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Liftoff! Jeff Bezos And 3 Crewmates Travel To Space And Back In Under 15 Minutes

Laurel Wamsley

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket lifts off from the launch pad Tuesday morning in Van Horn, Texas. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket lifts off from the launch pad Tuesday morning in Van Horn, Texas.

Wearing a cowboy hat under the West Texas morning sun, Jeff Bezos crossed the bridge to enter the capsule made by his company Blue Origin. He was accompanied by three others – his brother Mark Bezos, female aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen.

Then the shuttle hatch closed and just before 9:15 a.m. ET, the four blasted into space on the first human flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle.

Jeff Bezos And Blue Origin Travel Deeper Into Space Than Richard Branson

Bezos is the second billionaire this month to reach the edge of space: Richard Branson rocketed there last week aboard a vessel made by his company Virgin Galactic.

The date of the New Shepard's maiden launch is no accident: July 20 was the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.

The crew went 62 miles above Earth in minutes

The New Shepard suborbital flight path was designed to go higher than the Kármán line, which is often considered the boundary of space: about 62 miles above Earth.

That line has been a sticking point in the space race between Bezos and Branson .

Bezos Vs. Branson: The Billionaire Space Race Lifts Off

Branson's SpaceShipTwo hit a peak altitude of around 282,000 feet – higher than NASA's designated Earth-space boundary of 50 miles, but short of the Kármán line.

About three minutes into the flight, the booster separated from the crew capsule. Then the New Shepard passed the Kármán line, with hoots of celebration heard over the in-shuttle audio.

A sonic boom was heard as the booster returned to Earth. The capsule remained aloft longer, floating against blue skies.

The crew riding with Jeff Bezos included his brother Mark (left), 18-year-old physics student Oliver Daemen and 82-year-old pioneering female aviator Wally Funk. Blue Origin hide caption

The crew riding with Jeff Bezos included his brother Mark (left), 18-year-old physics student Oliver Daemen and 82-year-old pioneering female aviator Wally Funk.

The astronauts, as Blue Origin calls them, were briefly allowed to unbuckle.

"Who wants a Skittle?" Jeff Bezos asked, tossing one of the candies slowly across the capsule, which Daemon caught in his mouth.

"Oh Jeff, look at those, it's dark up here!" Funk was heard saying a minute later, apparently looking out the capsule windows. "Two thousand miles an hour."

'Who Wants A Skittle?' And Other Things Overheard On Jeff Bezos' Trip To Space

At about the eight-minute mark of the flight, parachutes deployed from the capsule to give the crew an easy touchdown.

The capsule touched down in the desert sand, and a soft plume of dust rose around it. All together, the mission lasted roughly 11 minutes from takeoff to touchdown.

After the capsule landed, cars arrived carrying crews to open the hatch and videographers to document the moment. Scant winds meant the capsule landed where it was expected to.

Jeff Bezos stepped off the capsule first, followed by Daemen. Then Funk emerged, her arms flung out in glee. Mark Bezos came out last, and the four embraced family and friends.

The trip featured the youngest and oldest people to travel to space

The New Shepard's flight included both the oldest and youngest people to travel to space.

Funk, 82, is one of the last surviving members of a group of female pilots who were part of a test to see whether women were fit for space travel back in 1961. The women passed many of the same tests as the male pilots, and they became known as the Mercury 13 – but NASA never sent them to space.

Wally Funk, A Lifelong Aspiring Astronaut, Will Finally Head To Space At 82

Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student on a gap year, was the first paying customer aboard the New Shepard.

His father, Joes Daemen, founder and CEO of Dutch investment company Somerset Capital Partners, initially secured a spot for his son on the second flight. But the mystery winner of an auction for a spot on the New Shepard's voyage apparently had a scheduling conflict, and Jeff Bezos invited Oliver Daemen aboard.

Blue Origin's Flight Will Include The Youngest And The Oldest Humans To Go To Space

The start of a space tourism era.

The launch was a big day for Bezos but also for Blue Origin's space tourism program. The company's webcast touted that interested viewers should get in touch about booking a spot on a future Blue Origin flight.

Two more flights are scheduled for 2021.

Bezos announces new $100 million awards

At a news conference following the landing, Bezos announced a new philanthropic award, the Courage and Civility Award.

The award's first winners are political commentator and social entrepreneur Van Jones and restaurateur and humanitarian José Andrés. Each winner will receive $100 million, which they can give to the charities of their choice.

Bezos touted that the awards feature no bureaucracy. "They can give it all to their own charity, or they can share the wealth," he said. "It's up to them."

NPR's Scott Neuman and Bill Chappell contributed to this report.

