Blue Ocean Strategy Examples: Dive into Supreme Marketing Success

Model Name : Blue Ocean Strategy
Creator : W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Year : 2004
Purpose : Create new market space | Innovation | Strategic Direction | New Product Introduction | Eliminate Competition

Welcome to the shark tank

Make no mistake – it is 2018, it is the digital age of globalization, and every single business today is operating under intense competition in overly saturated markets.

Enter any market, any industry, and you’ll be immediately challenged by companies, big and small, selling similar products and services. All these companies will also have the same goals as you; to achieve significant profit, revenue, and market share growth.

We all want our business to prosper and thrive, and we all know fights for market share can get brutal. It’s a shark-infested tank full of rivals attacking each other with bared fangs.

Am I being a bit melodramatic? Maybe. However, it creates a very clear image of the point I am trying to make.

Picture an ocean bed covered in fish chunks, where a bunch of sharks arrives together. Naturally, they will each tear apart at the fish chunks ferociously, trying to devour more than any other shark. They’ll also do what they can to hurt or sabotage the other sharks over every morsel, to improve their chances of getting the most fish for themselves.

Pretty soon, the ocean bed would become blood red from the never-ending vicious shark clashes.

Now, imagine if one of the sharks swims away from all this violent mayhem, into calm, smooth, blue waters. Eventually, the shark comes across lots of food, with little or no sharks in the area to fight with. The shark eats to its fill and enjoys the prospect of getting fed consistently, without going through that bloody struggle.

The clear blue ocean is full of new, undiscovered beds of food, my friends. And this is precisely the principle of the ingenious Blue Ocean Strategy.

The Strategy and the belief

It was in 2004 that two professors at INSEAD Business School got together to write and publish a groundbreaking marketing theory book.

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne shaped the analogy that companies should stop struggling to win in red oceans of bloody competition, where rival businesses fight for dominance of an established yet saturated market space.

Instead, companies can create “blue oceans” of uncontested market space, where the potential for profit is far greater, and the competition nonexistent or irrelevant.

The Blue Ocean strategy focuses on a new definition of success.

Instead of trying to fight for the biggest slice of a pie that’s quickly being devoured, success can be achieved by creating a larger pie for all

Speaking in a practical sense, the Blue Ocean Strategy is geared towards the development of innovative market-creating schemes. It is about opening up new possibilities where competing organizations are not operating in a defined cost-value structure.

Embracing the strategy

You can discover your blue ocean in one of four ways.

Take a look at what Kim and Mauborgne call the Four Actions Framework. This framework restructures buyer value elements to give birth to a new value curve.

To get started, ask yourself these four critical questions:

1. [Raise]

What factors of your business, product or service are simply similar to current industry standards? Raise them.

2. [Reduce]

What factors hindering business growth are an outcome of competing against other companies. Reduce them.

3. [Eliminate]

Which factors have your industry competed on for too long? Eliminate them.

4. [Create]

What are the factors that your industry has never really offered? Create them.

When businesses start embracing the strategy by critically examining every factor of competition, it enables the key decision makers to identify conventional assumptions they had intuitively made in the midst of the competition. Once these factors are realized and accepted, companies are free to search for blue oceans within their industries and make the shift.

According to the acclaimed Harvard Business Review book, a successful Blue Ocean shift is a product of three elements working together :

1. The Mindset shift that is fundamental to the process in order to expand the mental horizons of where the business growth opportunity truly lies.

2. The Tools practically implemented to translate the blue ocean thinking into compelling new offerings that create demand.

3. The Human-ness of the process which inspires businesses to confidently create and drive the effective execution of innovatory tactics and offerings.

Companies that swim the blue ocean

There’s no better way to inspire than with living breathing success stories. Some of the world’s biggest names happened to be following the primary principles of the Blue Ocean Strategy when they discovered unprecedented business growth and market domination.

Blue Ocean Strategy Example – Apple

Let’s start with Apple. In 2003, Apple encompassed digital music and introduced iTunes. With iTunes, Apple users could legally download high-quality music at affordable rates, thereby replacing other conventional or questionable sources of music such as CDs, illegal downloads, etc.

In a market where competitors strived to sell their existing products better, Apple captured the growing demand for music with a new product that made the competition practically irrelevant.

Blue Ocean Strategy Example – Cirque du Soleil

Next up is the uniquely brilliant example of Cirque du Soleil, the legendary entertainment company that performs in over 300 cities for more than 150 million spectators in a world where circuses are dying down to slow extinction.

Within 20 years of the company’s founding, Cirque du Soleil captured the audience that it took entertainment companies like the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey more than 100 years to capture.

How did they soar to astronomical levels in such a rapidly declining industry?

Cirque du Soleil created alternative forms of entertainment in an uncontested market space that captured new demands by appealing to all groups of customers, not just children. In their own words, they “reinvented the circus.”

What company would deny the opportunity to take their business beyond the confines of saturated competition?

What firm can resist the prospect of creating a whole new, unshared lucrative market space?

It’s no surprise that the Blue Ocean Strategy was a huge hit, selling millions of copies and being translated into 44 languages around the world.

Final Thoughts

The Blue Ocean Strategy can be applied across all sectors and businesses. With limited room for market share growth, the company turns to verticals or avenues of finding new business. This strategy directs businesses to capture new demand.

It preaches,

“Don’t fight your competitors – make them irrelevant.”