What drives business growth?

Chart of the Day: Strategies and practical factors that support growth of a business - new research

The Ansoff matrix growth drivers

The Ansoff matrix model is a classic marketing model featured in our free top marketing models guide.

Although developed in the 1960s, Ansoff is still useful for considering, at a top level, the strategic initiatives that a business is taking to increase its competitiveness in a sector through identifying new revenue opportunities.

This new research based on the views of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in large US organizations is interesting since it translates the theory of Ansoff into practice, showing how businesses are investing in the four quadrants of Ansoff.

You can see that a market penetration strategy of selling existing products or services into existing markets has the largest investment. This is building on existing strengths and is fine, with the proviso that sufficient investment is going into other areas to support future growth - that is developing the product and service or developing new markets. The benchmark that this provides is that around one quarter of spending / budget is going into product and service development and perhaps surprisingly low, around 10–15% is going into market development. Diversification into entirely new products and markets is surprisingly high at around 10%

Which practical factors drive organic growth?

The research also considers factors which are important for driving the activities shown on Ansoff:

This chart shows clearly that although the importance of martech and data are often stressed when discussing digital transformation, it is having the right skills or talent for market and product development that are most important. Of course, getting agreement amongst stakeholders as part of business strategy development is also vital as is having the right businss model to support product and market development

Research source

• Source: CMO Survey arranged by Duke University Fuqua Business School, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association
• Sample: 2895 top marketers at U.S. for-profit companies of which 324 responded for a 11.2% response rate. 95.3% of respondents VP-level or above.
• Recommended Smart Insights resource: Business marketing strategy guide