Back

Learn & Earn (Pt. 4) 🧠 Escape the Shark Tank! 🦈 Create Your Own Blue Ocean! 🌊 Is your startup constantly battling it out in a crowded "Red Ocean" 🩸 – fighting hard for every customer, where competition is fierce, and profits often get squeezed thin? There's a powerful alternative! Kim & Mauborgne's brilliant Blue Ocean Strategy isn't about out-competing everyone in the existing game; it's about finding (or creating!) clear, uncontested market waters where you make the competition irrelevant! ✨ So, What's the Big Difference? Red Ocean vs. Blue Ocean: 🔴 Red Oceans (The Crowded Battleground): - You compete in existing market space. - The goal is to beat the competition. - You fight to exploit existing customer demand. - Often leads to price wars and a struggle for market share. (Stressful!) 🔵 Blue Oceans (Your Unexplored Waters): - You create new market space that didn't exist before. - You make competition irrelevant by being unique. - You create and capture new demand (often from "non-customers"). - Offers potential for high growth and strong profits! (Exciting!) How Do You Find or Create Your Blue Ocean? 🤔 It's All About Value Innovation! This means offering a leap in value for your customers and your company. A practical way to think about this is using the Four Actions Framework (ERRC Grid): ❌ Eliminate: What factors that your industry has long competed on (and takes for granted) can be completely eliminated? (Think: things customers don't truly value anymore, or add unnecessary cost). ➖ Reduce: Which factors should be reduced well below the industry standard? (Where is the industry over-serving customers, adding complexity or cost they don't appreciate?). ➕ Raise: Which factors should be raised well above the industry standard? (What do customers really care about that competitors aren't doing well enough?). 🌟 Create: Which brand-new factors or sources of value can you introduce that the industry has never offered before? (This is where real differentiation happens!). Think Reliance Jio 📱 (in its early days): They didn't just try to be another telecom company. They radically eliminated domestic voice call charges, drastically reduced data prices, massively raised data accessibility for millions, and created an entire ecosystem of affordable digital services. This targeted a huge new wave of first-time internet users and fundamentally reshaped the Indian telecom market. It’s about challenging the old rules and finding new ways to deliver exceptional value. Using those "Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create" questions, what's ONE thing in your industry you could totally rethink to discover a potential Blue Ocean? 💡