What if there was a way you could take your business outside the confines of competition and create your own market space? What if you were able to set the pace and create unique products, while also profiting from lucrative new markets?
The blue ocean strategy is a business theory that suggests companies are better off searching for ways to gain “uncontested market space” than competing with similar companies. The term is derived from the book “Blue Ocean Strategy” (Harvard Business Review Press, expanded edition, 2015), by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. The strategy represents the simultaneous pursuit of high product differentiation and low cost, thereby making competition irrelevant.
“Our study shows that blue ocean strategy is particularly needed when supply exceeds demand in a market,” Kim explained in an article in Forbes. “This situation is applying to more and more industries today and will be even more prevalent in the future.”
Here’s everything you need to know about the blue ocean strategy, and how to create your own market.
Examples of blue ocean strategy
Kim pointed out how Amazon has shifted from an online retailer to a digital platform that sells practically anything
“Just think of its initial blue ocean shift in book retailing that separated it from the pack with its offering of the largest selection of books in the world, good prices, automatic confirmation of buyers’ orders, its useful selection on ‘people who bought this book also bought,’ and firsthand reviews on what readers found useful or not in a book,” Kim told Business News Daily.
Amazon isn’t always successful in creating blue oceans, however. According to Mauborgne, it failed in a few instances …