Blue Ocean Strategy

A blue ocean strategy creates a new market category for products or services by dramatically redefining the benefits and costs of offerings. By thoroughly changing customer expectations about the values that can be received, a blue ocean strategy enables a company to move from an intensively competitive "red ocean" market to a new "blue ocean" market, free from competitors.

Many of the products and services we now take for granted—for example, online music stores and discount airlines such as SouthWest—were blue ocean opportunities when they were introduced. In crowded markets, blue oceans are often the only sensible strategy for a new business.

If you've read Kim and Mauborgne's book and are looking for a consultant to guide you through the process as an objective contributor, please contact me.

Blue Ocean Case Study

Between December and April 2008, I helped one of my clients develop a blue ocean strategy for a new data integration offering. My engagement with the client began in October 2007. First, I worked with the CEO to develop comprehensive messaging guidelines, reflecting the company's product features and capabilities at that stage. We created a new Web site, but we purposely kept a low profile in the market while the engineering team was working on the next big release.

Meanwhile, we continued working on our messaging and launch planning. We could see that the market was crowded. The obvious open source positions (where company A is the open source equivalent of propriety software company B) had been staked out. We needed a blue ocean strategy. (Interesting enough, at the March 2008 Open Source Business Conference, an executive from Alfresco, a leading open source software company, remarked that any new open source company should pursue a blue ocean strategy, because all the obvious open source markets have become so crowded.)

I introduced the book and the framework to the CEO, who jumped at the opportunity to apply blue ocean thinking to the company's strategy.

Now, roughly five months later, we have a redesigned product that creates a blue ocean in the data integration market. We launched the product at a technology conference in April. The reception has been positive: in about 3 weeks, we've garnered 27 news stories and blog entries, and more are coming in every day. "This is very cool!" a major analyst gushed. Obviously, we still need to execute well on sales and marketing, but we're off to a great start.

This was a rare opportunity: a CEO who really saw the value of a blue ocean strategy and was willing to work through the development of value curves, even if the results meant changing the product; a strong technical team; and a crack PR firm who helped us stay focused on communicating our solution in a simple, compelling way.

It's been a valuable learning experience. So, again, if you're looking for someone who has actually been through this process, please give me a call: +1 (510) 495-6590. I would be glad to help you with your own blue ocean strategic planning.