A Conversation with W.

Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

authors of BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY

1) What is a blue ocean strategy?

Kim & Mauborgne : Blue Ocean Strategy is a way to make the competition
irrelevant by creating a leap in value for both the company and its customers.

2) What are red and blue oceans, and why do you use the colors red and blue?

Kim & Mauborgne : We use the terms red and blue oceans to describe the market
universe. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today—the known market
space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the
competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies try to outperform their
rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded,
prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, and
cutthroat competition turns the red ocean bloody. Hence, the term “red” oceans.

Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today—the
unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created
rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable
and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are
waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of
market space that is not yet explored. Like the “blue” ocean, it is vast, deep, powerful,
in terms of profitable growth, and infinite.

3) How does blue ocean strategy fundamentally differ from red ocean strategy?

Kim & Mauborgne : To sustain themselves in the marketplace, red ocean strategists
focus on building advantages over the competition, usually by assessing what
competitors do and striving to do it better. Here, grabbing a bigger share of a finite
market is seen as a zero-sum game in which one company’s gain is achieved at
another company’s loss. They focus on dividing up the red ocean, where growth is
increasingly limited. Such strategic thinking leads firms to divide industries into
attractive and unattractive ones and to decide accordingly whether or not to enter.

Blue ocean strategists recognize that market boundaries exist only in managers’
minds, and they do not let existing market structures limit their thinking. To them,
extra demand is out the re, largely untapped. The crux of the problem is how to create
it. This, in turn, requires a shift of attention from supply to demand, from a focus on
competing to a focus on creating innovative value to unlock new demand. This is
achieved via the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low-cost.

Under blue ocean strategy, there is scarcely an attractive or unattractive industry per
se because the level of industry attractiveness can be altered through companies’
conscientious efforts. As market structure is changed by breaking the value/cost
tradeoff, so are the rules of the game. Competition in the old game is therefore
rendered irrelevant. By expanding the demand side of the economy new wealth is
created. Such a strategy therefore allows firms to largely play a non–zero-sum game,
with high payoff possibilities.
4) Why are so many CEOs focused on the red ocean, while as you’re claiming, the
money is increasingly in the blue ocean?

Kim & Mauborgne : Blue and red oceans have always coexisted and always will.
Practical reality, therefore, demands that companies understand the strategic logic of
both types of oceans. At present, however, competing in red oceans dominates the
field of strategy in theory and in practice. Part of the reason traces back to the
historical foundation of business strategy—war—where territory is defined and
limited and opponents compete to protect and enlarge their share of limited and
existing terrain. This focus on beating the competition in existing market space was
exasperated by the meteoric rise of the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s. Faced with
mounting competition in the global marketplace as, for virtually the first time in
corporate history, customers were deserting Western companies in droves, the center
of strategic thinking gravitated further towards the competition. A slew of
competition-based strategies emerged which argued that competition is at the core of
the success and failure of firms, and that competition determines the appropriateness
of a firm’s activities that can contribute to its performance.

The result has been a fairly good understanding of how to compete skillfully in red
waters, from analyzing the underlying economic structure of an existing industry, to
choosing a strategic position of low cost or differentiation or focus, to benchmarking
the competition. Yet, although some discussions around blue oceans exist, little
practical guidance exists to create and capture them. This largely explains why CEOs
remain focused on red oceans—it’s the ocean the y are familiar with and feel equipped
to compete in.

What BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY seeks to do is to make the creation and capturing
of blue oceans as systematic and actionable as competing in the red waters of known
market space. For although blue ocean strategists have always existed, for the most
part their strategies have been largely unconscious. Blue ocean strategy seeks to
remedy this by not only decoding the pattern and principles behind the successful
creation of blue oceans, but also providing the ana lytical frameworks and tools to act
on this insight.

5) What makes blue ocean strategy imperative in today’s business climate?

Kim & Mauborgne : Prospects in most established market spaces—red oceans—are

shrinking steadily. Technological advances have substantially improved industrial
productivity, permitting suppliers to produce an unprecedented array of products and
services. And as trade barriers between nations and regions fall and information on
products and prices becomes instantly and globally available, niche markets and
monopoly havens are continuing to disappear. At the same time, there is little
evidence of any increase in demand, at least in the developed markets, where recent
United Nations statistics even point to declining populations.

The result is that in more and more industries, supply is overtaking demand. This
situation has inevitably hastened the commoditization of products and services,
stoked price wars, and shrunk profit margins. According to recent studies, major
American brands in a variety of product and service categories have become more

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 and more alike. And as brands become more similar, people increasingly base
purchase choices on price. People no longer insist, as in the past, that their laundry
detergent be Tide. Nor do they necessarily stick to Colgate when there is a special
promotion for Crest, and vice versa. In overcrowded industries, differentiating brands
becomes harder both in economic upturns and in downturns.

As products and services increasingly become commodities in overcrowded industries

and companies’ profitable growth shrinks, companies are driven to compete
principally on cost. One result of this has been the rising exodus of jobs to low cost
countries like India and China as companies increasingly engage in outsourcing.
While governments may seek to solve the issue of outsourcing through legislation,
history teaches us that this is not a long-term solution. The long-term solution to
creating jobs is in companies creating compelling products and services that take
them out of the vicious cycle of commodity competition. This means moving
companies’ products and services from the red ocean to the blue ocean. These issues
alone make blue ocean strategy a rising imperative for CEOs.

6) Are you saying red ocean stra tegy is no longer useful?

