WHAT IS THE BCG GROWTH SHARE MATRIX?For starters, BCG is an acronym for Boston Consulting Group, a top management consulting firm highly regarded in equity consulting business strategy. BCG Growth-Share Matrix (see Figure 1) appears to be one of many BCG strategic concepts developed by the organization in the late 1970s and is taught in major business schools and executive education programs around the world. It is a management tool that has four distinct purposes (McDonald 2003; Kotler 2003; Cipher 2006): it can be used to classify the product portfolio into four business types based on four graphic labels including Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks and Dogs ; can be used to determine what priorities should be given in a company's product portfolio; classify an organization's product portfolio based on usage and cash generation; and offers management strategies available to address various product lines. Consider companies like Apple Computer, General Electric, Unilever, Siemens, Centrica, and many others, engaging in diverse product lines. The BCG model therefore becomes a valuable analytical tool for evaluating an organization's diversified product lines, as we will see further in the following sections. WHAT ARE THE KEY ASPECTS OF THE BCG GROWTH-SHARE MATRIX? The BCG Growth-Share matrix is ​​based on two-dimensional variables: relative market share and market growth. They are often indicators of the healthiness of a company (Kotler 2003; McDonald 2003). In other words, products with a larger market share or within a rapidly growing market are expected to have relatively larger profit margins. The opposite is also true. Let's look at the following components of the model:Fig. 1: Source: 12manage.com 2006 Relative Market Share According to proponents of BCG (Herndemson 1972), it captures the relative market share of a business unit or product. But that's not all! It allows the analyzed business unit to compare itself with its competitors. As highlighted above, this is due to the correlation between relative market share and the product's cash generation. This phenomenon is often compared to the experience curve paradigm that when an organization benefits from lower costs, better efficiency comes from carrying out business operations over time. The basic principle of this postulate is that the more often an organization performs a task; tends to develop new ways to perform these tasks better, which results in lower operating costs (Cipher 2006). This suggests that the experience curve effect requires market share to be increased to be able to reduce costs in the long run and at the same time a company with a dominant market share will inevitably have a cost advantage compared to competing companies because they have the largest market share.