Creating Blue Oceans

Blue Ocean Strategy co-authors voted world’s most influential thinkers

In conjunction with McGraw Hill, the Crainer-Dearlove annual list of the World’s Top 50 Thinkers has been published. As a testament to the continued power and relevance of Blue Ocean Strategy, Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne again appear in the Top 10, this time making the leap to second place. 

Via Forbes:

The top runners-up, sharing the No. 2 spot: W. Chan Kim and Renée Maborgne, two professors at INSEAD business school whose book Blue Ocean Strategy lays out a system for developing and executing large-scale plans that has been adopted by businesses, nonprofits, and governments worldwide.

Since its initial publication in 2005, Blue Ocean Strategy remains a global, perennial bestseller, having been published in a record-breaking 42 languages.

Get truthful, unleash your creativity: Danielle LaPorte chats with Gabor

Interested in liberating truth, raw reality and grace? Then you won’t want to miss Gabor’s chat with Danielle LaPorte, agente-de-change, beacon of creative inspiration, coming up tomorrow. Danielle is the creator of WhiteHotTruth.com, which has been called "the best place on-line for kick-ass spirituality." She is the author of The Spark Kit: A Digital Experience for Entrepreneurs, an inspirational speaker, and a former think tank executive. Her next book, The Fire Starter Sessions: A Guide to Blazing Your Own Trail in Life & Work, launches in April 2012 from Random House.

You can listen in here. 

Your fork in the road: obsolescence or continuous relevance

Companies that focus too narrowly on beating their competition are in danger of losing out on substantial new market opportunities and of becoming inconsequential to consumers. The Accordion Chart™ process, as detailed in Gabor’s new book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Busines, Re-Imagine Your Life, can help you to broaden the relevance of your offering to a significantly wider audience and also draw your attention to where such opportunities reside. 

Samsung’s approach, to shift away from “infotainment” and into “lifecare,” represents the kinds of critical strategic insights gained by applying the Accordion Chart process to your offering. 

Via the Economist: 

Samsung wants to diversify away from consumer electronics, a market that suffers from falling prices, thin margins, fast product cycles and fickle customers. Chinese rivals may do to Samsung what Samsung did to Western and Japanese firms in the past. “The majority of our products today will be gone in ten years,” Samsung’s patriarch and chairman, Lee Kun-hee, told executives in deliberately alarmist tones last January. 

To survive, he said, the company must not only go into the new businesses it has identified, but open itself up to work with partners and even make acquisitions. Samsung has long been a closed world from that point of view, a disposition reinforced after the disastrous acquisition of a PC maker in the 1990s. But now the company knows it needs new skills, sales channels and customers.

Find out more about the Accordion Chart and its connection to Blue Ocean Strategy in Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.  

[Image © 2011 Slingshot by Gabor George Burt]

Infatuating with a “Dip and Squeeze”

While there is no such thing as a perfectly and continuously satisfied consumer, there is such a thing as an infatuated consumer. And there are certain offerings that may hold an almost permanent infatuation for consumers. Many of these derive from a strong childhood association that may stay with consumers for life. For example, always eating Heinz ketchup with your favorite meals as a child could spark a lifelong attachment to it, which would explain why someone as an adult would be reluctant to travel to any country where it is not available. That is a pretty strong and potentially permanent infatuation (from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life  by  Gabor George Burt).

Via the Wall Street Journal:  

Heinz for decades has searched for better single-serve packets. The company has tried making them bigger, easier to open, or attachable to a cup of French fries. None of the changes could be made cheaply or solve customers' main complaints—the single-serve packets are messy, hard to open and don't provide enough ketchup—say executives. For about the past decade, Heinz sold two single-serve containers: the classic squeeze packet and a dipping cup.

Heinz believes traditional ketchup packets are so annoying that they stop people from ordering fries at drive-thrus. "Fry inclusion orders" at drive-thrus "have been going down for years," says John Bennett, vice president of food-service ketchup, condiments and sauces for Heinz.

How does your offering continually infatuate? Share your story with us via Twitter (@SlingshotLiving). 

[Image via PMMI.]

Blue Ocean Strategy: still one of the most highly sought after business books

Since its initial publication in 2005, Blue Ocean Strategy remains a global, perennial bestseller, having been published in a record-breaking 42 languages. Most recently, Blue Ocean Strategy appears on 800-CEO-READ’s September 2011 list of best-selling business books by corporate customers. 800-CEO-READ is a leading direct supplier of book-based resources. 

Via the Miami Herald: 

24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne; Harvard Business Press, 256 pages ($29.95).

If you’re a fan of Blue Ocean Strategy, you’ll definitely want to grab a copy of Gabor’s new book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life, which links systematic creativity with smart strategy. 

