Are you RED or BLUE?

not talking about Man U or Chelsea here, but the Ocean :)

Are you a Red Ocean Strategy or Blue Ocean Strategy?

Basically,
RED OCEAN STRATEGY is a traditional competition-based strategy. You assume that an industry's structural conditions are given and the firms are forced to compete within them. Simpler term, you fight for what is laid out there. Imagine, a table full of chocolates, 20 kids surround the table, at the count of 3, grab as many as you can. The one who grab the most, wins.
To sustain themselves in the marketplace, you focus on building advantages over the competition. usually by assessing what competitiors do and you strive to do it better. You grabbing a bigger share of the market is achieved at another company's loss.

Here, cost and value are seen as trade-offs and a firm chooses a distinctive cost or differentiation position. Because the total profit level of the industry is also determined exogenously by structural factors, firms principally seek to capture and redistribute wealth instead of creating wealth. They focus on dividing up the red ocean, where growth is increasingly limited. (cited from wikipedia.org).

If you are BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY,
on the other hand, is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. This is "reconstructionist view”. Assuming that structure and market boundaries exist only in managers’ minds, practitioners who hold this view do not let existing market structures limit their thinking. To them, extra demand is out there, 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 value innovation—that is, the creation of innovative value to unlock new demand. This is achieved via the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low-cost. 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.

lAYMAN TERM, instead of being one of the 10 kids who stood around the table of chocolates, fighting for a share of chocolate, you create a new table of candies, and you own it.



ARE YOU RED OR BLUE?