Stop kidding yourself. Everyone knows it's a Dog.

December - It's time to sacrifice some sacred Dogs. Reduce your focus for 2025 and concentrate on where you can make impact.

Author

Basil Choudhry
December 03, 2024

In partnership with

You’ve been carrying that dead product all of 2024 (and probably in 2023, 2022 and 2021 before that). Pumping budget into it, trying to defibrillate it into life….and it’s just not working.

With just a month to go until 2025, it’s time to kill some sacred cows Dogs, and start 2025 slimmed down and focussed.

Yes - that’s right, this week it’s time to dust off the Boston Consulting Group Matrix and start plotting your products/solutions on it.

How do you know it’s a dog?

Secure buy-in from the rest of the organisation?

Inevitably, the marketing and sales teams know which products are Dogs (without even doing the quantitative analysis). They’re the products that are an uphill battle to position to clients. But normally, a Dog that is refusing to die is a pet project of an influential executive.

One tactic is to quietly shift all campaign budget and team time away from a Dog…but the right thing to do is to tackle it head on and get broad buy-in as to why your organisation needs to stop working on the Dog.

The market share/market growth analysis from the Boston Matrix is a good starting point, but it’s worth also presenting the holistic view, by stack ranking all of your solutions by:

  • Profitability

  • Revenue

  • Marketing spend ROI

  • Customer NPS / satisfaction / usage

Inevitably the Dogs are unprofitable, unliked by clients and deliver terrible ROI from marketing spend.

Holidays Strategic Time

Looking for a book to read over Christmas?

Chris Kocek’s book Any Insights Yet? only takes about 2 hours to read, in it he covers:

  • What is an insight? How do marketers use them to their advantage?

  • Proven techniques for building better insights.

  • Getting value/ROI from insights.

  • How to communicate insights effectively.

Sponsored content

Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.

Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.

Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.

Modernize your marketing with AdQuick

AdQuick unlocks the benefits of Out Of Home (OOH) advertising in a way no one else has. Approaching the problem with eyes to performance, created for marketers with the engineering excellence you’ve come to expect for the internet.

Marketers agree OOH is one of the best ways for building brand awareness, reaching new customers, and reinforcing your brand message. It’s just been difficult to scale. But with AdQuick, you can easily plan, deploy and measure campaigns just as easily as digital ads, making them a no-brainer to add to your team’s toolbox.