Blue Ocean Strategy Path 5: Look across functional or emotional appeal to buyers

This week we advance to the fifth path in the Blue Ocean Strategy Six Paths Framwork, which involves looking across functional or emotional appeal to buyers. As each path is highlighted, it becomes available in our Blue Ocean Strategy Basics archive.   For the fifth path, we turn to pages 69 - 70 of the book Blue Ocean Strategy (co-authored by Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne):

When companies are willing to challenge the functional-emotional orientation of their industry, they often find new market space. We have observed two common patterns. Emotionally oriented industries offer many extras that add price without enhancing functionality. Stripping away those extras may create a fundamentally simpler, lower priced, lower-cost business model that customers would welcome. Conversely, functionally oriented industries can often infuse commodity products with new life by adding a dose of emotion and, in so doing, can stimulate new demand.

Two well-known examples are Swatch, which transformed the functionally driven budget watch industry into an emotionally driven fashion statement, or The Body Shop, which did the reverse, transforming the emotionally driven industry of cosmetics into a functional, no-nonsense cosmetics house.

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[Image via Mafer178.]