Create Your Own Market

Red Oceans vs Blue Oceans

Most businesses compete in crowded markets, fighting over existing demand. Kim and Mauborgne call these red oceans, bloody with competition. Blue oceans are uncontested spaces you create, where competition is irrelevant.

Value Innovation

The cornerstone of blue ocean strategy is value innovation: simultaneously pursuing differentiation and low cost, rather than trading one off against the other. This is what makes a new market space attractive to both customers and the business.

The Four Actions Framework

To reconstruct value and create a blue ocean, Kim and Mauborgne offer a practical tool: four questions that force you to challenge every assumption in your industry and rebuild your offering from scratch.

Reaching Non-Customers

Every industry focuses intensely on its existing customers while ignoring the much larger population of people who are not buying at all. Kim and Mauborgne argue that the biggest blue oceans are usually found by understanding why non-customers are not buying.

Reconstructing Market Boundaries

Blue oceans are not found by accident. Kim and Mauborgne identify six paths through which companies have systematically created new market spaces, by looking across industries, across time, across buyer groups, and beyond.

The Strategy Canvas

The strategy canvas is the diagnostic and action tool at the heart of Blue Ocean Strategy. It makes visible, in a single image, where your offering stands relative to competitors and where the opportunity for a new value curve lies.

Tipping Point Leadership

Creating a blue ocean strategy is hard. Executing it is harder. Kim and Mauborgne study how leaders break through the cognitive, resource, motivational, and political hurdles that prevent good strategies from being implemented.