Blue Ocean Strategy: Book Review: Blue Ocean Strategy

Up till now, most books on competition and marketing clearly focused on how companies can survive in a highly competitive market, for example by a choosing a strategy of differentiation or cost leadership. The authors of the book Blue Ocean Strategy argue, however, that intensive competition will only lead to bloody red oceans in which companies find themselves fighting over an ever-shrinking profit pool.

Blue Ocean Strategy, on the other hand, is a very practical book that dares to deviate from this path by challenging and motivating companies to swim away from the bloody red oceans, where competition is fierce, by creating blue oceans of uncontested market space, where competition is irrelevant.

Even though blue oceans are not a new phenomenon,
Blue Ocean Strategy is a book that really stands out from the rest of the books on competition and marketing. It introduces a whole new perspective on business, competition, strategy and strategy formation. I thought the book would be a little bit more theoretical in nature. Especially chapter three contains a lot of examples, a bit too much in my opinion. One example to clarify the theory would have been sufficient for me. On the positive side, due to the numerous examples, this book is fairly easy to read and understand and does not get you bored that easily.

I would highly recommend this book to companies that are struggling to survive in red oceans and would like to be taken by the hand in creating blue oceans of uncontested market space.
Blue ocean strategy, on the other hand, challenges and motivates companies to swim away from those bloody red oceans where competition is fierce, by creating blue oceans where competitors are not yet present and they get the chance to grow. According to the blue ocean strategy, companies create uncontested market space, try to make the competition irrelevant, create and capture new demand, break the value-cost trade-off, and align all their activities in pursuit of differentiation and low cost.

The existence of blue oceans is anything but new. They have always been a feature of life and will always be. All red oceans were once blue oceans. While some blue oceans are created outside existing industry boundaries, most are created by expanding existing industry boundaries of red oceans. Even though only 14 percent of all new business launches have the goal to create blue oceans, they can be very profitable, generating 38 percent of total revenues and 61 percent of total