It is a complicated task to review a non-fiction. So here are the parameters upon which I see the book.

Avoiding Redundancy: 3/5
Case Studies: 5/5
Authenticity: 4/5
Readability: 4/5

Overall: The book deals with the idea of providing something to people which others are not and in some cases not providing something others are providing. It will revolve around the product differentiation and niche market. I suggest to give it a read as this one plunged deeper into product differentiation and how to stay ahead of the traditional competition.

Kind of a stupid book. The overall premise is, don’t compete directly with your competitors, create new markets. Of course, it falls into the classic trap that all business books seem to fall into, which is looking only at cases that support the theory and ignoring all that don’t. The theory itself is pretty obvious when you look at it - basically it argues that making a profit in any commodities market boils down to reducing costs, and that when your competitors cannot directly compete against you, you will make much more money. This is essentially the classic economic picture of perfect competition vs monopoly, and is quite obvious.

Furthermore, many of the examples he uses have only a tenuous connection to his theory. For example, he tries tying the turnaround of the NYPD to his theory. It was an interesting story, but I’m still scratching my head how targeting hotspots and shifting resources is an example of Blue Ocean theory.

I love this book! It gets my creativity juices flowing, with real life examples and tangible strategies to help me think out of the box.

This book raises a very interesting question which, I believe, does not get enough attention in business writing - succeeding by avoiding competition. But other than getting you to think about this topic and a couple of cool tips on performing organizational change, this book contains very little useful information. It spreads itself too thin and accomplishes nothing

Besides the Lean Launchpad Methodology, the Blue Ocean Strategy provides another perspective on how we might lead new innovations.

Four Action Framework:
Eliminate: Factors that industry takes for granted and should be eliminated
Reduce: Factors to be reduced below industry standard
Raise: Factors to be raised above the industry's standard
Create: Factors to be created that the industry has not offered

Strategy canvas
A strategy canvas is basically a line graph that plots functions/factors against importance for a company or an organization and then overlays competitors or industry benchmarks. In this way, information can be built to help formulate a competitive strategy.

Formulating Blue Ocean Strategy
Reconstruct Market Boundaries

Path 1: Look across alternative industries (What are the alternative industry to your industry?)
Path 2: Look Across Strategic Group within Industry
Path 3: Look Across the Chain of Buyers
Path 4: Look Across Complementary Product and Services
Path 5: Look Across Functional or Emotional Appeal to Buyers
Path 6: Look across Time (How the trend will change value to customers and impact the company’s business model)

Use a PMS Map to test the Growth Potential of a Business
Pioneers, Settlers, Migrators

Three Tiers of Non-customers:
First-Tier: "Soon to be customers" who are waiting to jumpship
Second-Tier: Refusing noncustomers, people who either do not use or cannot afford to use the current market offerings because they find the offerings unacceptable or beyond their means
Third-Tier: Typically, these unexplored noncustomers have not been targeted or thought of as potential customers by any player in the industry.

Buyer Utility Map:
6 stages of Buyer Experience Cycle:
- Purchase
- Delivery
- Use
- Supplements
- Maintenance
- Disposal

6 Utility Levers:
- Customer Productivity
- Simplicity
- Convenience
- Risk
- Fun and Image
- Environment Friendliness


Strategic Pricing of Corridor -- Pricing Corridor of the Mass:
Upper Level Pricing -- Difficult to imitate
Mid Level Pricing -- Some degree of legal protection
Low Level Pricing -- Easy to imitate

Step 1: Identify the Price Corridor of the Mass
Step 2: Specify a Level Within the Price Corridor
Step 3: Target costing

Possible idea: Changing the pricing model of the industry

لا أعتبر نفسي قرأت الكتاب وإنما قمت بدراسته، وإعادة قراءة بعض الفصول فيه أكثر من مرة. سمعت عنه منذ أكثر من ٥ سنوات وتوقعت أن تكون النظريات فيه قد أصبحت بالية ولكنها مازالت تتوافق مع وضع السوق اليوم. يجعلك ترى من أكثر من زاوية وتتعلم من الأمثلة الحقيقية المذكورة في الكتاب. كتاب جيد للمهتمين في الإدارة.

This is a business school sort of trade book that has been getting a lots of hype. I had to read it for some other purposes so I worked through the book rather than through the numerous HBR articles. The premise of this book is that firms should not bother with messy competition, which will limit their profits and keep them warring with other competitors. Instead, firms should redefine their businesses into new offerings that are appealing to customers but are in such conditions or situations that other firms cannot easily imitate them. This is "blue ocean" strategy - in which you are the only fish in a big pond. The alternative, of course, is "red ocean" strategy - red because there are other fishes in the pond, whose competition will bloody the waters. Get the analogy?? Examples are provided of firms that have done this and suggestions are made about how to copy them. The writing style is crisp.