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Jeff Bezos hails ‘best day ever’ after successful Blue Origin space flight

• Suborbital flight on New Shepard rocket lasted 11 minutes
• Bezos blasted for traveling to space as Amazon workers toil

The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hailed “the best day ever” after completing his pioneering foray into space on Tuesday with three crewmates, among them his brother Mark.

The billionaire’s New Shepard rocket and capsule touched down in the Texas desert after a suborbital flight that lasted a mere 11 minutes, but set several records for his Blue Origin space company, including the oldest and youngest humans to fly into space.

Wally Funk, an 82-year-old female aviation pioneer who trained as an astronaut in the 1960s, flew as Bezos’s guest, while Oliver Daemen, 18, a student from the Netherlands and son of a private enquiry firm’s chief executive, was Blue Origin’s first paying customer.

The world’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $206bn, Bezos, 57, sprayed champagne and shouted his enjoyment after the successful landing of New Shepard’s first crewed mission following 15 uncrewed test flights.

“It was the best day ever,” Bezos said after emerging from the capsule, adding that he felt “unbelievably good” and that his colleagues were “a very happy crew”.

The tycoon, however, has also attracted criticism for putting his fortune into space tourism amid concerns over working conditions at Amazon, and “aggressive” tax avoidance .

In recent years, Bezos, who stood down as Amazon chief executive this month to concentrate on the space company he founded in 2000, has sold about $1bn in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

In a post-flight press conference on Tuesday, Bezos said the venture had reinforced his commitment to tackling the climate crisis, and using New Shepard as a stepping stone towards colonising space for the benefit of Earth.

“The whole point of doing this is to practice,” said Bezos, who announced in February that he was donating $10bn to efforts to “ preserve and protect the natural world ”.

“Every time we fly this tourism mission we’re practicing flying the second stage of New Glenn,” he added, referring to Blue Origin’s planned reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle , which is central to his vision of ultimately moving industry off the planet.

“We’re going to build a road to space so our kids, and their kids, can build the future. This is not about escaping Earth … this is the only good planet in the solar system and we have to take care of it. When you go to space and see how fragile it is you want to take care of it even more.”

Bezos, who donated the proceeds from the New Shepard seat auction to Blue Origin’s Club for the Future to encourage young people to pursue careers in space and science, also announced two $100m “ Courage and Civility” awards for recipients to donate to charities of their choice.

Asked if he would fly into space again, Bezos was unequivocal.

“Hell yes,” he said. “How fast can you refuel that thing? Let’s go.”

The firm intends to run regular space tourism flights for commercial passengers.

New Shepard, named as a tribute to Alan Shepard, the first American in Space in 1961, blasted off into a clear blue sky from the launchpad in Van Horn, Texas, at 8.12am local time, the first of three scheduled flights this year, on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The crew capsule successfully separated from its rocket booster shortly before reaching the 62-mile altitude Kármán Line , the internationally accepted boundary of space, after about three minutes of flight.

The crew experienced about three to four minutes of weightlessness during which the spacecraft reached the top of its flight path at 66.5 miles, more than 10 miles higher than the British billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s flight to the edge of space aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity nine days earlier.

Audio from the capsule on Blue Origin’s live webcast of the flight captured the crew members shouting in excitement as they floated around the spacecraft. Video was later released.

After re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the capsule glided to a gentle landing on parachutes, minutes after the reusable booster made a powered landing on a nearby pad.

Mark Bezos assumed the moniker “Astronaut Demo”, for the flight to distinguish him from his brother, Astronaut Bezos. Their sister Christina, director of the family foundation, sent her siblings a message before the flight, reminding them how they would pretend to be Star Trek characters as children.

“As you buckle in, I’m reminded of when Jeff was Captain Kirk, Mark, you were Sulu, and I took the role of Uhura, we would battle Klingons while firing torpedoes, all the while dodging in and out of traffic and praying that we make it to our destination safely,” she said.

“Mark, be prepared to fire those torpedoes in order to do so. Now, get your asses back down here so I can give you a big hug. We love you, and Godspeed New Shepard.”

Blue Origin has opened sales for space tourism flights but has not set a price or revealed how much Daemen paid. The winning bid in a June auction for the first seat was $28m (£20m), the winner pulling out of Tuesday’s flight because of a “scheduling conflict”.

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Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin company is exploring space to protect Earth and keep ‘the natural world’ from backsliding

Good morning.

I spent much of this week at the Lake Nona Impact Forum, held in partnership with Fortune, with a focus on health and wellness. As at every executive forum I’ve attended recently, much of the focus was on AI. But while executives in other industries talk about double-digit productivity gains in marketing, technology, finance, supply chain management, sales, etc., health care executives talk about gains in research and development that have a different order of magnitude. Here’s what Emma Walmsley, CEO of GSK , said in her interview with me.

