Challenges
Strategy can be developed on many levels—for example, national, regional, industry, or multibusiness corporation—but perhaps is most commonly developed at the business unit level.
Business unit strategy entails knowing what business you are (or should be) in, understanding the current and future sources of competitive advantage in that business, and then defining a plan to capture and sustain an unassailable relative advantage over competitors.
Several questions are central to the development of a business unit strategy:
How well are we positioned in relation to competitors?
What can we do to enhance our relative advantage?
What can we learn from customers today to better compete tomorrow?
What specific moves will position us for greater success?
Can our current business model take us into the future?
BCG Competencies
We offer extensive experience in helping clients craft strategies for their business units.
We bring together a commitment to deliver a tailor-made solution for each client with our decades-long heritage of thought leadership on strategy. BCG has pioneered a disproportionate share of the most important concepts in business strategy—the experience curve, time-based competition, and deconstruction, to name a few.
These are some of our typical projects:
Planning for the launch of a new business
Understanding and overcoming the drivers of declining business performance
Developing a strategic response to moves by traditional or emerging competitors
Understanding future risks and their implications for strategy
In addition, because the best strategic options are sometimes beyond the scope of the current business model, we offer assistance with business model innovation and new-business building.