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Blue Ocean Strategy: A Small Business Case Study

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I read "Blue Ocean Strategy" by Kim & Mauborgne recently and thought it was compelling. I thought I'd give you some excerpts from the book and use my current startup as a case study to explain some of the Blue Ocean concepts. I'm hoping it will spur thinking and feedback from you.

The theme of the book reminds me a lot of what my strategy professor from MIT Sloan (Arnoldo Hax) used to talk about when he quizzed us on cases. He repeated over and over again that we should "watch our competitors, but never follow them" and that we should "play a different game on the same field as the competition." This professor used to stress that within marketplaces, conventional wisdom about the rules of competition build up and that over time, those rules become irrelevant to potential customers.

Blue Ocean Strategy Synopsis

Rather than summarize, I thought I would give you a few quotes that lay out the theme in the authors' words:

"The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition. In red oceans, the industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. ...The companies caught in the red ocean followed a conventional approach, racing to beat the competition by building a defensible position within the existing industry order. The creators of blue oceans, surprisingly, didn't use the competition as their benchmark. ...Instead of focusing on beating the competition, they focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space. …Value innovation is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not 'given' and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. …To fundamentally shift the strategy canvas of an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives, and from customers to non-customers of an industry. As you shift your strategic focus from current competition to alternatives and non-consumers, you gain insight into how to redefine the problem the industry focuses on and thereby reconstruct buyer value elements that reside across industry boundaries"

The first example in "Blue Ocean Strategy" is Cirque de Soleil. The criteria/boundaries/rules for the circus industry that were "taken for granted" for decades included: animal shows, star/famous performers, multiple shows at the same time (i.e. 3 rings), and pushing concession sales. Rather than keeping a high emphasis on all the existing rules and then creating new ones, they either eliminated or reduced many of those rules and created a bunch of new ones. In the process, they increased value for their target market while lowering their own costs.

A key thing they did at Cirque de Soleil was that they looked across market boundaries to alternatives to the circus. It ended up being part circus and part theatre. Rather than focus on the market boundaries, they focused on the job the customer was hiring for -- in this case, it was adults looking for sophisticated entertainment. Another key thing they did was not targeting the existing market (i.e. children), rather they targeted non-consuming adults. Blue ocean strategy is all about creating and capturing net new demand by ignoring boundaries defined by traditional competitors.

The authors are big on stressing that new technology rarely turns into a great company. They state that unless the technology makes buyers lives dramatically simpler, more convenient, more productive, less risky, or more fun/fashionable, it will not attract the masses.

Blue Ocean Strategy Framework

The Blue Ocean Strategy authors propose a graphical framework for helping readers understand the book and for helping businesses create blue oceans of their own. Here's an example of the tool applied to Southwest Airlines, who are an interesting case. Southwest entered a terrible marketplace that a Porter five forces analysis would have said was a blood bath. The criteria/rules/boundaries of the airline industry are listed along the x-axis. Most of the major airlines played the same game with only the slightest of nuances. Southwest eliminated many of the rules/criteria in the industry, reduced focus on some of the rules below industry standard, raised focus on some of the rules above industry standard, and created a new rules of their own. The way they were able to do that was they targeted non-consumers (family/shorter trips v. business trips) and they looked across industry boundaries at alternatives (cars v. planes) as their competition v. looking at traditional airlines. Only by de-emphasizing some of the existing rules were they able to lower costs enough to compete in this new market.
blue ocean strategy canvas

They encourage the reader to come up with their industry's "standards." They then give the reader four questions to which you can start thinking about your company/market from a blue ocean perspective:

Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
Which factors should be reduced well below the industry's standard?
Which factors should be raised well above the industry's standard?
Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

The book suggests that an ideal strategy has 3 qualities: focus (not too many criteria), divergence (from the alternatives in the framework), and a compelling tagline.

HubSpot Blue Ocean Strategy Case Study

I used their framework/4-questions to create a draft of how we think about the Customer Managed Relationships (as opposed to CRM) marketplace. HubSpot, an Internet Marketing company, is targeting a non-consuming market (small businesses only) vs. targeting companies who already have information technology tools in place. The job HubSpot is focused on being hired for is not "tracking" customers, but helping these very small businesses (VSBs) grow revenue. In our target customer's mind, the competition for HubSpot probably isn't Salesforce.com, but rather is alternatives like hiring an SEO consulting firm, hiring an outsourced lead generation firm, hiring a new VP of Sales, etc. In fact, _____ is hiring a new VP of Sales, hired an outsourced lead generation company, hired me as a consultant, and implemented Salesforce.com.
blue ocean strategy

Putting our CMR money where our mouth is, we will eliminate the large sales force to push this type of thing as is used by much of the industry. Rather, we should spend the same amount of cycles a traditional software company would on building a "sales force" to creating an innovative "referral force" which provides rich incentives for our customers to refer us to other small businesses as that is the way small businesses tend to make decisions.