Are you attracting or repelling your best customers?

In order to stay relevant in a fast and continuously changing environment, you need to be market driving rather than market driven. Market driven, no matter how responsive, is a reactionary stance. In contrast, market driving is proactive, creating spaces of lifestyle enrichment that did not exist before (from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life by Gabor George Burt).

Case in point: the cautionary tale of one airline which is bypassing the golden opportunity to further enrich the lives of its best passengers and is instead pursuing a kneejerk strategy of cost-cutting that will alienate its most loyal customers. 

Via Businessweek:

To avoid raising prices, a number of consumer-products makers have chosen to reduce quantity: A half-gallon carton of ice cream a few years ago became a quart-and-a-half carton, facial tissues were reduced in size so they now “rattle” around in oversized boxes, a 13.5-oz. box of crackers turned into a 12.25-oz. box of crackers, and so on. Do they think customers are stupid and won’t notice?

The airlines are among the worst offenders, almost seeming to work hard to make interstate bus travel look elegant….

Have you spotted a missed opportunity for a brand to enrich the lives of its customers? Tell us about it via Twitter (@SlingshotLiving).

[Image via travelshopgirl.]

Scott Belsky joins Gabor on Slingshot Living Radio

Tomorrow morning grab yourself a tasty cup of coffee and tune in to Slingshot Living for a real big treat as Gabor chats with Scott Belsky. Scott is the author of the national best-selling book Making Ideas Happen and CEO of Behance and recently noted in a Fast Company video that “to create what will be, you must remove yourself from the constant concern for what already is.” 

In the meantime, why not start re-imagining your business—or even your life—with Gabor’s new, inspiring book Slingshot?

Blue Ocean Strategy: banking on the “unbanked”

Challenging an industry’s conventional wisdom about which buyer group to target can lead to the discovery of new blue oceans. By looking across buyer groups, companies can gain new insights into how to redesign their value curves to focus on a previously overlooked set of buyers (Blue Ocean Strategy, page 61).

And it looks like a few telecom carriers in Africa are doing just that by launching products that allow money to be transferred between mobile users across all mobile telephone networks—“a mobile phone-based alternative to MoneyGram or Western Union.” 

Via Zimbabwe Independent: 

A Blue Ocean is an entirely new industry, created by bringing in neglected potential customer segments through offering them compelling buyer utility not currently offered anywhere. In a recent research, four buyer utility values were mentioned by the users of M-Pesa. Ninety-eight per cent (98%) cited speed, 98% picked safety, 96% identified convenience and 96% cited affordability (M-Pesa costs between 0,2% and 0,9% of amount to be transferred). In a Blue Ocean competition is irrelevant. With no competition, profits are sterling.

M-Pesa is branching into other creative product offerings. 

What do you think about the Blue Ocean-like approach of these carriers? Share your thoughts with us via Twitter (@SlingshotLiving). 

[Image via MI-Geekculture.]

Netflix’s tough lesson in infatuation

Readers of Gabor’s new book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life know that any company must understand the risk of upsetting its permanently infatuated consumers when looking to alter its offering. Certain offerings grab customers just the right way at the right time and help to keep them continuously infatuated. The interesting thing with such lasting infatuations is that consumers actually become very territorial about the offering and feel entitled to the permanence of their infatuation. Hence they demand that the offering stay unchanged.

Netflix learned this lesson the hard way recently. Take note of their misstep, via the New York Times:

Reed Hastings was soaking in a hot tub with a friend last month when he shared a secret: his company, Netflix, was about to announce a plan to divide its movie rental service into two — one offering streaming movies over the Internet, the other offering old-fashioned DVDs in the mail.

“That is awful,” the friend, who was also a Netflix subscriber, told him under a starry sky in the Bay Area, according to Mr. Hastings. “I don’t want to deal with two accounts.”

Mr. Hastings ignored the warning, believing that chief executives should generally discount what their friends say.

He has since regretted it. Subscribers revolted and many dropped the service. The plan further tarnished a once widely respected Internet service that had already been wounded by an unpopular price increase in the summer. Mr. Hastings was forced to reverse the planned split — but not the price increase — three weeks later and apologized. 

[Image via Flickr.]

Making ideas happen. Scott Belsky joins Gabor on Slingshot Living Radio

We’re delighted to have as Gabor’s guest Scott Belsky, author of the national best-selling book Making Ideas Happen and CEO of Behance. Scott recently noted in Fast Company that “to create what will be, you must remove yourself from the constant concern for what already is.” So if that gets your neurons firing, tune in to Gabor’s chat with Scott on Saturday 05 November and find out how Scott is helping oodles of creative professionals to work smarter and more successfully. 

While the countdown advances, why not grab a copy of Gabor’s new book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life for inspiring, creative remedies for your business.