Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

Does your industry compete on functionality or emotional appeal? If you compete on emotional appeal, what elements can you strip out to make it functional? If you compete on functionality, what elements can be added to make it emotional

offering the best of commercial travel and private jets and eliminating and reducing everything else, NetJets opened up a multibillion-dollar blue ocean wherein customers get the convenience and speed of a private jet with a low fixed cost and the lower variable cost of first-and business-class commercial airline travel (see figure 3-1). And the competition? Now, nearly thirty years later, NetJets’ share of the blue ocean it unlocked still stands a staggering five times greater than that of its nearest competitor

In the broadest sense, a company competes not only with the other firms in its own industry but also with companies in those other industries that produce alternative products or services

The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition

the planning process doesn’t produce strategy.

On the other hand, it gave CTR a recurring revenue stream while precluding customers from buying used machines from one another.

isn’t because they involve bleeding-edge technology per se, but because these offerings make the technology essentially disappear from buyers’ minds. The products and services are so simple, easy to use, fun, and productive that buyers fall in love with them. So technology is not a defining feature.

Noncustomers, not customers, hold the greatest insight into an industry’s pain points and points of intimidation that limit the size and boundary of the industry. This is why to create new demand, analyzing and understanding the three tiers of noncustomers are essential components of blue ocean strategy. A focus on existing customers, by contrast, tends to drive organizations to do more of the same for less, thereby anchoring companies in the red ocean irrespective of their blue ocean intent.

Unless the technology makes buyers’ lives dramatically simpler, more convenient, more productive, less risky, or more fun and fashionable, it will not attract the masses no matter how many awards it wins. Value innovation is not the same as technology innovation.

The lesson: noncustomers tend to offer far more insight into how to unlock and grow a blue ocean than do relatively content existing customers.