Our target market has not moved over to running their businesses on the internet because they simply don't know how to do it and do not have anyone to help them. The existing tools are just too hard.

Therefore, I think we should reduce emphasis relative to the industry on feature richness/depth and on platform/add-ons (small companies do not have resources to deal with the complexity of multiple vendors products). For the same reasons, I think we should increase emphasis ease of use, help (video, audio, searchable via most frequently asked or tag cloud), integration (key features from several apps selected by HubSpot and provided to small businesses), and familiar user interface (i.e. like Office). We should also think about increasing emphasis on "handholding" and "advice" which is apart from traditional support and consulting.

We should look across industry boundaries and provide some of what our target market gets when they hire a consultant or a new employee -- good advice and hard to obtain knowledge. Our blog should not drone on about web2.0 and whatever else pops into our head like others' do, rather it should be "how to" advise on growing revenue by leveraging easy-to-use technology. Since we are passionate about strategy, we should weave some of that stuff in there as well as it is directly relevant to how to grow revenues.

We might steal a page from other types of service companies and provide our customers with a monthly email on their progress on the top of their sales funnel relative to when we first came across them (pagerank, visitors, RSS subscribers, avg pages/visitor, etc.), metrics relative to their peer group, some standardized advice based on how well/poorly they are doing like the way realage.com does it, potentially a grade (maybe a red, yellow, green would suffice), and we might give them an hour a year for a "how we doin'" checkup with one of our MIT-trained consultants.

We have talked a few times about creating an eBay for small service companies. This idea reaches across market boundaries and helps our customers with the job they are hiring us for: growing revenues. When you think about HubSpot itself, we are a very small business and we have spent money with several other very small businesses: outside accountant, outside law firm, a video producer, several designers, freelance developers, etc. About half of these services are examples of long-tail services where we found the vendor over the internet. Why not create a section on our website that helps remove friction from the process of connecting long-tail service firms with each other using the internet. We could start with it being just a simple external facing tracker application where companies can enter information on service firms they do business with, share comments, and rate them just like they would do a movie or restaurant (1-5 stars), with the ratings simply doing a moving average.

One other aspect of this CMR angle that I like is that there are shifts happening in the marketplace that companies are starting to become aware of that they will need to take action on. For example, in two years, the Google PageRank will become a common topic of conversation at the operations committee meeting of almost every company in our target market. It reminds me a bit of selling software to manufacturing companies in the mid-90's. All of them knew they needed to get their product catalogues on the web, but didn't have any idea how to do it.

 

internet marketing kit
 

 


Posted by Brian Halligan on Fri, Sep 15, 2006 @ 10:32 AM

COMMENTS

Brian-
This is a great post and the author raises a terrific case for why many companies fail to innovate. I kept thinking of Clay Christenson's "Innovators Dilemma" as I read your post..the challenging part of established companies is that they, by their natures, are caught in a Red Ocean, and unable to challenge market boundries. To them, the map is the territory, which is not the way to think about how to one up the competition.
On a more personal level, as I work to launch my own company, we are continually asked the question by established players in our industry as to "How will you compete with company xyz which has enormous share!" The answer is, as your correctly point out, create a new value proposition, define your product/service as something different, and grow in a fundamentally different direction. Thanks for the post-very enlightening.

posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 12:17 PM by Brian Harrington


Line graphs for data that has no sequential relation?! You have to be kidding!

posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 12:22 PM by ChartJunkie


Great case study for applying the Blue Ocean Strategy. The first part of the book was awesome, but I felt like the second half focused more on established large companies than start-ups. I used the Elimited, Reduce, Raise, and Create method for coming up with the business model for fizboflorida.com. But that was a little over 5 months ago and your article reminded me to refocus and make sure our Strategy Canvas is where we want it to be.

posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 2:50 PM by Eric Allam


This is a great model. I used it many moons ago to with great success. Another way to think of it might be simpler. Company "A" competes with other company A's. Company "B" ... Company "C". Now if you create a company or process that contains all 3 company types, you'll have no competitors, a unique offering, and can charge a good price!

