81 Impressive Quotes from The Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim



 Anyone looking to get a real edge in business or wanting to learn Marketing must read The Blue Ocean Strategy.It's one of THE BEST book about business master planning.


Here are the quotes i love:

''Imagine a market universe composed of two sorts of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans represent all the industries in existence today. This is the known market space. Blue oceans denote all the industries not in existence today. This is the unknown market space.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here, companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, and cutthroat competition turns the red ocean bloody.Blue oceans, in contrast, are defined by untapped market space, demand creation, and the opportunity for highly profitable growth…In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant

chan kim The Blue Ocean Strategy Quote


''Companies need to go beyond competing. To seize new profit and growth opportunities, they also need to create blue oceans.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''While supply is on the rise as global competition intensifies, there is no clear evidence of an increase in demand relative to supply, and statistics even point to declining populations in many developed markets.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''For major product and service categories, brands are generally becoming more similar, and as they are becoming more similar, people increasingly select based on price. People no longer insist, as in the past, that their laundry detergent be Tide. Nor will they necessarily stick to Colgate when Crest is on sale, and vice versa. In overcrowded industries, differentiating brands becomes harder in both economic upturns and downturns.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space. Value innovation places equal emphasis on value and innovation.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, something that improves value but is not sufficient to make you stand out in the marketplace. Innovation without value tends to be technology-driven, market pioneering, or futuristic, often shooting beyond what buyers are ready to accept and pay for. In this sense, it is important to distinguish between value innovation as opposed to technology innovation and market pioneering.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Value innovation occurs only when companies align innovation with utility, price, and cost positions. If they fail to anchor innovation with value in this way, technology innovators and market pioneers often lay the eggs that other companies hatch.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''By breaking the market boundaries of theater and circus, Cirque du Soleil gained a new understanding not only of circus customers but also of circus non-customers: adult theater customers. This led to a whole new circus concept that broke the value-cost trade-off and created a blue ocean of new market space.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant

  
''Cirque du Soleil offers the best of both circus and theater, and it has eliminated or reduced everything else. By offering unprecedented utility, Cirque du Soleil created a blue ocean and invented a new form of live entertainment,one that is markedly different from both traditional circus and theater. At the same time, by eliminating many of the most costly elements of the circus, it dramatically reduced its cost structure, achieving both differentiation and low cost. Cirque strategically priced its tickets against those of the theater, lifting the price point of the circus industry by several multiples while still pricing its productions to capture the mass of adult customers, who were used to theater prices.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  
Chan Kim Blue The Ocean Strategy Quote


''Of course, there is no such thing as a riskless strategy. Strategy will always involve both opportunity and risk, be it a red ocean or a blue ocean initiative.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Effective blue ocean strategy should be about risk minimization and not risk taking.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


 ''It won’t work to benchmark competitors and try to out-compete them by offering a little more for a little less. Such a strategy may nudge sales up but will hardly drive a company to open up uncontested market space. Nor is conducting extensive customer research the path to blue oceans.Our research found that customers can scarcely imagine how to create uncontested market space. Their insight also tends toward the familiar “offer me more for less.” And what customers typically want “more” of are those product and service features that the industry currently offers.''


 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''To pursue both value and low cost, you should resist the old logic of benchmarking competitors in the existing field and choosing between differentiation and cost leadership. As you shift your strategic focus from current competition to alternatives and noncustomers, you gain insight into how to redefine the problem the industry focuses on and thereby reconstruct buyer value elements that reside across industry boundaries.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''To break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost and to create a new value curve, there are four key questions to challenge an industry’s strategic logic and business model:
Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered? ''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  
The Blue Ocean Strategy quote


  ''When a company’s value curve, or its competitors’, meets the three criteria that define a good blue ocean strategy—focus, divergence, and a compelling tagline that speaks to the market—the company is on the right track.These three criteria serve as an initial litmus test of the commercial viability of blue ocean ideas.On the other hand, when a company’s value curve lacks focus, its cost structure will tend to be high and its business model complex in implementation and execution. When it lacks divergence, a company’s strategy is a me-too, with no reason to stand apart in the marketplace. When it lacks a compelling tagline that speaks to buyers, it is likely to be internally driven or a classic example of innovation for innovation’s sake with no great commercial potential and no natural take-off capability.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant

