Strategic Group (Analysis)

“Strategic group” is a concept used in strategic management and strategic marketing that clusters together companies that pursue similar underlying strategies or have comparable business models. Companies are assigned to specific strategic groups through comparison along competitive dimensions such as pricing, product or service quality, firm size, and degree of vertical integration. More recently, attempts have been made to combine industrial organization‐ and resource‐based views in strategic management by conceptualizing strategic groups not as sets of companies with similar product market strategies but as organizations that share similar resource bundles. Strategic group analysis has been applied to a number of sectors including pharmaceuticals, computing, retail, and financial services. The concept and its assumptions have been subject to much criticism. Some commentators consider the predictive validity of strategic groups to be low or view strategic groups as statistical artifacts only. The theory has also been hampered by conflicting empirical findings and snapshot‐type analyses.