Strategies for Market Domination in 2024

The stakes are high going into 2024. Warnings about consumer spending softness and challenges around consumer-packaged good pricing place even more importance on sales and revenue plans to deliver the most profitable and efficient growth. So, what does this year’s sales and revenue plan look like? Organic or new acquisition growth? New product pipeline? What will influence these decisions and how will you profitably deliver this growth? To deliver year-end, year-out opportunities for years to come, try incorporating Blue Ocean Strategy into your plans this year.

Blue Ocean was first introduced by W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in 2005, as a strategy to “create uncontested market space while making the competition irrelevant.”^1-3 This ties in with the idea of a Red Ocean market. A Red Ocean typically is an established industry in which companies compete for every piece of available market share. The competition is often so intense that some firms cannot sustain themselves. In other words, a Red Ocean market is a saturated market share bloodied by competition. Blue Ocean offers the opposite, a market with uncontested competition. A pure Blue Ocean market has no competitors, first-mover advantages, cost advantages in marketing with no competition, and the ability to set prices without competitive constraints.

To further understand how Blue Ocean can work, these questions can define whether you are a Red Ocean strategist or a Blue Ocean strategist, which will establish how you define your markets.  

What type of market strategist are you (Red versus Blue)?  

1. Do you focus on benchmarking competitors and striving to beat them (Red)? Or do you aim to make the competition irrelevant by offering a leap in value (Blue)?
2. Do you take industry structure as given and strive to achieve the best position within it (Red)? Or do you seek to shape industry structure in your favor through your strategy and actions (Blue)?
3. Do you focus on existing customers and how to make them happier (Red)? Or do you also look to noncustomers to understand why they refuse your industry (Blue)?
4. When you think about innovating, do you focus on what to 'improve' and 'create' (Red)? Or do you focus on how to simultaneously stand apart and achieve low costs (Blue)?
5. Do you embrace differences among customers and pursue finer segmentation (Red)? Or do you seek out key commonalities among buyers to de-segment the market and capture the greatest catchment of demand (Blue)?
6. In a bid to understand the market, do you outsource your eyes by sending out market questionnaires (Red)? Or do you strive to get face-to-face with market realities speaking directly with lost customers, disenchanted customers, and noncustomers of the industry (Blue)?

While there are a vast number of tools to help incorporate the Blue Ocean Strategy into your plans, successful entry into uncontested market space begins with the following:

• Stop trying to outperform rivals to grab bigger slices of existing demand. As space gets increasingly crowded, profit and growth prospects shrink and products become commoditized.
• Stop taking market conditions as a given.
• Stop exploiting existing demand.
• Stop building advantages over the competition.
• Stop focusing on premium versus low-cost strategies; worry less about segmentation.
• Stop competing in existing market space.
• Focus on making the competition irrelevant: how to simultaneously stand apart and achieve low costs.
• Challenge the existing boundaries of an industry.
• Start focusing on attracting new customers and noncustomers to understand why they refuse your industry.
• Break away from the cognitive bounds set by existing rules of competition.
• Desegment the market and capture the greatest catchment of demand.
• Understand the market realities by uncovering the hidden pain points in your industry.

The benefits of a Blue Ocean Strategy are simple; a pure Blue Ocean market has no competitors. A Blue Ocean market “leader” has first-mover advantages and cost advantages, the ability to set prices without competitive constraints, the flexibility to take its offering in various directions, and reshape the structure of an industry.

References

1. Blue Ocean Strategy- How to Create Uncontested Market Space and make the competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
2. Blue Ocean Shift- Beyond competing, Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth, by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
3. Blue Ocean Classics by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

About the author: Eric Rittenhouse, MBA works at BSM Partners as Business Development Manager/Outside Sales. His areas of expertise include business development, sales and trade marketing while helping brand companies uncover and execute on opportunities to strategically dominate their niche in the consumer product space. He has completed the Blue Ocean Practical Introductionä certificate by the Blue Ocean Academyâ and is Action Selling Master Certified by Action Sellingâ and The Sales Board. 

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