Which strategy to achieve high #growth is the best?
1. Expand the core of the business
2. Expand into adjacent categories or geographies
3. Create breakout businesses via innovations, #ecosystem or platform building
McKinsey analyzed B2C outperformers of the last decade and found that today companies need to 🎯 use all three. Each of them separately isn't enough any more to achieve high growth.
A few interesting thoughts:
📊 Expanding the core
Predictably, expanding the core is the most essential - it drives 82% of growth in B2C.
🏁 Expand into adjacent categories or geographies
Companies that move into new categories successfully are 23 percent more likely to achieve above-market growth. It’s critical to enter only adjacent categories that are sufficiently related to the current core.
For companies hoping to build adjacencies quickly, inorganic expansion is likely the best strategy for achieving rapid scale.
Companies sometimes feel compelled to enter many markets at once, but evidence suggests that new-market entry is generally harder and slower than anticipated. Successful companies concentrate on their initial geographic growth forays, as they recognize that those successes will build confidence for subsequent expansions.
🚀 Create breakout businesses via creating an ecosystem or #platform
Disruption through platform building—employing either a B2C or B2B model—is a popular gambit and can be a winning play.
📍 But across consumer subsectors, only a small number of platforms tend to achieve meaningful scale. There are often clear #1 and #2 players—with a long tail of competitors battling over the remaining 20-30% of the market.
Very few consumer companies have the scale and resources to build a robust platform on their own.
It’s vital for a company to decide whether and when it is willing to disrupt its own business by, for example, hosting competitive brands on its platform.
Companies that choose to simply participate on a platform instead of building it are more likely to thrive if they can act as “kingmakers”—joining the platform early and securing favorable terms such as autonomous pricing power, access to platform data, or exclusivity within a category.
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