I came across this book by listening to a podcast by Tony Robbins, who interviewed one of the authors (Renée Mauborgne) of the book. The ideas she was talking about really captivated my attention and led me to reading the book.

I have a traditional business education from a well known university in Sydney, Australia that I spend tens of thousands of dollars and 3 years of my life getting. The things I learned at university were mostly old and conventional strategies: in other words, how can we steal market share from the competition and beat them?

Several ventures I started using this knowledge all failed, because the strategies I used were out of date and focused on the “red ocean”: getting existing customers from an often saturated market without a clear differentiation. This book helps to be different: it teaches you how to tap into the blue ocean, so you don’t need to focus on the competition and can instead tap into new and very profitable markets. Businesses I have started and grown that were successful used the blue ocean strategy, that I instinctively used. Reading this book and its processes makes it clearer how to use the blue ocean strategy more consciously and proactively through the use of a couple of processes (Such as the 6-path framework and the 4-actions framework)

To be honest, in the beginning of reading this book it was a real stretch to get my mind around the concepts, due to my “indoctrination” at university of using conventional marketing techniques and being scored on their application rather than on thinking outside the box, like this book does a great job of outlining.

The main thing I liked is the process of developing a strategy canvas. This helps to provide a clear overview of the value factors in any market, what the competitors are doing and how additional value can be created.

What the book could have improved upon are two things:
1. Focus on small to medium sized business. Since this book is written for big corporations and using mostly case studies from big companies, it becomes much harder to apply the concepts to small to medium sized businesses. I would have liked some more strategies that small business can use who have little resources (read: no team and little money) available to test it out.

2. The concepts and ideas are great: a couple of empty worksheets in the back of the back, that business owners could copy and use by themselves would be very useful… This would have saved a lot of work and decrypting the concepts and added great value to the readers.

Overall “Blue Ocean Strategy” is a great read to help business owners tap into new markets and get the ball of using effective marketing rolling. I also liked the use of easy to understand tables to illustrate the concepts.

To buy the book for the best price at Amazon, click on the link below:

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