The MyBlogAgency ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ Challenge For The New Year

For Christmas, one of my son’s presents was the book ‘Blue Ocean Strategy – How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrevelant’ by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

The presentation inspired me to finish reading the book in two sittings. For me, it was another perception and confirmation of what marketing is and how to be a good marketer. There were challenge references throughout the book; that is, the use of the word challenge in a statement. The very word challenges me to read-for-meaning. For me, the challenge is the development of a story that is absolutely based on the truth, the facts and the realities of the product and service, and is both believable to and accepted by the reader.

Following are marketing insights I highlighted while reading and personal reflections, presented as a basis of turning information into knowledge into meaning into awareness into incorporation and finally into application.

MyBlogAgency New Year’s Resolution

To do our best to inspire every reader to persuade themselves to Drink H2Ultra Fitness Water, use Future Spark Plugs and conduct an Individualized Search every day and tell all their friends to do the same.

Marketing Insights In ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’

Blue Ocean Strategy provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant.

Red oceans represent all the industries in existence today, known as market space. Blue oceans denote all the industries not in existence today, the unknown market space.

86% of launches are line extensions; that is, incremental improvements within the red ocean of existing market space. The remaining 14% of the launches were aimed at creating blue oceans.

A strategic move is the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering.

The companies caught in the red ocean followed a conventional approach, racing to beat the competition by building a defensible position, within the existing industry order. The creators of blue oceans, surprisingly, didn’t use the competition as their benchmark. Instead, they followed a different strategic logic that we call value innovation.

Value innovation focuses on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space. It is a new way of thinking about and executing strategy.

To fundamentally shift the strategy canvas of an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives and from customers to noncustomers of the industry.

Instead of offering wine as wine, Casella created a social drink accessible to everyone by creating three new factors in the US wine industry: easy drinking, easy to select and a fun adventure.

Create a new value curve. The strategy canvas enables companies to see the future in the present. Embedded in the value curves of an industry is a wealth of strategic knowledge on the current status and future of a business.

The kind of language used in the strategy canvas gives insight as to whether a company’s strategic vision is built on an “outside-in” perspective, driven by the demand side or an “inside-out” perspective that is operationally driven.

To break out of red oceans, companies must break out of the accpeted boundaries that define how they compete.

The key to creating a blue ocean is to break out of narrow tunnel vision by understanding which factors determine customer’s decisions to trade up or down.

Curves created a blue ocean fitness strategy for women.

... the strategic profile with high blue ocean potential has three complementary qualities: focus, divergence and a compelling tagline.

A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself.

First tier noncustomers are in search of better solutions. Noncustomers tend to offer far more insight intow how to unlock and graow a blue ocean than do relatively content existing customers.

Leaders need to free up resources by searching out cold spots and redirecting resources to hot spots.

People’s minds and hearts must align with the new strategy. Where blue ocean strategy is concerned, this challenge is heightened.

The Three E-Principles of Fair Process: Engagement, explanation and clarity of expectation.

When individuals feel recognized for their intellectual worth, they are willing to share their knowledge.

A blue ocean strategy brings with it considerable barriers to imitation.