When I owned a copy shop, I sustained this model against Kinlos and other competitors in the area for years. We not only did copies, but also banking and pre-registration for 500+ person seminars. My competitors would only do copies because they were in the "copy" business. We would collect 500 individual checks for $120 before we bought one ream of paper. And easily charged 5 cents a copy for a 500,000 copy run job.

This stuff works well when you truly focus on combining 2 or 3 "critical" customer needs in one business. And it's very hard for the old guard to copy you.

posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 2:54 PM by Stacy


Great write up - thanks for sharing. I know you guys are also fans of Professor Christensen's work of which this seems to be reminiscient. For example, Christensen find that challengers ("innovators", "disruptors", etc) can compete if they realize that “3. Markets that Don’t Exist Can’t be Analyzed”. Established companies have effective market research and planning organizations and processes. Yet these organizations and processes are not effective ways to discover new markets. As a small business owner, I am encouraged by trends and findings such as these and your analysis. (Related note: I agree with ChartJunkie - what's up with line graphs here?).

posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 8:16 PM by Scott Meade


I look forward to reading the book.

Competitor analysis is a key area of strategy that can be difficult to undertake. More importantly, it can be difficult to easily display results and areas of differentiation - I do believe that high-level analyses of this sort should be readily shown on a whiteboard with coloured markers. Otherwise, results can be muddled and resulting decisions misguided.

Without straying off post, the line graphs could have meaning if there were a continuum in the matrix from left to right (eg, needs of small business through needs of large corporations). This may be somewhat limiting, however, which would defeat the point of "fundamentally shifting the strategy canvas".

There's also room to codify what is Low, Medium, and High within a business - unclear terms can lead to unclear decisions that, in small businesses, can be life or death.

posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 11:12 PM by Jacob Aldridge


Thanks for a very enlightening post! It's the first useful framework I have seen that one can apply towards creating a potentially disruptive business model in any industry.

I think the Hubspot model looks promising, particulary for international emerging markets that need much easier, lower cost solutions with a lot of advice. Most of them find Salesforce.com too difficult. Some analytics after lead generation might be good, eg. why a large percentage are not turning into sales (salesforce effectiveness, website, etc.).

I can think of plenty of customers for a small business services eBay!

posted on Saturday, September 16, 2006 at 11:31 AM by Shaheen Husain


It's nice to see more people talking about this wonderful book. If you liked Blue Ocean Strategy, another book you'll probably find useful is Jim Collins' Good To Great. Althought it's an analysis of established business (rather than of startups), the lessons in there apply to all organisations.

posted on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 9:27 AM by Stuart Herbert


Brian, one more thing about competition. A while back, I read and posted about another book http://therainmakermaker.com/2006/07/03/inside-the-magic-kingdom-at-disney-world.aspx. The author suggests that we not define our competition too narrowly, rather our competition is "anyone the customer compares you with".

posted on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 11:13 AM by Rick Roberge


I have read the book and found it quite interesting. But when I wondered about how to gather the knowledge you need to create new markets, I had a (big) cost problem, specially for SMEs. I got interested in how to use the existing knowledge of your company's employees rather than building a brand new department, and a solution that seems promising is to use an internal wiki to consistently pursue a blue ocean strategy inside your company.

I wrote an article on the topic at http://wikibc.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-can-wiki-help-you-build-blue-ocean.html, you might be interested in reviewing it.

posted on Thursday, November 02, 2006 at 7:44 AM by Guillaume


Great case study for applying the Blue Ocean Strategy. The first part of the book was awesome, but I felt like the second half focused more on established large companies than start-ups. I used the Elimited, Reduce, Raise, and Create method for coming up with the business model for fizboflorida.com. But that was a little over 5 months ago and your article reminded me to refocus and make sure our Strategy Canvas is where we want it to be.

posted on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 1:19 PM by Mohamed


Mohamed,
I kind of agree w/ you that the second half of the book fizzled a bit. I generally find w/ a lot of business books that you get the gist of it within 100 pages. ...I also find that most popular business writers really have one breakthrough concept in their career and that their follow-on book usually aren't that valuable after their first big hit.
Bh.

posted on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 1:53 PM by Brian Halligan


