How can you render competitors totally irrelevant?

Answer: increase your business by using "blue ocean” strategies, which provide almost infinite possibilities for profitable growth.

"Blue ocean” marketing means you find new strategies, new ways, new products, and new places to do business—all yet undiscovered by competition.

Consider your "blue ocean” to be your "uncontested market space,” where you can swim successfully and profitably without running into large schools of hungry sharks.

"Blue ocean” marketing is characterized by both exceptional value (real or perceived) and innovation.

A few examples:

Southwest Airlines' successful "blue ocean” growth strategy was not to compete with other airlines for the existing market of flyers, but to create a new market of flyers from non-flying car drivers.

Result: many airlines are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Southwest is flourishing.

The Starbucks "blue ocean” strategy took the old coffee shop concept up several levels. Starbucks coffees are international, upscale and pricey. They sell marvelous coffee-related products as well.

It's cool to hang out a Starbucks. It's an inexpensive, hip place to take a date. This coffee retailer even serve non-coffee drinkers a line of milkshakes, Frappuchinos.

Starbucks, the world's largest coffee retailer, offers an upscale experience, not just a mundane cup of cheap coffee, in its thousands of stores internationally.

Starbucks has enjoyed huge profit increases, while mediocre coffee shops flounder and perish.

The alternative to "blue ocean” selling is to swim in the "red ocean” of fierce, bloody competition where there is little opportunity for new growth and robust profits.

"Red ocean” markets and products experience

slow growth, incremental (usually meaningless) product enhancements, and heavy (often both inane and insane) price slashing.

How many "blue ocean” strategies can you develop and implement in 2006?

Why compete in bloody "red ocean” situations against inferior products, marketed by price cutting?

Merchants for years have referred to such products as "schlock." Now we can call these things "red ocean" stuff.

You cannot find cheap Rolex watches, unless they were stolen and being sold by a crook. So why ever discount and give away your top-notch products?

Properly sold, a hefty price can reaffirm product value and make the buyer feel good about his/her purchase and himself/herself, since it meets a person's real or perceived need.

So, business people, let's make 2006 the year of "blue ocean" excellence for ourselves.

The "blue ocean” concept was developed by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne. It's explained in their book, "Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space & Make Competition Irrelevant.”

The authors are professors at INSEAD, the world's second largest business school, located in France.

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