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Blue Ocean Strategy

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4

Activities

Advanced

Learning Level

1-2 hours

Time to Complete

Business Strategy

Focus

Overview

The Blue Ocean Strategy created by Kim and Mauborgne and adapted by Aurore enables students to use critical thinking and analytical insights to develop a blue ocean strategy.

How it works

Learners begin by analyzing the key factors that buyers’ consider when making purchasing decisions. Then, we’ll guide students to understand how importance to the customer, ability to differentiate, and potential to lower cost  form the foundation for the value-cost relationship. The goal is to identify which buyer values can be manipulated to create a new offering.

Use your current case study to set up the scenario for your students. Then, let them apply what they’ve learned.

recommended Uses

Use this tool as a learning device to practice and apply high level concepts in Marketing, Strategy, Business, and Entrepreneurship courses in undergraduate and graduate programs.

Skills acquired

  • Understanding the Blue Ocean framework
  • Creative, strategic thinking using a competitive lens
  • Practice the process of raising, reducing, and eliminating the buyer value factors using a competitive lens to analyze ability to differentiate and potential to lower cost.

Download The Framework

learning path

Define your product category and geography. Then, determine the buyer value factors that drive purchasing decisions in the market and rank order them from most to least important to the buyer.

10-20 minutes to complete

List your top 4 competitors in the field. Then, evaluate how well you and competitors perform on each of the buyer value factors. Then, analyze and identify how much it generally costs each company to compete on each buyer value.

10-20 minutes to complete

In this activity, evaluate the ability to differentiate and the potential to lower cost for each buyer value factor. The results from this activity form the foundation for creating a blue ocean. We want to improve factors that are differentiating and have a high likelihood to lower cost, and reduce factors that don’t.

10-20 minutes to complete

Using data from the last activity, raise, reduce, eliminate, and create buyer values. The goal of a blue ocean strategy is to raise values that have a high ability to differentiate and reduce or eliminate values that don’t.

20-30 minutes to complete

Use the Blue Ocean Analytics to analyze the buyer values impact on profitability. Raising, reducing, and eliminating buyer value factors will shift the cost and value and ultimately determine the success or detriment of your new blue ocean strategy.

10-20 minutes to analyze

How To Guide + demo

Blue Ocean Strategy:
UBER

Let’s use Uber to walkthrough the Blue Ocean Strategy tool and help us understand how they created a new, differentiated solution in the taxi and passenger transportation market.

What is a blue ocean strategy?

The goal of a blue ocean strategy is to differentiate in a highly competitive environment to create a new market, new buyer values, and new demand.

Essentially, blue ocean strategy uses (1) differentiation or (2) potential to lower cost to create a unique solution in a highly competitive market. That highly competitive market is a red ocean. The new market is a blue ocean.

In this framework, the first three steps help us determine the current competitive landscape, and the final two steps guide us to creating our blue ocean strategy.

Jump to the guide

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