Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Market Level Strategies: Strategizing How to Grow

Successful growth stems from matching your strengths and weaknesses with the opportunities that exist in your business environment. Your growth strategy is the way in which you position your company to exploit your strengths and opportunities and mitigate your weaknesses and threats. By strategizing how to grow, you're actively deciding how to connect your mission with your vision (see Chapter 6 for more on missions and visions). Your growth strategy answers the question, “How do we get there?”

Keep these key points on growth in mind as you move through this chapter:

• Growth begins with your customers in mind.
• Growth focuses on opportunities.
• Growth looks forward by learning from the past.
• Everyone can grow.

Growth comes from either leveraging your market knowledge or leveraging your product knowledge. Figure 11-5 illustrates how you can leverage your market and/or product knowledge to create four different strategies, originally presented by Igor Ansoff in 1957, which still has practical business application today:

• Market penetration
• Product development
• Market development
• Diversification

Figure 11-5: The four areas of growth.

In Part III of this book, you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. If you've ...