies and imperatives, at least about the content of
strategies (if not the process by which to make them). Instead it was
believed that systematic study could uncover the ideal strategies to be
pursued under given sets of conditions.