How to disrupt and dominate a red ocean market

Blue Oceans Are A Thing of the Past

Business leaders dream of what is now a nearly mythical space: a “blue ocean” market, the term Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim coined to denote unexplored and uncontested markets in their 2004 bestselling book Blue Ocean Strategy.

The truth is, nearly all businesses operate in “red oceans” — markets that are crowded and competitive. The challenge today isn’t as much about searching for some rare niche that may offer a small window of opportunity and fleeting advantage as it is about competing in and conquering established customer and market segments with new value.

To do that requires revisiting what many executives find complicated, painful, and often marginally effective: strategy.

One of the things that makes strategy complicated is that there are so many definitions of it.

The word itself is most often used in adjective form with planning, i.e. “strategic planning,” connoting a process, one that is unfortunately perceived by many as a rather endless chore to produce a weighty document capturing everything you’re going to do, along with timing and costs.

But as Michael Porter told us 30 years ago in his definitive book Competitive Strategy, in order to prevail against others…