Blue Ocean Strategy Book: Shift Your Business To a Blue Ocean Approach

The book Blue Ocean Strategy  has a great theory on how to shift your business & marketing to a winning strategy. This tells us why some business strategies work while others don't. It's written by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. 

Blue ocean theory compares setting up your own market by creating or shifting your business to something unique, instead for competing with others over the readily available ways of doing business. This is a blue ocean shift.

The Blue Ocean Strategy

The blue ocean strategy is straight-forward: red oceans are the known marketplace where the rules are defined and the working order has already been established. Blue oceans are an unknown marketplace that's wide open for the taking with little or no competition. The rules and working order are yet to be established.

The Blue Ocean Theory

The blue ocean theory says that if you compete in a red ocean; you'll end up competing on things like price, product and promotion in a race to the bottom on lowering your price. This ends up in failure as you lower your profit margin again and again until there’s little or no profit.

Blue Ocean Market

A blue ocean market has no competition because you've created something that nobody else is offering. This gives you a lot of room for growth.

This is where we want to be in the online business world! There's no reason for someone to buy a product or service from you if they can get the same thing from other people. Offering something that sets you apart makes you the best choice for a customer or client.

Blue Ocean marketing opens you up to distinguishing yourself or your company as something that others can’t compete with.

Blue Ocean Shift

You can make a blue ocean shift by pivoting your business strategy to one that's unique and definitive for your business, instead of just offering the same things as everyone else.

We can find countless examples or red ocean marketing on social media and paid ads through Google and Facebook, they all look similar and also seem to be conforming to an aesthetic, idea and offering that are all parallel to each other. You can avoid this trap by forging your own unique path in which you offer a product and/or service that's different than what everybody elese is doing. Let them all fight over scraps while you give your customers or business partners based on the blue ocen shift you make.

By making a blue ocean shift, you can focus on developing your own product or service that's unique that your competitors don’t offer.

Blue Ocean Strategy Book

The Blue Ocean Strategy book says it best by saying “Blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant.”

You can use the essentials of blue ocean strategy and shift how you do business into an unknown market space. Competing in an ocean of of one (or an ocean of few) means you can be much more competitive in what you offer.