Blue Ocean Strategy

Authors: W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

A close friend, who’s judgement I respect a lot, just finished reading this book and told me that I must read it. I quickly dowloaded the audio book from the library and started listening to it. In case you choose to listen to this in audio format, I must warn you that I have not encountered a more unemotional and robotic narrator. Nevertheless, the material is interesting and there are a lot of interesting case studies and lessons that I learnt from this book.

It starts out by contrasting red oceans, where companies fight their competitors on price and product features, to blue oceans that define new market spaces that are uncontested by virtue of them being uncharted territory. 

The first example the authors cite is Cirque du Soleil and how they reinvented the traditional circus. The traditional circus were 3 ring acts with animal sets and star performers and their audience were mainly children and their parents.  Cirque du Soleil created a novel entertainment concept that combined the elements of circus, theater, dance and music and were thus able to create a new value proposition that expanded the market. Their target audience were adults and corporate clients who are more willing to pay premium prices for entertainment. Additionally managing animal sets and employing star performers drove up the costs of the traditional circus. Eliminating these improved the profitability of the enterprise.

There are many similar examples the authors cite in the book like the Ford Model T, JCDecaux signboards, Bloomberg Business terminals, NYPD crime fighting, Curves weight loss, novo nordisk diabetes care, cemex cement gifting and others. Each of these are fascinating stories in their own right and you can find a good summary of the case studies at https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/blue-ocean-strategy-examples/. 

Since this is a business book, it must include some nuggets of wisdom that it extracts from these case studies. These are packaged in nice little sets of 3 (or more) bullet points that the  reader can tuck away.  I have read many such books of late and must confess that I am now jaded with the generous advice doled out by management consultants trying to extract principles from case studies. This book is no exception to that well worn path. Nevertheless, it is a good framing of the problem statement and forced me to think differently about some of the business challenges that I face in every day work life.