Blue Ocean Strategy Concept - Overview & Analysis

Innovate your way to success and push your business to the next level

50minutes

• Publisher: 50Minutes.com
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9782806264671
• eBook ISBN: 9782806264664
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Innovate your way to success and push your business to the next level! This book is a practical and accessible guide to understanding and implementing blue ocean strategy, providing you with the essential information and saving time. In 50 minutes you will be able to: •Distinguish between the two different types of markets: 'red oceans' and 'blue oceans'
•Use innovation to create your own market, where the opportunities for growth are endless
•Attract new customers that weren't accessible until now ABOUT 50MINUTES.COM| Management & Marketing 50MINUTES.COM provides the tools to quickly understand the main theories and concepts that shape the economic world of today. Our publications are easy to use and they will save you time. They provide both elements of theory and case studies, making them excellent guides to understand key concepts in just a few minutes. In fact, they are the starting point to take action and push your business to the next level.

APPLICATION

Blue ocean strategy is a strategic model involving several steps.

ADVICE

Six questions to move towards a blue ocean

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne identify six central questions linked to the creation of a blue ocean strategy.

• What alternatives are there on the market? This involves adopting a customer’s point of view to determine the options available. Two different products, whose creators believe to be completely independent, can find themselves in competition depending on the purchasing intentions of the customer. Also, holidays and work on the house make up two unavoidable expenditures: the year that a family is refurbishing a floor in the house, they will definitely spend less on a summer vacation.
• What are the interests of the groups available? This question is intended to give priority to the concerns of different groups available. These normally come down to two things: price and performance.
• How is the chain of buyers and users made up? Some businesses sell directly to the users, others sell through middlemen. Breaking this chain could be the answer to reaching a blue ocean. This is what Nespresso did by not selling its coffee pods through traditional networks (large food retailers), but by establishing their own line of high end stores.
• What are the products and complimentary services? This question is important because it enables successful strategic sequencing by picturing the two things together. Apple’s success back in 2000 was due to the recognition that content (mainly digital downloads) was a vital offering alongside their products (iPod, etc.).
• What is the functional or emotional aim of the sector? Revitalizing the value or even stripping a product of its overly symbolic charge is part of the effort required for a blue ocean. The most pertinent example of this is Nespresso, a company that was able to create a luxury image for its coffee pods.
• What main trends determine consumer behavior? The protection of the environment and the search for personal fulfillment make up the main trends of contemporary societies, which will definitely inspire the creation of products and services for a blue ocean.

Stimulation and creativity: a 4-step path

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne also propose a method for applying blue ocean strategy in enterprise. They identify four key steps:

• Visual awakening with the design of the value curve. For every characteristic of the offer, the company plots its weak points and strong points according to the competition. This first step mainly serves to create a consensus where company teams come together, through representation and the need for change, to allow for value creation. This places the company alongside its competitors. Is the differentiation clear or non-existent? According to the path the two curves follow, the answer will be clear;
• Visual exploration involves looking at the foundations to assess the innovative potential for development. How can you have an impact on a market if you don’t know its consumers? Regularly consulting clients is useful, but not sufficient. The client is not necessarily the user of the product. Blue ocean strategy seeks to widen the existing customer base, and also question unrelated clients to get to know their habits and expectations;
• Visual strategy fairs, organized between members of the company and external people (clients, target markets, partners, etc.), let you validate the importance of the offered criteria. The objective is to build a strategy based on things other than intuition and internal obstacles, such as a resistance to change;
• Visual communication happens once there is a defined strat...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Blue Ocean Strategy
• Theory of the concept
• Limits and extensions of the model
• Application
• Summary
• Further reading
• Copyright