Strategic Group Mapping

Strategic group mapping is the visualization technique that turns strategic group analysis into a readable picture: a two-dimensional plot whose axes are two strategic variables on which firms in an industry differ, with each firm shown as a bubble sized by its market presence. Michael Porter popularized the strategic group map in his 1980 Competitive Strategy as a practical device for displaying the competitive structure of an industry, locating clusters of similarly positioned firms, and exposing the empty 'white space' where no competitor sits. Fiegenbaum and Thomas's 1990 work added the temporal discipline of strategic time periods — intervals over which group structure is stable — so that a sequence of maps can show how firms migrate and how the competitive landscape evolves. The result is one of the most widely used communication tools in competitor and positioning analysis.