OK, but the problem is that there is nothing new here.

Coming up with a distinctive position that is very attractive to customers and that will justify high prices and good profits is a very old idea. Who wouldn't want to do that? The problem is that finding such opportunities happens most times through a combination of some skill and more luck. The firms that do this, and the examples in the book, have not escaped competition and their advantage does not last for long on average.

Telling someone to go out and follow such a strategy is a little bit like the old joke about the cure to poverty being simple - step 1, get yourself a million dollars; Step 2 . . .
(I think Steve Martin originally did this.)

The examples are not really helpful. Given a successful firm, it will not prove hard to find a reason why it succeeded. That is not helpful for someone else moving forward.

Overall, this is a popular treatment of corporate strategy that oversimplifies a lot. Careful readers can find better meals on which to chew.

Touto knihou som zavŕšil svoj dvojročný čitateľský focus na stratégiu. Blue Ocean Strategy je klasikou medzi biznisovými knihami a hoci som jej princípy poznal, prečítať si ju do hĺbky mi pomohlo pozrieť sa aj na viaceré veci v Martinuse novými očami. Modrý oceán bol kľúčovou myšlienkou pri tvorbe služby Knihovrátok, ktorou sa snažíme rozširovať knižný trh a spájať ľudí s knihami novými spôsobmi. Ak chcete v biznise piecť nové koláče a nielen sa trhať o tie existujúce, táto kniha je pre vás.

“Štruktúra odvetvia nie je nikdy navždy daná, vždy je možné ho nanovo tvarovať.”

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Harvard Business School Press

This is an especially thought-provoking book that, as have so many others, evolved from an article published in the Harvard Business Review. According to Kim and Mauborgne, "Blue Ocean Strategy challenges companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant...This book not only challenges companies but also shows them how to achieve this. We first introduce a set of analytical tools and frameworks that show you how to systematically act on this challenge, and, second, we elaborate the principles that define and separate blue ocean strategy from competition-based strategic thought." The material provided by Kim and Mauborgne is essentially worthless, however, unless and until decision-makers in a given organization accept their challenge, are guided and informed by the six principles, and effectively use the tools within appropriate frameworks. The responsibility is theirs, not Kim and Mauborgne's. To assist their efforts, Kim and Mauborgne focus on several exemplary companies that have dominated (if not rendered irrelevant) their competition by penetrating previously neglected market space. They include the Body Shop, Callaway Golf, Cirque du Soleil, Dell, NetJets, the SONY Walkman, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, the Swatch watch, and Yellow Tail wine.

All of these Blue Ocean strategies created new or much greater value for customers. Their emphasis is on the quality of experience, not on the benefits of a new technology. According to Kim and Mauborgne, their research indicates that "the strategic move, and not the company or the industry, is the right unit of analysis for explaining the creation of blue oceans and sustained high performance. A strategic move is the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering." The cornerstone of a Blue Ocean strategy is value innovation that 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." For Kim and Mauborgne, value innovation is about strategy that embraces the entire system of a company's activities. It requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a "leap" in value for both buyers and themselves. Kim and Mauborgne explain HOW to create uncontested market space wherein competition is essentially irrelevant.

It was a booming marketing strategy that suddenly every body talked about. Even my 'ex' boss!

With curiousity I bought this book to find out what is this so famous new marketing strategy?!?!? when I finally read the book, actually there is nothing new in it. It is actually the same strategy that I've learned in university. Mainly it talks about DIFFERENTIATION AND BEING DIFFERENT, that's it.

Thanks God I didn't buy the original english version that cost a fortune!!

This book has a few good insights. The core premise: as a business, you should minimize time spent in "red oceans," where fierce, bloody competition has turned the waters red, and instead look for "blue oceans" where you create a new market that is uncontested. Instead of beating the competition, you look to make them irrelevant; instead of squabbling over existing demand, you create and capture new demand; instead of incrementally tweaking the value-cost trade-off, you break the value-cost trade-off curve entirely; and so on.

