WHAT IS THE BCG GROWTH SHARE MATRIX? To begin, BCG is the acronym for Boston Consulting Group, a highly respected general management consulting firm in business strategy consulting. The BCG Growth Share Matrix (see Figure 1) happens to be one of several BCG strategic concepts that the organization developed in the late 1970s and is taught in leading business schools and training programs executives from all over the world. It is a management tool that serves four distinct purposes (McDonald 2003; Kotler 2003; Cipher 2006): it can be used to classify a product portfolio into four business types based on four graphical labels , including stars, cash cows, question marks and dogs; it can be used to determine priorities in a company's product portfolio; classify an organization's product portfolio based on their usage and cash generation; and provides management with available strategies to address various product lines. Take the example of companies like Apple Computer, General Electric, Unilever, Siemens, Centrica and many others, which are launching into diversified product lines. The BCG model therefore becomes an invaluable analytical tool for evaluating an organization's diverse product lines, as we will see further in the following sections. WHAT ARE THE MAIN 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 good health of a company (Kotler 2003; McDonald 2003). In other words, products with a larger market share or belonging to a rapidly growing market are expected to generate relatively higher profit margins. The opposite is also true. Let's look at the following components of the model: Fig. 1: Source: 12manage.com 2006Relative market shareAccording to proponents of BCG (Herndemson 1972), it captures the relative market share of a business unit or product. But that's not all! This allows the analyzed business unit to be pitted against its competitors. As highlighted earlier, this is due to the correlation sometimes between relative market share and product cash generation. This phenomenon is often compared to the experience curve paradigm whereby when an organization benefits from lower costs, improved efficiency from conducting business operations over time. The basic principle of this postulate is that the more often an organization accomplishes a task; it tends to develop new ways to perform these tasks better, which results in reduced operating costs (Cipher 2006). What this suggests is that the experience curve effect requires market share to increase to be able to reduce costs in the long run and that at the same time a company with a dominant market share will inevitably have a cost advantage over competing companies because they have the largest market share.