Blue Ocean Strategy

W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne · 2005

Stop competing on the factors an industry already competes on, and change which factors are on the table at all.

Its place in the frameworkMarket Core›Competitors

What it does

Its working tool is a grid of four moves made together: which factors the industry takes for granted could be eliminated; which are over-served and could be reduced; which deserve to be raised well above the standard; and which the industry has never offered and could be created. The insistence on all four at once is the argument — cutting alone is cost-cutting, adding alone is feature creep, and only the combination changes what the offer is rather than how well it is done.

Reach for it when: When every competitor is improving the same handful of factors and the differences between them have stopped mattering to anyone buying.
Where it stops: The published cases are chosen after the fact, and there is no shortage of companies that removed the wrong factor and were never written up. It is a way of generating options, not evidence that any of them will work.

W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, Harvard Business School Press, 2005. Blue Ocean Strategy is a registered trademark of its owners and is named here only to refer to their work.

Why it sits at Competitors

Who else serves the same demand, what they can actually do, and where they are heading — read from evidence rather than from reputation.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

The competitor setLevitt on competition defined by the need served, and the substitution threat in Porter’s five forces.
Capability comparisonThe resource-based view applied competitively: comparing capability rather than output.
Reading their strategyPorter’s four-component competitor analysis: future goals, assumptions, current strategy and capabilities.
MonitoringCompetitive-intelligence practice on indicator selection and the cost of undirected monitoring.

All of Competitors

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Competitors lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Brand CorePositioning is argued against this set, and against the frame the customer actually uses.
Business CoreCapability comparison is only interpretable against a clear reading of your own competences.
Market OpportunitiesWhy nobody is serving an apparent opportunity is usually answered here.
Data CoreMonitoring is a measurement programme and decays without an owner.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Competitors too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

The five forcesProfitability in an industry is set by five pressures, and rivals are only one of them.
Strategic group mappingCompetitors cluster into groups following similar strategies, and the real rivalry happens inside a group.
Disruptive innovationThe competitor that displaces you usually starts by serving customers you were glad to lose.

Elsewhere in Market Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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