“The biggest problem our sector has to face is the productivity of R&D. It costs billions, it takes decades, and 90% of it doesn’t work.”  Applying AI to research  “is the holy grail for us. That is where we can create real material value.”

Walmsley, who sits on the board of Microsoft , acknowledged that gains in research, while potentially huge, may take longer to realize.

“ Like most extraordinary innovations, we underestimate how absolutely massive the transformation is going to be, and we probably overestimate the pace at which it is going to happen.”

I also spoke with Chip Bergh, who just stepped down as CEO of Levi’s after 12 years on the job. As CEO, Bergh increased the company’s market value five times over, but also was attacked as a “woke CEO” for taking strong stances on gun violence and voting rights. Bergh was unrepentant:

“ This is not about me. This is about the role of the CEO at Levi Strauss and Company. We have a history. We’ve been around for 171 years now. Going all the way back to our founder Levi Strauss…the very first year he made a profit he donated a percentage of it to a church orphanage in San Francisco. And he always believed that, yes, we make bluejeans, but we are here to do more than just make a buck for the shareholders. We are here to make an impact on society.”

Jeff Bezos also spoke at the forum, which was held just 50 miles west of Cape Canaveral, about his space company Blue Origin. He said the real reason he is interested in space travel…

“… is to protect this gem of a planet. If you look at it, by almost every metric, our lives are better today than ever before. If you think about the whole world, literacy rates are way better. Child mortality rates are way better. Global poverty is way better. All of these things have gotten better over time. And there’s one exception. The natural world has not gotten better….We can’t go backwards. We need to go forwards. But what does this mean? We need to continue to use more and more resources and also protect this gem of a planet.”

More news below.

Alan Murray @alansmurray [email protected]

The biggest worry for CEOs

The top concern for CEOs isn’t rising costs, disruption or even geopolitics, according to a recent survey of chief executives from BCG. It’s talent, with 60% of CEOs citing finding, hiring and upskilling workers among their top two long-term management concerns. The AI boom is making talent more important, as both executives and employees worry they don’t have the skills to manage generative AI. Fortune

A scandal at Teflon-maker Chemours

Shares in Chemours, the company behind Teflon, crashed over 30% on Thursday after it put CEO Mark Newman and other top executives on leave. The company will also delay the release of its audited financial reports. In December, the Securities and Exchange Commission said it was looking into some of Chemours’ non-standard accounting measures, some of which were tied to executive pay. The Wall Street Journal

A new CEO at Vanguard

Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley will step down at the end of the year, after spending 33 years at the asset manager. Vanguard’s assets under management grew to $8.7 trillion under Buckley’s six-year tenure as CEO. Vanguard has benefited from the decade-long boom in index investing, with clients shifting to low-cost passive funds pioneered by the asset manager. Bloomberg

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This is the web version of CEO Daily, a newsletter of must-read insights from Fortune CEO Alan Murray. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.

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Space Travel and Deep-Ocean Exploration Are Becoming More Accessible

Travel to earth’s final frontiers is more possible than ever before, with exciting plans on the horizon. The question today isn’t whether you can actually get there anymore, but whether you can afford it.

Heading out the door? Read this article on the Outside app available now on iOS devices for members! >","name":"in-content-cta","type":"link"}}'>Download the app .

In 2020, former astronaut Kathy Sullivan descended nearly seven miles below the Pacific’s surface. When she touched down at a spot on the ocean floor known as Challenger Deep, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, the 68-year-old became the first person to visit both outer space and the deepest known part of the ocean. The next year, multimillionaire video-game developer Richard Garriott, now 61, became the first man to execute the same feat. (Garriott had purchased a trip to the International Space Station in 2008.)

Their rare distinction as intrepid explorers of distant frontiers may not remain unusual for long. Just as tour operators turned quests once reserved for explorers into potential destinations for anyone with the means (read: money)—climbing Mount Everest, treks to the North and South Poles, sailing trips around the world—today’s entrepreneurs are now building paths to the ocean’s depths and up to the stars. Say hello to tourism at the edge of existence.

Vacations in Space

American entrepreneur Dennis Tito kicked off space tourism in 2001 with his $20 million seat on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station. Several private astronauts have visited the ISS since, including four men who spent 12 days at the station last year as a part of NASA’s Private Astronauts Program. Their $55-million-a-seat visit helped mark the arrival of entirely modern space travel.

Elon Musk’s company SpaceX oversaw that first all-civilian ISS trip in April 2021, as well as the first first all-civilian orbit around the earth that September. Last year also saw billionaire Jeff Bezos make a suborbital sortie on a rocket built by his space company, Blue Origin, and next year, SpaceX plans to send Japanese billionaire and fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa on the first-ever private moon orbit . Then there’s Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, a company taking reservations for suborbital microgravity flights, slated to start next year. Thousands have already shelled out for the $450,000 plane-like ride, which will start and end in New Mexico. The 90-minute experience will take travelers up 50,000 feet before boosting into space to experience a few minutes of microgravity.

