Blue ocean strategy

by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

5*/10

Key Ideas:

Don’t compete with rivals – make them irrelevant by redrawing industry boundaries.
(1) eliminate what buyers no longer value, (2) reduce over delivery that often results from competitive benchmarking, (3) raise value in areas that appeal to buyers, and (4) create new value to attract former non-customers into the market.

Other interesting notes:

The six different things to examine when looking for your Blue Ocean Strategy are:

  1. Alterative industries for lessons you can learn
  2. Strategic groups within industries for clusters of companies following a similar strategy
  3. The chain of buyers, formal and informal, who are involved in purchasing decisions
  4. Complementary products or services which may influence demand for your products and services
  5. Functional and emotional appeal to buyers – is there a way to add functional or emotional appeal?
  6. Time – what are the trends that will affect your business?

Build execution into strategy:

  • Engagement – involve people in strategic decisions by asking their input and allowing them to debate the merits of one another’s ideas and assumptions
  • Explanation – everyone should understand the rationale behind the final decisions
  • Expectation – clarify the new rules of the game

Thoughts on the book:

*10/10 idea, didn’t need to be such a huge book.

Longer summary/notes: RK

If you like this, you’ll probably like: This is marketing, Your music and people, Competition is for losers lecture by Peter Thiel, books