I too am executing a blue ocean strategy. I agree with the points about the book. I took the standpoint that there were too many self-service accounting programs and if people didn't have the discipline or the time, they would be stuck with the same old problem.

posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 6:43 AM by Jack Stack


So, I completed my grid against the 6 blue ocean tenants. Its in a post on my site. Check out http://epaper.hubspot.com

posted on Thursday, October 25, 2007 at 3:47 PM by Jack Stack


Jack -- I read your article...sounds like an interesting application of the blue ocean framework! Brian.

posted on Thursday, October 25, 2007 at 6:50 PM by Brian P Halligan


I was asked by a client to perform a Blue Ocean Srategy project in a very Red Ocean industry. In 3 months, the key staff had created a new product set that wowed their major suppliers and satisfied the immediate needs (scorching pain) of their clients and prospects. I am free all December to help anyone who has questions regarding Blue Ocean product development.

posted on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 10:25 AM by eagleforce


I teach this stuff (and also consult - small plug)! Feel free to ask me any questions on this strategy. http://ethnicomm.com
note: no relation to Dharmesh Shah (AFAIK)

posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 at 10:44 PM by Bhupesh Shah


bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb

posted on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 3:13 AM by rajdeep


Was a fan until I read the book. My thoughts spilled on my blog.

posted on Thursday, May 01, 2008 at 1:55 AM by Entrepreneur


Interesting stuff!

posted on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 1:59 AM by lowline


Enjoyed!

posted on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 2:03 AM by TJ


Proof that the fundamentals of marketing have not changed. If you truly understand marketing, you don't forget to
"know the competitors but FOLLOW the customer's PROBLEMS and opportunities".
Remember the good old SWOT.
Do it for competitors, customers, employees, suppliers, and you find gems.

posted on Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 9:51 PM by Online Marketing Firm


please send the application of blue ocean stratergy in cement

posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 1:49 AM by Dr. jagannath kukkudi


Last year, I guided a company through the Blue Ocean Strategy exercise end-to-end. They were able to create a completely new game-changing product set for their market and a new industry innovation that will be adopted by Fortune 1000.

posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 4:44 PM by eagleforce


Great book - it's one of the guiding philosophies for building my healthcare practice in a very competitive, red ocean market!

posted on Sunday, August 10, 2008 at 12:22 AM by Bud Ward


The strategy is very good and provide a good learning basis

posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 8:26 AM by Eldard Mukasa Ssebbaale


The Blue Ocean Strategy is being discarded by both Samsung and LG because it narrowed their markets into unprofitable niches. Rather they have both taken on the Consumer Need Model which is being used so successfully by P&G for ages. The Consumer Need Model simply means going into the market to see what the consumer needs and then producing that. This means that if people want thin mobiles with highspeed connectivity, you've got the desire platform to start with. 
 
Kishore Dharmarajan 
www.eightstorm.com

posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 3:39 AM by Kishore Dharmarajan


The consumer need model is fine if you seek to fulfill an existing requirement but what about being innovative and creating a NEW need and then owning that space until the competition figures it out? 
 
What happened to innovate or perish? Is that concept no longer valid?

posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 1:58 PM by ethnicomm


@Kishore I'd love to hear more about why LG and Samsung have moved away from using the Blue Ocean model. Fascinating. 
 
I'm in violent agreement that listening to customers is a very good thing. In terms of building really big companies or breakthrough products, I think listening to customers has "some" limitations. Customers tend to give you incremental innovation and rarely give you something breakthrough or disruptive to an existing market. As Henry Ford said, "If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 7:31 PM by Brian Halligan


What P&G is doing is that they're going into the bathrooms of people and watching how people clean it up. They don't ask questions, they watch. (If you ask people something they'll parrot back what they hear on TV). By watching people you can discover needs that can be converted into profitable blue oceans. In the P&G example they were able to create a new mop for bathrooms by doing this bathroom watching. 
 
The mistake that LG & Samsung did was to create Blue Ocean products that no body wanted. Who wants a chocolate inspired mobile that costs twice that of a similarly featured phone. You can discover a new patch of land but if its on Sibera, no one's going there. 
 
I am not an advocate for the Consumer Model or the Blue Ocean Strategy. Rather I think it's better to spy on the needs of consumers through the eyes of an innovator and come up with inspiring products that are useful and ahead of consumer expectations. If it's done properly the end product will automatically be an blue ocean product with a consumer focus. 
 