''THE FIRST PRINCIPLE of blue ocean strategy is to reconstruct market boundaries to break from the competition and create blue oceans. This principle addresses the search risk many companies struggle with. The challenge is to successfully identify, out of the haystack of possibilities that exist, commercially compelling blue ocean opportunities. This challenge is key because managers cannot afford to be riverboat gamblers betting their strategy on intuition or on a random drawing.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  
Marketing quote



 ''In the broadest sense, a company competes not only with the other firms in its own industry but also with companies in those other industries that produce alternative products or services. Alternatives are broader than substitutes.Products or services that have different forms but offer the same functionality or core utility are often substitutes for each other. On the other hand, alternatives include products or services that have different functions and forms but the same purpose.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Products or services can take different forms and perform different functions but serve the same objective. Consider cinemas versus restaurants. Restaurants have few physical features in common with cinemas and serve a distinct function: they provide conversational and gastronomical pleasure. This is a very different experience from the visual entertainment offered by cinemas. Despite the differences in form and function, however, people go to a restaurant for the same objective that they go to the movies: to enjoy a night out. These are not substitutes, but alternatives to choose from.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''In making every purchase decision, buyers implicitly weigh alternatives, often unconsciously. Do you need a self-indulgent two hours? What should you do to achieve it? Do you go to the movies, have a massage, or enjoy reading a favorite book at a local café? The thought process is intuitive for individual consumers and industrial buyers alike.For some reason, we often abandon this intuitive thinking when we become sellers. Rarely do sellers think consciously about how their customers make trade-offs across alternative industries. A shift in price, a change in model, even a new ad campaign can elicit a tremendous response from rivals within an industry, but the same actions in an alternative industry usually go unnoticed.Trade journals, trade shows, and consumer rating reports reinforce the vertical walls between one industry and another. Often, however, the space between alternative industries provides opportunities for value innovation.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


Chan Kim The Blue Ocean Strategy Quote


 ''Just as blue oceans can often be created by looking across alternative industries,so can they be unlocked by looking across strategic groups. The term refers to a group of companies within an industry that pursue a similar strategy. In most industries, the fundamental strategic differences among industry players are captured by a small number of strategic groups.''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Strategic groups can generally be ranked in a rough hierarchical order built on two dimensions: price and performance. Each jump in price tends to bring a corresponding jump in some dimensions of performance. Most companies focus on improving their competitive position within a strategic group. Mercedes,BMW, and Jaguar, for example, focus on outcompeting one another in the luxury car segment as economy carmakers focus on excelling over one another in their strategic group. Neither strategic group, however, pays much heed to what the other is doing because from a supply point of view they do not seem to be competing.The key to creating a blue ocean across existing strategic groups is to break out of this narrow tunnel vision by understanding which factors determine customers’ decisions to trade up or down from one group to another.''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''What are the strategic groups in your industry? Why do customers trade up for the higher group, and why do they trade down for the lower one? ''

― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Challenging an industry’s conventional wisdom about which buyer group to target can lead to the discovery of a new blue ocean. By looking across buyer groups, companies can gain new insights into how to redesign their value curves to focus on a previously overlooked set of buyers.''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''By questioning conventional definitions of who can and should be the target buyer,companies can often see fundamentally new ways to unlock value. Consider how Canon copiers created the small desktop copier industry by shifting the target customer of the copier industry from corporate purchasers to users.''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''What is the chain of buyers in your industry? Which buyer group does your industry typically focus on? If you shifted the buyer group of your industry, how could you unlock new value?''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant

Marketing quote

 ''Few cinema operators worry about how hard or costly it is for people to get babysitters. But they should, because it affects demand for their business.Imagine a movie theater with a babysitting service.Untapped value is often hidden in complementary products and services. The key is to define the total solution buyers seek when they choose a product or service. A simple way to do so is to think about what happens before, during,and after your product is used. Babysitting and parking the car are needed before people can go to the movies. Operating and application software are used along with computer hardware.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''What is the context in which your product or service is used? What happens before, during, and after? Can you identify the pain points? How can you eliminate these pain points through a complementary product or service offering?''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  

