Blue Ocean Strategy. Crocs, Nintendo Wii

INTRODUCTION TO THE BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY The Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) concept is known to us since 1995 on a book titled “Blue Ocean Strategy” written by W. Chan Kim in which the book was a success and being translated into over 40 languages (Bryan, 2006). However, the concept that the author described had been used in practice decades ago. In this write up, focus will be given on introducing the blue ocean strategy concept and examples from Crocs incorporation and Nintendo incorporation to discuss the relevance and importance of BOS in today’s business environment. In today’s competitive business environment, many companies and organizations compete in the defined and existing market space and are racing each other for an attempt to out-compete their competitors. They make the value-cost trade-off and are struggling within the competition to exploit the existing market demand (Kim & Mauborgne, 2010). Hence, these companies often result in the strategic move of trying to differentiate their products/services from their competitors or they compete based on low cost. The business environment being described above is termed the red ocean whereby the market is saturated by competition. However, Blue Ocean is being described as a business environment whereby no competition is present. Blue ocean strategy is a strategic move in which a company would take to create market in an uncontested market space and therefore making market competition irrelevant. The aim of the strategy is to capture and to create new market demand and to break the value-cost trade-off. Blue ocean strategy also involves in aligning the firm’s strategy to achieve differentiation of products/services and low cost simultaneously. This strategy is becoming immensely important in today’s business environment despite that business in the red ocean is inevitable as blue ocean strategy would help a company to grab a greater market share by targeting non-market customers and

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