We may receive compensation when you click on product links from our partners. For more information, please see our disclosure policy.
The importance of business strategy simply cannot be underestimated. Without strategic direction, you are essentially operating without vision. strategy is the basis for everything your company does as it generates a context for all operating decisions. It offers guidance in everything from company structure and priority of initiatives, to the position of marketing and the skills needed by your employees.
Advantages of Blue Ocean Strategy
- It helps businesses create new, untapped market spaces.
- Blue Ocean Strategy fosters innovation and creativity.
- It allows businesses to avoid the fierce competition in red oceans.
- Blue Ocean Strategy enables companies to create greater value for customers.
- It helps businesses differentiate their products or services from competitors.
- Blue Ocean Strategy promotes growth and profitability.
- It encourages businesses to explore non-customers and expand their customer base.
- Blue Ocean Strategy supports cost reduction while enhancing customer value.
- It inspires long-term strategic planning.
- Blue Ocean Strategy can lead to increased market share and brand recognition.
Blue Ocean Strategy
Blue Ocean Strategy is one that is being embraced by many organisations and strategy consultants. Other strategies are heavily focused on contending with your competition in the industry, whilst those who implement blue ocean thinking compete against no one but themselves.
Before delving into the mechanics of this strategy, it’s important to acknowledge where it derives from. Blue ocean strategy is a theory offered by Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. This book was published in 2005.
Red Ocean strategy
It presents businesses with an alternative strategy for red ocean thinking. Red ocean strategy involves basing your decisions on your competition, i.e. looking for ways to fight against them for a share of the marketplace. However, W. Chan Kim and Renee Maulborgne believe that organisations will not succeed by battling against one and other.
Professionals like James Arthur Ray have carved success by focusing on themselves and not others. Instead, they state that the key to success is systematically creating ‘blue oceans’ of uncontested market space ripe for growth. By operating in this manner, competition becomes irrelevant.
Implementing
To implement a blue ocean strategic direction, one of the most important things you need to do is create a new value curve for your business. How do you achieve this? The authors recommended using a ‘Four Actions Framework’ to break the trade-off between low cost and differentiation.
“To paraphrase the 7 Ps, an old British military adage: “Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Pretty Poor Performance” (you can probably guess which word has been changed). It isn’t just a useful philosophy for military planning. It works with everything you can imagine: work, planning a holiday, poker and a
job interview .”
Firstly, you must deal with raise and reduction. You need to determine what factors you should raise high above the standard in your industry, yet you must also decide what factors you are going to lower well below the standard in your industry. Secondly, you need to deal with creation and elimination. Decipher what factors to eliminate that the industry has long competed with. Moreover, determine what factors to create that the industry has never offered. This gives you the framework you need to find uncontested market space.
Nonetheless, answering these questions is no easy task. You need to assess each and every facet of what the industry competes on. This is why seeking the help of expert strategy consultants comes highly recommended. You need consultants who can guide your
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans.