''Competition in an industry tends to converge not only on an accepted notion of the scope of its products and services but also on one of two possible bases of appeal. Some industries compete principally on price and function largely on calculations of utility; their appeal is rational. Other industries compete largely on feelings; their appeal is emotional.Yet the appeal of most products or services is rarely intrinsically one or the other. Rather it is usually a result of the way companies have competed in the past, which has unconsciously educated consumers on what to expect.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''When companies are willing to challenge the functional-emotional orientation of their industry, they often find new market space. We have observed two common patterns. Emotionally oriented industries offer many extras that add price without enhancing functionality. Stripping away those extras may create a fundamentally simpler, lower-priced, lower-cost business model that customers would welcome. Conversely, functionally oriented industries can often infuse commodity products with new life by adding a dose of emotion and, in so doing,can stimulate new demand.Two well-known examples are Swatch, which transformed the functionally driven budget watch industry into an emotionally driven fashion statement, or The Body Shop, which did the reverse, transforming the emotionally driven industry of cosmetics into a functional, no-nonsense cosmetics house.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Does your industry compete on functionality or emotional appeal? If you compete on emotional appeal, what elements can you strip out to make it functional? If you compete on functionality, what elements can be added to make it emotional?''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  
Chan Kim The Blue Ocean Strategy Quote

  
''Three principles are critical to assessing trends across time. To form the basis of a blue ocean strategy, these trends must be decisive to your business, they must be irreversible, and they must have a clear trajectory. Many trends can be observed at any one time—for example, a discontinuity in technology, the rise of a new lifestyle, or a change in regulatory or social environments. But usually only one or two will have a decisive impact on any particular business. Having identified a trend of this nature, you can then look across time and ask yourself what the market would look like if the trend were taken to its logical conclusion.Working back from that vision of a blue ocean strategy, you can identify what must be changed today to unlock a new blue ocean.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''What trends have a high probability of impacting your industry, are irreversible, and are evolving in a clear trajectory? How will these trends impact your industry? Given this, how can you open up unprecedented customer utility?''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''By thinking across conventional boundaries of competition, you can see how to make convention-altering, strategic moves that reconstruct established market boundaries and create blue oceans. The process of discovering and creating blue oceans is not about predicting or preempting industry trends. Nor is it a trial-and error process of implementing wild new business ideas that happen to come across managers’ minds or intuition. Rather, managers are engaged in a structured process of reordering market realities in a fundamentally new way.Through reconstructing existing market elements across industry and market boundaries, they will be able to free themselves from head-to-head competition in the red ocean.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Do your business unit heads lack an understanding of the other businesses in your corporate portfolio? Are your strategic best practices poorly communicated across your business units? Are your low-performing units quick to blame their competitive situations for their results? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, try drawing, and then sharing, the strategy canvases of your business units.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''A company’s pioneers are the businesses that offer unprecedented value. These are your blue ocean offerings, and they are the most powerful sources of profitable growth. These businesses have a mass following of customers. Their value curve diverges from the competition on the strategy canvas. At the other extreme are settlers—businesses whose value curves conform to the basic shape of the industry’s. These are me-too businesses. Settlers will not generally contribute much to a company’s future growth. They are stuck within the red ocean…. the more an industry is populated by settlers, the greater is the opportunity to value-innovate and create a blue ocean of new market space.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Chief executives should instead use value and innovation as the important parameters for managing their portfolio of businesses. They should use innovation because, without it, companies are stuck in the trap of competitive improvements. They should use value because innovative ideas will be profitable only if they are linked to what buyers are willing to pay for.Clearly, what senior executives should be doing is getting their organizations to shift the balance of their future portfolio toward pioneers. That is the path to profitable growth.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Noncustomers tend to offer far more insight into how to unlock and grow a blue ocean than do relatively content existing customers.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  

''The starting point is buyer utility. Does your offering unlock exceptional utility? Is there a compelling reason for the target mass of people to buy it? Absent this, there is no blue ocean potential to begin with. Here there are only two options. Park the idea, or rethink it until you reach an affirmative answer.When you clear the exceptional utility bar, you advance to the second step:setting the right strategic price. Remember, a company does not want to rely solely on price to create demand. The key question here is this: Is your offering priced to attract the mass of target buyers so that they have a compelling ability to pay for your offering? If it is not, they cannot buy it. Nor will the offering create irresistible market buzz.These first two steps address the revenue side of a company’s business model. They ensure that you create a leap in net buyer value, where net buyer value equals the utility buyers receive minus the price they pay for it.''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant

Marketing quote


''Many of the most powerful blue ocean ideas have tremendous value but in themselves consist of no new technological discoveries. As a result they are neither patentable nor excludable and hence are vulnerable to imitation.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''The key here is not to pursue pricing against the competition within an industry but rather to pursue pricing against substitutes and alternatives across industries and non-industries. Had Ford, for example, priced its Model T against other autos, which were more than three times the price of horse-drawn carriages, the market for the Model T would not have exploded.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''To maximize the profit potential of a blue ocean idea, a company should start with the strategic price and then deduct its desired profit margin from the price to arrive at the target cost. Here, price-minus costing, and not cost-plus pricing, is essential if you are to arrive at a cost structure that is both profitable and hard for potential followers to match.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Freemium is yet another pricing strategy some companies are using by which a product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games, or web services) is provided free of charge to pull in the target mass, but a premium is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods. By being both “free” and “premium,” companies are striving to be strategically priced to capture the target mass while earning profit for the premium features those users, having used the product or service, will feel compelled to buy and upgrade to. These are all examples of pricing innovation.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Before companies go public with an idea and set out to implement it, they should make a concerted effort to communicate to employees that they are aware of the threats posed by the execution of the idea. Companies should work with employees to find ways of defusing the threats so that everyone in the company wins, despite shifts in people’s roles, responsibilities, and rewards.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Don’t rely on market surveys. To what extent does your top team actively observe the market firsthand and meet with your most disgruntled customers to hear their concerns? Do you ever wonder why sales don’t match your confidence in your product? Simply put, there is no substitute for meeting and listening to dissatisfied customers directly.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  

''What actions consume your greatest resources but have scant performance impact? Conversely, what activities have the greatest performance impact but are resource starved? When the questions are framed in this way, organizations rapidly gain insight into freeing up low-return resources and redirecting them to high-impact areas. In this way, both lower costs and higher value are simultaneously pursued and achieved.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Do you indiscriminately try to motivate the masses? Or do you focus on key influencers, your kingpins? Do you put the spotlight on and manage kingpins in a fishbowl based on fair process? Or do you just demand high performance and cross your fingers until the next quarter numbers come out? Do you issue grand strategic visions? Or do you atomize the issue to make it actionable to all levels?''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''To knock down the political hurdles, you should also ask yourself two sets of questions:
Who are my devils? Who will fight me? Who will lose the most by the future blue ocean strategy? Who are my angels? Who will naturally align with me? Who will gain the most by the strategic shift? Don’t fight alone. Get the higher and wider voice to fight with you. Identify your detractors and supporters—forget the middle—and strive to create a winwin outcome for both. But move quickly. Isolate your detractors by building a broader coalition with your angels before a battle begins. In this way, you will discourage the war before it has a chance to start or gain steam.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Key to winning over your detractors or devils is knowing all their likely angles of attack and building up counterarguments backed by irrefutable facts and reason.''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Conventional theory of organizational change rests on transforming the mass. So change efforts are focused on moving the mass, requiring steep resources and long time frames—luxuries few executives can afford. Tipping point leadership,by contrast, takes a reverse course. To change the mass, it focuses on transforming the extremes: the people, acts, and activities that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance. By transforming the extremes, tipping point leaders are able to change the core fast and at low cost to execute their new strategy.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''The more removed people are from the top and the less they have been involved in the creation of the strategy, the more this trepidation builds. On the front line, at the very level at which a strategy must be executed day in and day out, people can resent having a strategy thrust upon them with little regard for what they think and feel. Just when you think you have done everything right,things can suddenly go very wrong on your front line.''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''People care as much about the justice of the process through which an outcome is produced as they do about the outcome itself. People’s satisfaction with the outcome and their commitment to it rose when procedural justice was exercised.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''At the highest level, there are three propositions essential to the success of strategy: the value proposition, the profit proposition, and the people proposition. For any strategy to be successful and sustainable, an organization must develop an offering that attracts buyers; it must create a business model that enables the company to make money out of its offering; and it must motivate the people working for or with the company to execute the strategy.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  