A good example which springs to mind is the iPhone. Someone in Apple was watching people fiddle with their phones and came to the conclusion that if they could free up the fingers of people from buttons they could create an awesome product. We all know what happened next. 
 
Kishore Dharmarajan

posted on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 12:36 AM by Kishore Dharmarajan


Hi Kishore. 
 
Thanks again for the thoughtful comment. I've read that same story about how P&G watches folks clean their bathroom and ends up coming up with good ideas. 
 
I recently read "Inside Steve's Brain" about Steve Jobs and Apple. They talked quite a bit in there about the ipod development. The interviews with the employees made it clear that at the time they built the ipod, there were several competitors on the market and that they basically copied one made by "Creative" our of Singapore. The breakthrough for them was discovering better storage technology that would let them do it much much smaller. They were visiting Toshiba to talk about all sorts of things and Toshiba showed them their new storage and it was that combined with the Creative products that was the "ah-ha" that made them think they could pull off something big. ...The book talked a lot about how the other real break-through was how they pulled together the device ipod, the app (itunes), and the content library into one relatively seemless system. It was the integration and simplicity that unlocked the non-consumers according to the book.  
 
Fascinating stuff. 
 
Brian.

posted on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 8:56 AM by Brian Halligan


Alfred Kärcher GmbH used to observe people cleaning in their homes. However, their innovation stemmed from developing applications using technologies from other areas. Kind of like what P&G is now doing with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.

posted on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 9:33 AM by ethnicomm


Warning: longish post. 
 
In Marketing, it makes zero sense to talk about a product or service without defining the target market. You can sail on the Blue Ocean all day long, but when the sun sets, there needs to be a substantial, receptive, and reachable market. Innovation for innovation's sake? No good. 
 
 
 
As for the comments about P&G: typically, customers are unable to identify breakthrogh products. They can and will list desired feature sets and tell us when we do not meet expected quality levels. (Read Kano, everyone!) 
 
 
 
The key to breakthrough products is getting to the customer gemba. Observe: how do they do it now? When do they do it? Where do they do it? What else do they need to use when they are doing it? What are the pain points? 
 
 
 
But is does not stop there: the success of a breakthrough product also depends on five factors: R-O-T-C-C: relative advantage, observability, trialability, complexity, compatibility. The iPhone ranks high in all five areas; the Segway does not.

posted on Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 9:19 AM by James Anthony


Hi Brian, 
 
It's great that you follow Blue Ocean thinking...I too am an idea generator and really enjoy this area of strategic positioning. 
 
I ran across an article that stated the reason of pitiful success rates for truly new products and services within the corporate world has to been attributed to their talent in the business development analyst positions. 
 
This author stated that with proper training (he was with Dow for 20+ years) ROI could be pushed up dramatically. 
 
Also, I highly recommend Jack Trout and his books on positioning in the mind of the consumer. They're excellent in helping us think from the consumers' vantage point as well. 
 
Don

posted on Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 6:56 PM by Don Blanchard


@ Don Blanchard -- Thanks for your note. I have heard about Jack Trout a couple of times now, so I guess it is time to pick up his book.

posted on Friday, April 17, 2009 at 10:50 AM by Brian Halligan


Brian, I can certainly second the recommendations of Jack Trout's book. 
 
It's one that I use extensively with my business coaching clients, and it always delivers value. 
 
You can also see the basics of the message much quicker in this video I also send to many clients: 
 
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ciSrNc1v17M

posted on Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 2:58 AM by Jacob Aldridge


thanks for your post.perhaps you will like abercrombie

posted on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 8:49 PM by ed hardy


Reading about the comments from fellow members, who have doubts about the market viablity of a blue ocean product. I just wanted to clarify that formulation of a blue ocean strategy/product starts with the real customer insight (not relying on a market survey) but approaching the customers directly and inteviewing them to to gain understanding. i acknowledge that customer might not really know what they need, but it helps to watch their usage pattern. So, using Blue ocean strategy framework, the products/strategy does find real users. Another point is about LG chocolate phone and it sold more than 20 million unit worldwide putting it in a category of Motorola Razr. So, i think it did make sense for LG to use these frameworks. Regarding samsung, they still have the value innovation center and they are investing a lot into it. So, i am quite convinced that Blue ocean strategy is here to stay and stay for long long times to come.

posted on Monday, July 13, 2009 at 11:32 AM by MKS


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