Marketing strategy and growth: the frameworks to use with the board, and what they change in the brief

A communications plan is only as good as the strategy it serves. Five frameworks cover most of the strategy conversations a marketer has with a board, and each answers a different question.

• Ansoff's product/market matrix (Harvard Business Review, 1957): where will growth come from¹?
• Porter's generic strategies (Competitive Strategy, 1980): how will we win against competitors²?
• The BCG growth-share matrix what role does each business or product play in the portfolio³?
• Jobs to be done (Christensen and colleagues, HBR, 2016): why do customers buy, or stop buying⁵?
• Marketing 5.0 (Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan, Wiley, 2021): how should technology serve customers⁷?

The decision it informs: which growth path the plan supports, and what that changes in the audience, the message, the channels and the measures. Read it with planning frameworks and objectives and KPIs.

Strategy decides where the company competes and how; marketing decides whom to serve and with what value; communication makes that value known and chosen. Marketing Management places the value proposition and positioning at the heart of designing value⁹, and both depend on choices made above them. A brief written before those choices are clear will be rewritten when the board makes them. The frameworks below are the vocabulary for that conversation.

A practical rule: bring the board one framework per question, not a slide of all five. If the question is "where will next year's growth come from?", show the Ansoff grid. If it is "why are we losing to a cheaper rival?", show Porter. If it is "which products deserve the budget?", show the growth-share matrix. Then show what each answer changes in the communication plan, in the board's own numbers.

Igor Ansoff's "Strategies for Diversification" appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1957¹. Its grid crosses existing and new products with existing and new markets, giving four growth paths.

Planners usually read the grid as a ladder of risk: the further a path moves from existing products and markets, the less the company already knows. For communications, each quadrant implies a different job:

• Market penetration The Ehrenberg-Bass evidence on double jeopardy says growth comes mainly from more buyers rather than more loyalty¹⁰, so the brief is about reach among all category buyers and mental availability. See brand awareness.
• Market development A new audience needs its own insight, language and media; the brand promise may hold, but proof and tone change. See market entry.
• Product development Existing buyers need to learn that something new exists and why it fits; launches lean on owned channels and CRM before paid reach. See product launch.
• Diversification The first question is not the campaign but the brand: does the new business carry the master brand, a sub-brand or a new name? Decide it with brand equity in mind.

Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy, published by the Free Press in 1980, set out techniques for analysing industries and competitors, including three generic strategies²: overall cost leadership, differentiation and focus on a chosen segment.

The link to communication is direct. A differentiation strategy depends on people paying more, and Binet and Field's analysis of IPA cases found a correlation between very large brand-building effects and very large reductions in price sensitivity¹¹. A focus strategy needs care with targeting: Ehrenberg-Bass research in B2B argues that narrow targeting is counter-productive to growth¹², so focus the offer and the message, but plan reach across the segment's whole category, not just its most visible accounts. See positioning and the positioning statement tool.

The Boston Consulting Group's own history says the growth-share matrix was a collaborative effort: Alan Zakon, later the firm's chief executive, first sketched it and refined it with colleagues, and Bruce Henderson popularised it in his 1970 essay "The Product Portfolio"³. At its peak, BCG says, about half of the Fortune 500 used it³.

The logic is a cash cycle: low-growth businesses with high share are milked for cash to reinvest in high-growth, high-share stars⁴. The BCG Henderson Institute's own review notes what has changed since 1970: conglomerates are less common and competitive advantage is less durable⁴. Used carefully, the matrix still helps a marketer argue a portfolio budget: a cash cow's communication should defend mental availability at efficient cost, a star's should build it fast, and a question mark's should test before scaling.

In "Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'" (HBR, September 2016), Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David Duncan argued that detailed customer profiles and correlations in data miss what actually causes a purchase⁵. Customers "hire" a product to get a job done in a particular circumstance, and "fire" it when it performs poorly; the opportunity lies in jobs that are poorly served⁵.

For communication, the job is a better starting point than a persona. It says what progress the customer wants, in what circumstance, and against which alternatives. It also connects to how memory works: Jenni Romaniuk's category entry points, the internal and external cues buyers use to retrieve brands in a buying situation⁶, are close to the circumstances in which a job arises. A brief that names the job and the circumstances gives creative teams something concrete; see the creative brief template.

Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawan's Marketing 5.0: Technology for Humanity was published by Wiley in 2021⁷. The book argues that marketers must deal at once with technologies such as AI and the Internet of Things, generational change and new business models, and proposes "technology for humanity": using technology to serve people's needs and broader goals⁸. Its chapters cover the generation gap, prosperity polarisation and the digital divide, then strategies for tech-empowered marketing and the digital-ready organisation⁸.

For a board, the useful question it raises is not "which tools?" but "which customer experiences should technology improve, and how will we know?" Personalisation, automation and AI belong in the plan when they make the value proposition easier to find, buy and use, and when they respect consent. See personalisation and the marketing operations hub.

Bring the board numbers it already recognises. Penetration shows whether growth is coming from more buyers¹⁰. Price premium or price sensitivity shows whether brand building supports a differentiation strategy¹¹. Customer value, the discounted margin customers will bring, is a language finance shares: Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart showed that valuing customers makes it feasible to value the firm¹³. Put the three on one page with the communication KPIs that lead them; see KPI.

1. Writing the brief before the growth path is chosen A penetration brief and a product-development brief need different audiences and measures.
2. Using every framework at once Pick the one that answers the board's question; the others are context.
3. Calling a niche a focus strategy Focus still needs reach across the segment's category buyers¹².
4. Treating BCG labels as fate A cash cow starved of communication can stop being one; the matrix describes cash flows, not destiny⁴.
5. Letting technology lead Marketing 5.0 frames technology as serving people⁸; a tool without a customer job is a cost.

Illustrative example. A regional dairy company wants to double revenue in five years. The board's options: sell more milk in its home region (penetration), launch a protein range for existing buyers (product development) or export (market development). The marketing director maps each to Ansoff, notes that the company competes on quality rather than cost (differentiation), and that its milk brand is a cash cow while the protein range would be a question mark. She proposes defending the cash cow's mental availability at efficient cost, testing the protein range around one customer job ("a breakfast that keeps me full on a training day") before scaling, and postponing exports. Each option comes with its brief, its KPIs and the board numbers it should move.

Your checklist for Monday:

1. Write down the business objective and the growth path the board has chosen; if it has not chosen, show the options on an Ansoff grid.
2. State the competitive stance in one sentence: cost, differentiation or focus.
3. Place each product or business on a growth-share grid and agree its role.
4. Write the customer job and the circumstances for each priority product.
5. Turn the answers into one brief per priority with the IMC plan canvas and the STP worksheet.
6. Agree the three board numbers (penetration, price premium, customer value) and the communication KPIs that lead them.
7. Revisit the choices every year with the CMO; strategy changes, and so should the brief.

• H. Igor Ansoff, "Strategies for Diversification" (HBR, 1957)¹.
• Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy (Free Press, 1980)².
• BCG on the growth-share matrix and its revisit by the BCG Henderson Institute^3, 4.
• Christensen, Hall, Dillon and Duncan on jobs to be done (HBR, 2016)⁵.
• Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan, Marketing 5.0 (Wiley, 2021)⁷.
• On IMC Report: planning frameworks, how brands grow, customer value and lifetime value, and the glossary entries for value proposition and segmentation.