Introduction to Blue Ocean Strategy
Blue Ocean is a business strategy used by budding entrepreneurs to seek new opportunities in market spaces where competition doesn’t exist at all. These ‘pioneers’ become the first to bring about their product to the market and create a demand for it after strategizing using the Blue Ocean Analogy. It was a term coined in 2005.
Understanding Blue Ocean Strategy
In the business and marketing world, there are two oceans—red and blue. Red ocean refers to the existing market that is competitive, a contested market forum that tries to grab attention from its competitors in a limited market share. In the Blue ocean though, the product is one of its kind, the first ever to exist, which finds its way into the market. Strategizers develop this product using the value innovation approach to the strategy. It means that the new product has immense value and is the most innovative of its kind, that it needs and has no competitors either. This space for the product is an uncontested space. The entrepreneur had the first-mover advantage, and thus seized it in making the product. It brings a hoard of other benefits like cost advantage, pricing pattern without worrying about competition, and endless opportunities for the entrepreneur. It’s a space that yields high profits because of the very few barriers towards the goal.
Highlights Of Blue Ocean Strategy
Finding a Blue Ocean in the existing market is a challenge and that requires innovation. Value innovation is the point where price, cost positions and utility intersect with the need for the product by the consumer. No matter how meant for luxury it is, if the product has no value and utility, it will fail. Blue Ocean Strategy is also an assessing tool. It broadens the current horizons and brings about a shift in the mindset of the entrepreneurs. It’s not easy to survive in the Blue, unexplored and vast ocean. The risk is monumental and the entrepreneur should need to develop adequate strategies in the early days for the product to thrive.
