Conducting a Marketing Plan

Using the company you are conducting your marketing plan on, choose four products/services from an actual firm. Acting as the marketing manager for that firm, develop a BCG/portfolio analysis for your portfolio of products. Take into consideration that this BCG/portfolio analysis will be integrated in the final project, the Marketing Plan.  The BCG matrix (aka B-Box, BCG analysis, BCG-matrix, Boston Box, Boston Matrix, Boston Consulting Group analysis, portfolio diagram) is a chart that was created by Bruce Henderson for the Boston Consulting Group in 1968 to help corporations with analyzing their business units or product lines. This helps the company allocate resources and is used as an analytical tool in brand marketing, product management, strategic management, and portfolio analysis. For this PowerPoint presentation, you will develop a BCG/portfolio by following the four main categories of the BCG/portfolio analysis. Cash cows are units with high market share in a slow-growing industry. These units typically generate cash in excess of the amount of cash needed to maintain the business. They are regarded as staid and boring, in a “mature” market, and every corporation would be thrilled to own as many as possible. They are to be “milked” continuously with as little investment as possible, since such investment would be wasted in an industry with low growth. Dogs, more charitably called pets, are units with low market share in a mature, slow-growing industry. These units typically “break even,” generating barely enough cash to maintain the business’s market share. Though owning a break-even unit provides the social benefit of providing jobs and possible synergies that assist other business units, from an accounting point of view, such a unit is worthless, not generating cash for the company. They depress a profitable company’s return on assets ratio, used by many investors to judge how well a company is being managed. Dogs, it is thought, should be sold off. Question marks (also known as problem children) are growing rapidly and thus consume large amounts of cash, but because they have low market shares, they do not generate much cash. The result is large net cash consumption. A question mark has the potential to gain market share and become a star and eventually a cash cow when the market growth slows. If the question mark does not succeed in becoming the market leader, then after, perhaps, years of cash consumption, it will degenerate into a dog when the market growth declines. Question marks must be analyzed carefully in order to determine whether they are worth the investment required to grow market share. Stars are units with a high market share in a fast-growing industry. The hope is that stars become the next cash cows. Sustaining the business unit’s market leadership may require extra cash, but this is worthwhile if that is what it takes for the unit to remain a leader. When growth slows, stars become cash cows if they have been able to maintain their category leadership, or they move from brief stardom to dogdom. The company we have chosen is Apple and they have developed a coffee brand with K-Cup