To some extent, this is an obvious idea, but the reality is that most businesses don't make seeking out blue oceans an explicit goal. The tips in this book offer a useful mental model for making this happen and I've already found that merely having these ideas in your head gives you a new perspective when thinking about products and businesses. The main downside to the book is that it uses a lot of business jargon, including many of it's own buzzwords, so parts off it can be painful to read. But overall, it has lots of useful ideas in it. Here are a few of the top ones from my notes:

1. It may seem that creating a blue ocean is impossible, but the reality is that it happens all the time. It may be hard to see what these blue oceans are today, but when you look back at the great businesses of each decade, you realize that many of them succeeded precisely by creating totally new markets and not by out-competing other companies in existing markets. For example, Cirque du Soleil avoided the red ocean of competing with traditional circuses (e.g., Ringling Brothers) and created a totally new market for itself; Netjets created a new market by offering fractional ownership of a private jet (e.g., you get it for X days per year) rather than competing with other companies that sold private jets; Southwest Airlines created a totally new market in air travel by using secondary airports to offer flights that were so cheap that they were comparable to bus travel.

2. 6 paths for finding blue oceans. To find blue oceans, you'll need to think about what your industry is competing on that no longer matters and what it's not competing on that now does matter. Here are 6 concepts to explore to find blue oceans:

- Look to other industries. If you own a movie theater, instead of focusing on how to compete with other movie theaters, you may look to other industries for ideas. For example, the restaurant and sports industries may seem different, but in many cases, they serve the same purpose as movie theaters: giving people a way to enjoy a night out. A few movie theater chains have started to explore blue oceans in precisely these directions, combining fine dining (more than just popcorn) with movie and showing live sports events on the big screen at the theater (with all the other fans there too).

- Look at strategic groups within an industry. For example, luxury cars and economy cars are different strategic groups in the same industry. Most groupings happen by offering different combinations of price and performance. You may be able to find a blue ocean by offering a novel combination of price and performance: e.g., the first minivans and the first SUVs each created blue oceans for the auto makers that brought them to market.

- Look at different buyer groups. For example, if you're in the medical industry, does your product target the doctor or the patient? You can find blue oceans by targeting a different buyer group than other companies do: e.g., getting into enterprise software by targeting end users rather than the CIO.

- Look at complementary products and services. Another way to create blue oceans is to solve the entire problem for a customer, rather than just part off it, by offering complementary products and services. For example, if you're a movie theater owner, two of the things that could create a blue ocean for you are (a) offering free parking and (b) offering child care. This could unlock a massive new market of busy parents who never would've otherwise gone to see a movie, but if they can drive up, easily park, and have someone watch their kids for a few hours, they might flood to your theater.

- Look across functional and emotional appeal to buyers. Most industries focus mostly on either functional appeal (what the product can do) or emotional appeal (how the product makes you feel). You may be able to create a blue ocean by focusing on whichever aspect your industry typically ignores. For example, one company that produced cement—an industry that's all about functional appeal—created a massive blue ocean by focusing on family traditions around building and extending houses. Their cement was no better from a functional perspective than anyone else's, but because the company was part of family tradition, it created massive emotional demand.

- Look across time. Another path to blue oceans is to take advantage of macro market trends that are decisive and irreversible. For example, as a technology such as the Internet appeared on the scene, most business made small, incremental changes to adopt it (e.g., "check out our website" instead of "call us at..."), but the ones that created blue oceans figured out how this new trend completely changed the value proposition for the customer (e.g., creating an 100% online store, such as Amazon).

3. To create a blue ocean, you must create a leap in value for both buyers and the company. It's not enough to offer something slightly better or slightly cheaper than the competition. You have to make radical changes to completely transform the cost-value curve, focusing on what customers really value and throwing away the rest. For example, when the car industry was just starting, most cars were built-to-order, with lots of customizations, so they were extremely expensive, took a long time to assemble, were hard to learn, and hard to maintain. Then came along the Ford Model T, which unlocked a massive new market by offering a huge leap in value: they got rid of all the customizations (there was just one model, in one color, with essentially no options) but in exchange, the car was cheap, fast to build, easy to learn, and easy to maintain. To create this sort of leap in value, you need to ask the following questions:

- Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
- Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
- What factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
- What factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

4. Spend less time thinking about how to segment existing customers and the differences between them and more time about how to find non-customers and what they have in common. Blue oceans are all about finding non-customers, those who don't currently buy products from your industry, and deeply understanding why. There are generally three types of non-customers: (a) "soon-to-be" non-customers, who are aware of your market and right on the edge of buying, (b) "refusing" non-customers, who are aware of your market and consciously choose not to buy from it, and (c) "unexplored" non-customers, who aren't aware of your market at all. If you can find what those non-customers have in common, you may be able to create a blue ocean by unlocking all of their demand.

The book’s big idea is simple: Most companies fight it out in "red oceans", which is also crowded, competitive spaces where businesses keep undercutting each other with slightly better features, lower prices and aggressive marketing.

Where the Book Falls Short

To its credit, Blue Ocean Strategy acknowledges some of its limitations, which I appreciated. A few big ones: