As the competition becomes fierce, businesses must learn how to create their uncontested blue ocean, a market space where they make the competition irrelevant.
Enterprises create their blue ocean by going where the profits and growth are and the competition aren’t.
What is a blue ocean?
The blue ocean denotes all the unknown market space that are untainted by competition. In this space, the market demand is captured, or created rather than fought over.
In this ocean, businesses have wider and deeper potential to be found in unexplored market territory with many opportunities for growth that are both rapid and profitable.
The concept of the blue ocean was made popular by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their books, Blue Ocean Shift and Blue Ocean Strategy. As you know, the blue ocean is the opposite of the red ocean, where the majority of businesses bloodily slogging it out.
At the red ocean, businesses compete in existing market space, exploit existing demand, and look for ways to beat the competition. It takes more energy to contest in the red ocean than in the blue ocean. You can’t win big in business fighting with so much competition.
Reduce the competition
Today, forward-thinking businesses are embracing and tapping from great riches in the market by standing out.
You must align the whole system of your enterprise activities in pursuit of differentiation. Don’t just try to be better, try to be different.
Being different is the key to making a difference in the marketplace. It is important that you streamline your business to a point of differentiation.
This will help you to know who your target customers are and what to do to attract and keep them.
Whenever you come up with a business idea or solution, watch closely who shows up and why. Bill those who show up and keep your eyes focused on why they came. Rather than competing in games where you’re an underdog, find unexplored new markets in which you can win and make the competition irrelevant.
‘The secret of most successful start-ups’, someone said, ‘is the ability to hit a bull’s-eye-to aim with exquisite specificity.’ This is like finding the right market. Finding the right market means finding a starving crowd.
Eliminate the unnecessary
Which of your business operations or activities should you eliminate? Your product or service is not for everybody. If you get turned down, chances are you haven’t found your market, and maybe you are approaching the wrong people.
The generalist is weak; the specialists are strong. ‘When you try to be all things to all people’ Al Ries a marketing guru taught, ‘you inevitably wind up in trouble.’ There’s also an old saying that: I’d rather be strong somewhere than be weak everywhere.
Your business doesn’t need everyone in the marketplace; it only needs a segment of the market who find your offering highly valuable and can’t live without you. When you find such people, serve them better than anyone else could. By giving attention to a specific group, you achieve a very high market share in that category.
People should know what your business stands for and what it doesn’t stand for. When you stand out from the crowd, real men would run to your roof with treasures in their hands. Therefore, if you are not positioning your solution as a high-value-adding creator to a specific market, you are simply out of step.
…to be continued
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