Curatti

Use A ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ To Soar in 2014

  • Martin (Marty) Smith

    • Cirque du Soleil redefined “circus” creating a “blue ocean” where their value proposition could stand alone. Before Cirque du Soleil “circus” meant animals, brave performers and a nomadic tribe. Cirque du Soleil shifted circus to mean:


    Its no wonder Cirque du Soleil is a prominent example of “blue ocean strategy” in the book by Kim and Mauborgne. The book is an important read for Small To Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs), but practical and immediate needs may make adoption of a “blue ocean process” difficult. This Curatti.com post shares how SMBs can do simple things to identify “blue oceans” next year.

    Start With A SWOT

    Creating an honest Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis for your website and 3 to 5 competitors is a great place to start a “blue ocean” search. Create a spreadsheet to capture:

    Here is a rough example of a blue ocean SWOT created about a year ago for MusicMarker.org:

    See the value of having site, keyword, persona and branding information on the same page? ReverbNation.com was included to make the “platforms vs. websites” point. ReverbNation is platform where bands and music fans create pages of valuable User Generated Content (UGC) and then compete for traffic within the ReverbNation.com “commons”.

    MusicMaker.org is more akin to Blues.org than ReverbNation, but ReverbNation’s effective “roll up tactics” are clear with millions of pages in Google, almost 70,000 inbound links and the SEO and content marketing power created from so much traffic and social currency. The “platforms crush websites” idea is critical since costs of developing platforms isn’t that much greater than traditional website development. Blue ocean strategies stretch imaginations more than wallets.

    Create A Blue Ocean Strategy

    Most Internet marketers prefer to hop into a known ditch and fight over every shovel of dirt. Creating a “blue ocean strategy” recognizes WHERE you are strong, evaluates competitor strengths and then turns all previous assumptions about your business on its head just enough to find a unique value proposition, a value proposition that exists in uncontested space like Cirque du Soleil did for “circus”.

    There are many ways to create blue oceans online including:

    Blue Ocean Thinking

    If you want to shake up your business vertical in 2014 adopt a blue ocean strategy. Creating “blue ocean” strategies, strategies not yet made red from over competition, requires letting some “preconceived” notions about Internet marketing go such as:

    Unify your marketing. We like Jim Stengel’s “Brand Ideas” as shared in his book GROW: How Ideals Power Growth and Profits at the World’s Most Powerful Companies. We like to determine the most important “brand ideal” and then use knowledge to organize everything from personas to keywords. Read How Your Unique Greatness Meets Customer Aspirations on Atlantic BT’s blog for more on brands, ideals, customers and keywords.

    Where do most fail?

    Most Internet marketing teams fail to find blue oceans. They prefer the comfort of the known. Knife fighting doesn’t scale. Someday someone will be better at the Internet marketing equivalent of “knife fighting” than your team. Blue oceans scale and then scale again and again. By the third time around competitors jump into your blue ocean thus confirming the paradigm shift. Ringling Brothers is desperate to look like Cirque du Soleil these days.

    That moment, the moment a competitor must swim in your blue ocean, is when an Internet marketing team knows its won. Great Internet marketing teams know, despite the fact it could take competitors years to catch up, its time to find a new blue ocean. Time to find the next blue ocean before anyone watching even knows you are looking.

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    Martin (Marty) Smith

    Founder at Story of Cancer Foundation
    Passionate cancer survivor, Internet marketer and former Director of Ecommerce who believes in Margaret Mead's quote, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Glad to be an "Editor of Chaos".

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