Kim & Mauborgne : Absolutely not. It will always be important to swim

successfully in the red ocean by out-competing rivals. Red oceans will always matter
and will always be a fact of business life. But with supply exceeding demand in more
industries, competing for a share of contracting markets, while necessary, will not be
sufficient to sustain high performance. Companies need to go beyond competing. To
seize new profit and growth opportunities they also need to create blue oceans. A
better balance must be struck across red ocean and blue ocean initiatives.

7) In your research, why did you choose “strategic move” as your unit of analysis
instead of the popularly used company or industry? And how do you define
strategic move?

Kim & Mauborgne : When we first asked ourselves if there is a systematic approach
to create blue oceans, we began by looking at the basic unit of analysis used in
business literature: the company. However, history reveals that there are no
perpetually excellent companies. Consider In Search of Excellence, the first
bestselling business book published in 1982. Within just five years two-thirds of the
identified model firms in the book had declined. Likewise, for those sample
companies in the book Built to Last, another blockbuster business book, it was later
found that if industry performance was removed from the equation, many of the
companies in Built to Last were no longer exceptionally excellent. As Foster and
Kaplan point out in Creative Destruction, the companies listed certainly outperformed
their markets, but so did their entire industries.

So if there is no perpetually high-performing company and if the same company can

be brilliant at one moment and wrongheaded at another, it appears that the company is
not the appropriate unit of analysis in exploring the roots of high performance.
Likewise, there are no perpetually excellent industries. Consider IT. Five years ago
people envied companies in that industry, today the reverse is largely true.

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 Our analysis of industry history revealed 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 the root of profitable growth. By “strategic move,” we mean the set
of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating
business offering. The strategic moves we discuss—moves that have delivered
products and services that opened and captured new market space, with a significant
leap in demand—contain great stories of profitable growth. We built our study around
these strategic moves (over 150 from over 30 industries spanning from 1880 to 2000)
to understand the pattern by which blue oceans are created and captured and high
performance is achieved.

8) Is blue ocean strategy applicable to all types industries including businesses that
are several steps upstream from consumers?

Kim & Mauborgne : Yes, blue ocean strategy applies across all types of industries
from the typical suspects of consumer product goods to b2b, industrial,
pharmaceutical, financial services, entertainment, IT, and even defense. BLUE
OCEAN STRATEGY drives this point home by highlighting a rich array of
companies creating blue oceans across diverse, and unexpected, industry domains
from NetJets in jet travel, to NABI in the municipal bus industry, to Cemex in
cement, to Joint Striker Fighter in defense, to Cirque du Soleil in entertainment. Our
experience further suggests two interesting findings with respect to businesses several
steps removed from the final consumer. First, companies in these industries tend to
view their businesses as commodity businesses with little room to offer innovative
value. This has effectively created a self- fulfilling prophecy in that the more these
companies view their businesses as commodities, the more they treat their businesses
as such. Secondly, we observed that the more removed companies are from the final
customer, the more levers there are to unlock innovative value as every company in
that chain can be viewed as a customer. If a company can’t see an opportunity to
unlock innovative value for the next direct customer in that chain, there are still
opportunities to unlock innovative value for that customer’s customers, and so forth.

9) Is blue ocean strategy only intended for start -ups?

Kim & Mauborgne : Whereas blue ocean strategies create new market space and
change industry dynamics, they are not necessarily initiated by new entrants to an
industry. In our work, we looked back over 100 years of data on blue ocean creation
to see what patterns could be discerned. We found that blue oceans were created by
both industry incumbents and new entrants, challenging the lore that start-ups have
natural advantages over established companies in creating new market space. In the
auto industry, think of GM which created the blue ocean of emotional, stylized cars in
the 1920s, or the Japanese which created the blue ocean of small, gas efficient autos
in the 70s, or Chrysler which created the blue ocean of minivans in the 80s—all were
incumbents. Moreover, the blue oceans made by incumbents were usually within
their core businesses. In fact, most blue oceans are created from within, not beyond,
red oceans of existing industries. This challenges the view that new markets are in
distant waters. Blue oceans are right next to you in every industry. Issues of perceived
cannibalization or creative destruction for established companies also proved to be
exaggerated. Blue oceans created profitable growth for every company launching
them, start-ups and incumbents alike.

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 Our findings are encouraging for executives at the large, established corporations that
are traditionally seen as the victims of new market space creation. For what they
reveal is that large R&D budgets are not the key to creating new market space. The
key is making the right strategic moves. What's more, companies that understand
what drives good strategic moves—incumbents or start-ups—will be well placed to
create multiple blue oceans over time, thereby continuing to deliver high growth and
profits over a sustained period. The creation of blue oceans, in other words, is a
product of strategy and as such is very much a product of managerial action, not the
size or age of the firm.

10) Is blue ocean strategy new?

Kim & Mauborgne : Although the term blue oceans is new, their existence is not.
They are a feature of business life, past and present. Look back one hundred years and
ask yourself, how many of today’s industries were then unknown? The answer: many
industries as basic as automobiles, music recording, aviation, petrochemicals, health
care, and management consulting were unheard of or had just begun to emerge at the
time. Now turn the clock back only thirty years. Again, a plethora of multibillion-
dollar industries jumps out—mutual funds, cell phones, gas- fired electricity plants,
biotechnology, discount retail, express delivery, minivans, snowboards, coffee bars,
and home videos to name a few. Just three decades ago, none of these industries
existed in a meaningful way.

Now put the clock forward twenty years—or perhaps fifty years—and ask yourself
how many now unknown industries will likely exist then. If history is any predictor of
the future, the answer is many of them.