As a Certified Practitioner, Innovaxis Applies Blue Ocean Strategy for B2B Small & Mid-Sized Businesses
A Common Fallacy & the Market Differentiator Trap
Many believe there is a tradeoff between value and cost: to differentiate your business, you need to add value unless you are a low-cost leader. That value will then cost you more to provide, hurting your profitability, unless you pass the additional cost on to customers.
What do Tefal ActiFry, Citizen M Hotels, and Red Nose Day have in common? They did not buy into the value-cost tradeoff: they tapped into blue oceans of demand by adding value while reducing costs.
Blue Ocean Strategy helped them achieve what many thought impossible.
What Is Blue Ocean Strategy?
Blue Ocean Strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and lower cost options to open up “blue oceans” of new markets and new demand.
Making competition irrelevant is a core tenet of Blue Ocean Strategy, because it’s about creating and capturing uncontested market space where there is a need for your solutions among prospects who:
- Are soon-to-be non-customers because they are unhappy with their current situation
- People that have heard of your solution but refuse to consider it as a possibility (until you give them a reason to reconsider)
- People not actively searching for any solution but may have a problem you can solve
Blue Ocean Strategy is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by your actions.
Red Ocean vs. Blue Ocean Strategy
Many business owners don’t realize they have a adopted a red ocean strategy that leaves them trying to one-up competitors instead of increasing the value provided to customers in innovative ways that cost less. How? By reducing or eliminating the costs of delivering other things that aren’t really providing value.
| Red Ocean Strategy | Blue Ocean Strategy |
|---|---|
| Compete in existing market spaces | Create uncontested market spaces |
| Beat the competition | Make the competition irrelevant |
| Exploit existing demand | Create and capture new demand |
| Make the value-cost trade-off | Break the value-cost trade-off |
| Choose a strategy of differentiation or low cost | Choose a strategy of differentiation and low cost |
Your Blue Ocean Partner
As a fan of Blue Ocean Strategy since it was introduced in 2005 while he was heading up product management for the scanner division of Bell + Howell, Innovaxis president and founder Sean Parnell has successfully completed the Blue Ocean Strategy Practitioner program.
Parnell serves as a fractional CMO for business owners and can lead or facilitate the implementation of Blue Ocean Strategy as a low-friction way for your marketing efforts to drive double-digit revenue growth and dramatically increase the value of your business.