''The excitement over Napster’s spectacular growth prevented it from appreciating that it needed an external people proposition that offered differentiation and low cost for its key partners, the record labels. Rather than work to build a compelling people proposition that would strike a win-win arrangement with record labels, Napster took a belligerent approach, declaring it would advance with or without the record labels’ support. The rest is history; Napster was forced to shut down due to copyright infringement.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''CREATING A BLUE OCEAN is not a static achievement but a dynamic process. Once a company creates a blue ocean and its powerful performance consequences are known, sooner or later imitators appear on the horizon.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''A blue ocean strategy brings with it considerable barriers to imitation that effectively prolong sustainability. They range from alignment to cognitive,organizational, brand, economic, and legal barriers. More often than not, a blue ocean strategy will go without credible challenges for many years. Cirque du Soleil’s blue ocean endured over twenty years; Comic Relief’s, nearly thirty years; Apple’s iTunes’, now more than ten years.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''To avoid the trap of competing at the individual business level, monitoring value curves on the strategy canvas is essential. Monitoring value curves signals when to value-innovate and when not to. It alerts an organization to reach out for another blue ocean when its value curve begins to converge with those of the competition. It also keeps a company from pursuing another blue ocean when there is still a huge profit stream to be collected from its current offering.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant

  
''Salesforce.com has repeatedly broken away from the pack by value-innovating again as other companies’ value curves began to converge toward its own. In this way, it has successfully avoided the trap of competing and kept itself in the blue.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''By plotting the corporate portfolio as pioneers, migrators, and settlers on the dynamic PMS map, executives can see at a glance where the gravity of its current portfolio of businesses is, how this has shifted over time, and when there is a need to create a new blue ocean to renew the portfolio…To maximize growth prospects then, a company’s portfolio should have a healthy balance between pioneers for future growth and migrators and settlers for cash flow at a given point in time. Over time, however, a company’s current pioneers will eventually become migrators and then ultimately settlers as imitation begins and intensifies. To maintain strong profitable growth, executives need to ensure that as current pioneers become migrators, the company is set to launch a new blue ocean either by regenerating an existing business or via a new business offering. Consider Apple Inc. in this regard.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''The iPod revolutionized the digital music market, creating an uncontested blue ocean,which was strengthened further with its launch of the iTunes Music Store two years later. As the iPod was eventually imitated and sank toward migrator status,Apple reached out and launched its next blue ocean, the iPhone.Apple continued to launch subsequent blue oceans over time, including its app store and the iPad to ensure the next chunk of growth at the corporate level as others began to encroach on the blue oceans it was creating in its individual businesses.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  

''To create new demand, an organization needs to turn its focus to noncustomers and why they refuse to patronize an industry.Noncustomers, not customers, hold the greatest insight into an industry’s pain points and points of intimidation that limit the size and boundary of the industry.This is why to create new demand, analyzing and understanding the three tiers of noncustomers are essential components of blue ocean strategy. A focus on existing customers, by contrast, tends to drive organizations to do more of the same for less, thereby anchoring companies in the red ocean irrespective of their blue ocean intent.''
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant

Marketing Quote


 ''Technology is not a defining feature. You can create blue oceans with or without it. However, where technology is involved, it’s key that you link it to value. Ask: How does your product or service offer a leap in productivity, simplicity, ease of use, convenience, fun, and/or environmental friendliness? Without that, bleeding-edge technology notwithstanding, you won’t open up a blue ocean of commercial opportunity. Value innovation, not technology innovation, is what opens up commercially compelling new markets.When companies mistakenly assume blue ocean strategy hinges on new technologies, their organizations tend to push for products or services that are either too out there, too complicated, or lacking the complementary ecosystem needed to open up a new market space.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Under traditional competitive strategy, differentiation is achieved by providing premium value at a higher cost to the company and at a higher price for customers. Think Mercedes Benz. Differentiation is a strategic choice that reflects the value-cost trade-off in a given market structure. Blue ocean strategy,by contrast, is about breaking the value-cost trade-off to open up new market space. It is about pursuing differentiation and low cost simultaneously.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''When companies mistakenly assume that blue ocean strategy is synonymous with differentiation, they all too often miss the and-and of blue ocean strategy. Instead they tend to focus on what to raise and create to stand apart and pay scant heed to what they can eliminate and reduce to simultaneously achieve low cost. In this way, organizations inadvertently become either premium competitors or differentiated niche players in existing industry space rather than creating value innovation that makes the competition irrelevant.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
  
Marketing quote


''Blue ocean strategy is not about being first to market. Rather it’s about being first to get it right by linking innovation to value. One need only look to Apple here. The iMac wasn’t the first PC, the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, iTunes wasn’t the first digital music store, and the iPhone certainly wasn’t the first smart phone, nor for that matter was the iPad the first smart tablet. But what they all successfully did was link innovation to value. Organizations that mistakenly assume blue ocean strategy is about being first to market all too often get their priorities wrong. They inadvertently put speed before value. While speed is important, speed alone will not unlock a blue ocean. Corporate  graveyards are full of companies that got to market first with innovative offerings not linked to value.''

― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Blue ocean strategy pursues differentiation and low cost simultaneously by reconstructing market boundaries. Instead of focusing on low cost per se, it seeks to create a leap in buyer value at a lower cost. Further, a blue ocean strategic move captures the mass of target buyers not through low-cost pricing, but through strategic pricing. The key here is not to pursue pricing against the competition within an industry but to pursue pricing against substitutes and alternatives that are currently capturing the noncustomers of your industry.Using strategic pricing, a blue ocean does not have to be created at the low end of the market. Instead it can be created at the high end, as Cirque du Soleil,Starbucks, or Dyson did; at the low end, as Southwest Airlines or Swatch did; or in middle range of market.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Blue ocean strategy is not synonymous with innovation per se. Unlike blue ocean strategy, innovation is a very broad concept that is based on an original and useful idea regardless of whether that idea is linked to a leap in value that can appeal to the mass of buyers. Take Motorola’s Iridium. Was it an innovation?Sure. It was the first global phone and it was useful. But was it a value innovation? No. As Motorola learned, a breakthrough in technology is not necessarily synonymous with a breakthrough in value that can attract the target mass of buyers.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Many technology innovators fail to create and capture blue oceans by confusing innovation with value innovation, the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. Value innovation, not innovation per se, is the singular focus of blue ocean strategy. Simply creating something original and useful through innovation is not enough to create and capture a blue ocean, even if the innovation wins the company accolades and its researchers a Nobel Prize. To capture a commercially compelling blue ocean, companies need a strategy that can align their value, profit, and people propositions in pursuit of both differentiation and low cost. When organizations fail to register the difference between value innovation and innovation per se, they all too often end with an innovation that breaks, keeping them by and large stuck in the red ocean.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Blue ocean strategy requires more than a compelling value proposition. sustainable success can only be achieved when a company’s value proposition is supported by key internal and external people involved in its execution and is complemented by a strong profit proposition. Hence, to equate blue ocean strategy with a theory of marketing myopically masks the holistic approach needed to create a sustainable high-performance strategy, including overcoming organizational hurdles, winning people’s trust and commitment, and creating the proper incentives via a compelling people proposition. This inaccurate understanding of blue ocean strategy can often lead to a lack of alignment across the three strategy propositions of value, profit, and people.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Blue ocean strategy should also not be confused with a niche strategy. While the field of marketing has placed significant emphasis on finer segmentation to effectively capture niche markets, blue ocean strategy works in the reverse direction. It is more about desegmenting markets by focusing on key commonalities across buyer groups to open up and capture the largest catchment of demand. When practitioners confuse the two, they all too often are driven to look for customer differences for niche markets in the existing industry space rather than the  commonalities that cut across buyer groups in search of blue oceans of new demand.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Blue ocean strategy argues that firms need to go beyond competing and the mere improvement of product or services in overcrowded industries and pursue value innovation to open up new market space and make the competition irrelevant. Hence, while understanding how to compete in existing market space is important, blue ocean strategy addresses the critical challenge of how to redefine industry boundaries and create new market space when structural conditions work against you. This is how blue ocean strategy deals with competition to produce continuous renewal and the growth of industries.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Creative destruction or disruption occurs when an innovation disrupts an existing market by displacing an earlier technology or existing product or service. The word “displacement” is important here, as without displacement, disruption would not occur. In the case of photography, for example, the innovation of digital photography disrupted the photographic film industry by effectively displacing it. So today digital photography is the norm, and photographic film is seldom used. Disruption is, hence, largely consonant with Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction, whereby the old is incessantly destroyed or replaced by the new. Unlike disruption, however, blue ocean strategy does not necessitate displacement or destruction. Blue ocean strategy is a broader concept that goes beyond creative destruction to embrace nondestructive creation, which is its overriding emphasis.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant


''Blue ocean strategy is not about finding a better or lower-cost solution to the existing problem of an industry, both of which trigger disruption and displacement of existing products and services. Instead, blue ocean strategy is about redefining the problem itself, which tends to create new demand or an offering that often complements rather than displaces existing products and services.''
 ― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant



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