The decade of the 1970s will go down in the history of marketing as the period when strategic marketing planning first emerged as an identifiable area of theory and practice. In the process, a whole new vocabulary of terms was added to the marketing lexicon. Thus, one now speaks of cash cows, stars, problem children, and dogs when one refers to products and product portfolios. To deal with products classified in this manner, a set of four general market‐share‐based strategies has been formulated: building; holding; harvesting; and withdrawal.