The term ‘customer-centricity’ was coined in 1954 by management consultant Peter Drucker who stated: “It is the customer who determines what a business is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper”. (1) Essentially, this is a strategy and business culture that focuses on creating the best experience for the customer to build brand loyalty. Customer-centric businesses put the customer at the centre of their philosophy, operations and ideas. They believe that their customers are the primary reason they exist, and they use every means at their disposal to keep them satisfied.Customer-Obsession, on the other hand, is a more recent concept. It refers to being hyper-focused and consistently listening to customers in real-time to enhance their experiences. It revolutionises the way businesses think about customer relationships and can require a mind shift in the way brands perceive their customers.

The core premise of the strategic concept of “proximity” is that, thanks to digital technologies, value is being created closer and closer to the moment of demand — not just in time but also physically closer. This means companies can, in effect, procrastinate and wait until customer demand is present before producing an actual product or service. This trend, which is made possible by technologies ranging from AI to 3D printing to IoT, can help leaders make smart strategic decisions, especially when they feel overwhelmed by new trends and the speed of change. To do so, they need to first understand the four big shifts that are driving proximity, and then begin to brainstorm ways proximity can pay off in their own organizations.

In an era where the competition in manufacturing is fiercer than ever, adopting a blue ocean marketing strategy offers fresh air for manufacturers stuck in the red ocean’s relentless battle for market share. This strategic approach, centered around value innovation, paves the way for manufacturers, including steel fabricators and others in transformative manufacturing marketing, to break free from traditional competitive strategies and explore uncontested market spaces. The significance of transforming manufacturers’ marketing through the application of blue ocean strategy cannot be understated—it opens new avenues for growth, profitability, and sustainable competitive advantage beyond the confines of red ocean versus blue ocean dynamics.

Twenty years ago, strategy professors Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim introduced a revolutionary concept to the management world. Businesses, they said, could unleash growth by creating “blue oceans” (markets that did not exist) instead of competing in “red oceans” (established, overcrowded markets).

In the Man Markets Meeting this week, the great Rory Powe – soon to celebrate a decade at Man Group - spoke eloquently about Novo Nordisk, a firm whose GLP-1 semaglutide treatments for diabetes (Ozempic) and obesity (Wegovy) are only the most high-profile of its increasingly diverse range of drugs. The firm has more than 80% of the global weight management industry, notwithstanding competition from the likes of Eli Lilly and Company. Its rocketing share price has reflected the fact that it has not only attained this dominant market position, but also appears to have a strong pipeline of next generation drugs: Amycretin, currently undergoing trials, is being touted as significantly more effective than Wegovy, allowing patients to lose more weight, more swiftly.

Want your startup to taste success? Try out the blue ocean strategy to make waves in an untapped market with no competition!

Navigating through the competitive currents of the ecommerce industry requires businesses to constantly innovate and adapt their strategies to secure market share and achieve sustainable growth. The strategic frameworks of Red Ocean and Blue Ocean offer contrasting methodologies for understanding and engaging with market competition. While the Red Ocean strategy focuses on battling competitors in existing markets, the Blue Ocean strategy encourages the creation of new market spaces, rendering competition irrelevant.

Let’s talk about making price irrelevant. My good friend and fellow customer experience expert John DiJulius has often said, “Make price irrelevant.” He and I jab at each other over this statement. I’ve said, “Make price less relevant. There’s no way you can make price completely irrelevant.” John knows this, and he admits it, but at the same time, he argues the point that if you provide enough value with the experience, you can distance your company from the competition, even while charging more than others. I can live with that because he’s right. We’re just using different words to get us to the same outcome.

With Beyond Disruption, we dive into the field of innovation and continue our research into creating new industries in a positive-sum way, where profit and growth can be achieved in harmony with society. Here are five key insights from the book we believe are essential to organisations and our economies – both today and in the future.

Our research reveals that the obsession with disruption can lead companies to overlook an alternative pathway to innovation and growth. We term this process “nondisruptive creation” – creation or innovation without disruption or destruction. Nondisruptive creation presents a new way of thinking about what is possible and opens a bold new path for all of us to innovate new industries, new jobs and profitable growth without the social costs of shuttered companies, hurt communities or lost jobs.

“Every company wants one, yet only a few companies have one: a compelling strategy,” write Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their classic Blue Ocean Strategy. Don’t despair if you don’t know how to create a strategy that stands out in a sea of me-too competitors. In this blog, we’ll introduce you to one of the blue ocean strategy tools, the Strategy Canvas, that will help you stand out from the crowd and create a blue ocean of new market space. To understand the power of the strategy canvas, we’ll look at five powerful examples from a range of industries.

In the crowded and rapidly changing online retail industry, competitors try to differentiate themselves by offering low prices and quick shipping. By contrast, Stitch Fix differentiated itself through personalization and an element of surprise. Stitch Fix creatively leveraged artificial intelligence and human beings — in particular, stylists — to change the retail value proposition, creating a fundamentally different and significantly superior buyer experience, and a differentiated and low-cost offering.

The strategy canvas is a powerful one-page, visual tool that depicts the way a business configures its offering to buyers in relation to those of its competitors. It is both a diagnostic tool and an action framework for building a compelling blue ocean strategy. It captures the current state of play in the known market space.

The four actions framework and the eliminate-reduce-raise-create (ERRC) grid are two analytical tools of blue ocean strategy to help you simultaneously pursue differentiation and low cost to achieve value innovation. In this blog, we’ll look at how the four actions framework and the ERRC grid work together, examine some examples, and provide you with a template you can use to start creating your blue ocean. Let’s dive in.

History reveals that there are no perpetually excellent companies. The same company can be brilliant at one moment and wrongheaded at another. It would appear, therefore, that the company per se is not the appropriate unit of analysis when exploring the roots of high performance.

Businesses are constantly seeking strategies to stand out in a crowded market. The Blue Ocean Strategy emerges as a beacon, guiding companies toward uncharted waters where competition is irrelevant and new opportunities abound. Let’s dive into the depths of the Blue Ocean Strategy and explore its intricacies.

For decades, the business and corporate world has been sold on three ideas: One, we should analyze what is, to shape our view of what could be. Two, more than ever today, and even more so in the future, technology innovation is the key to market creation and growth. And three, at the heart of innovation is the lone, smart, and gut-instinct entrepreneur.

Imaginées par Kim et Mauborgne, dans leur ouvrage Stratégie Océan Bleu, les 6 pistes permettent d'aborder un marché existant avec des angles d'approche complètement nouveaux, et de trouver un marché sur lequel aucun concurrent n'est positionné, car il n'existe pas encore ! Pourquoi l'utiliser ? Remettre en cause les certitudes que nous pouvons avoir sur un marché existant, en le soumettant à 6 pistes de questionnement, qui vont permettre d'en redessiner les frontières.

The strategy known as customer-centricity, once adopted by the masses, is now outdated. It has been replaced by something even more customer-focused: customer obsession, a core principle and culture that focuses an entire organisation around its customers.

For the past three decades, the business mantra has been “customer first”. Yet focusing on retaining and expanding an existing customer base often results in finer segmentation and the greater tailoring of offerings to better meet customer preferences, which will likely lead companies into too-small target markets of an existing industry. The blue ocean strategist’s mantra is “noncustomers first”. By looking to noncustomers and building on powerful commonalities in what they value, companies can reach beyond existing demand to unlock a new mass of buyers.