SpaceX’s earth orbit was “the first purely tourist-oriented sightseeing flight,” says Rod Pyle, space historian and author of Space 2.0: How Private Spaceflight, a Resurgent NASA, and International Partners Are Creating a New Space Age . “That really draws a bright line for me that we’ve moved into space tourism at last after talking about it for decades.”

Purely private launches like this are still the minority of annual orbital launches—44 of the 146 orbital launches last year were entirely private, according to the analytics and engineering firm Bryce Tech —but the companies behind them are slashing the cost of spaceflight by increasing the number of trips and improving innovations like reusable rockets.

“How many people would be flying to Europe if they had to junk the plane after each flight?” asks Pyle.

This commercial-spaceflight boom enticed NASA to fund $415.6 million at the end of 2021 to private, established companies that can support the development of commercial destinations in space. This furthered the federal agency’s long march toward the  privatization of space travel. A congressional act in 2010 had essentially “ended the space-shuttle program and got the United States started on the commercial-cargo and crew paths,” says Paul Stimers, a commercial space lobbyist who worked on the legislation.

As a result, NASA funded millions to companies like Boeing and SpaceX to kick-start the transition and launched its own Commercial Crew Program to deepen these partnerships. Thanks to such efforts, the cost of reaching space has fallen significantly since increased privatization, says Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial space flight.

Soon, however, a rocket won’t be your only avenue to the edge of the atmosphere. Starting in 2024, the Florida-based Space Perspectives and Arizona-based WorldView aim to take travelers up to 100,000 feet in pressurized capsules suspended from high-altitude balloons (which are more commonly used as weather balloons). At this height, riders will be able to see the earth’s atmosphere and 1,000 miles in every direction, according to WorldView.

There’s no microgravity aspect—a sensation triggered by free fall in flights like the $8,200 Zero-G Experience—as high-altitude balloons move slowly up and down; Space Perspective, for example, says its Spaceship Neptune rises at just 12 miles per hour. It’s not cheap, though: the ride will cost you $150,000, whereas WorldView, whose 2024 flights from the Grand Canyon and Great Barrier Reef are already sold out, charges $50,000 a seat.

As tourists line up to leave the planet, Orbital Assembly is working to greet them with humanity’s first private space center, Pioneer Station . The U.S. company is aiming to have mints on pillows as early as 2027. Pioneer Station is being built for both tourism and business. Bookings will be segmented into a tourist season, a business season, and one for both; this overlapping period could give space tourists opportunities to contribute to cutting-edge science, like bio- or pharmacological research, says Orbital Assembly CEO Rhonda Stevenson.

The microgravity accommodation will be formed by individual pods, called free-flyers, connected by steel trusses in a spoke-and-wheel formation. Any number of free-flyers can be hitched together to form a habitable space station; the current plan is for Pioneer Station to host between 28 and 54 guests. Meanwhile, Voyager Station , Orbital Assembly’s planned space hotel, could eventually host as many as 440 guests. Stevenson declined to give a price estimate for a stay at either station, but said a vacation there is likely to span between four days to two weeks and involve activities like microgravity sports.

Assuming adequate funding and launch availability are nailed down, she says they hope to send the first free-flyer to space in 2025. Orbital Assembly projects this sets the stage for a completed Pioneer Station by 2027 and other outposts like Voyager Station to be constructed by the end of the decade. The company is currently in conversation with several space travel providers to arrange transportation to its stations.

“It will be like you have a hotel but you can take any number of airlines to get to that place,” says Andrew Lavin, who oversees Orbital Assembly’s communications.

Despite how this all sounds—will it really pan out?—space experts view the project as more likely than science fiction. Orbital Assembly’s timelines are optimistic to Anita Gale, head of the National Space Society and a senior engineer with Boeing’s space program who previously worked on the space-shuttle program, but she thinks sometime in the 2030s is a sound expectation.

“For decades, the idea of space settlement had… let’s call it a giggle factor. In the technical community, that giggle factor is gone,” she says. “We can talk about living in space, and engineers who are in touch with what’s going on in these spaces are saying, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna do it.’ It’s a question of when, but it is inevitable. We will be doing business in space.”

Deep-Sea Tourism

Going to great depths in the ocean has never seen the public zeal or government support of space travel. While a flurry of rockets reached the moon in the years immediately following the Apollo 11 landing in 1969, more than five decades passed between the first and second visit to Challenger Deep.

Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard were the first people to hit the ocean bottom, in 1960, recording a depth of more than 35,000 feet in a submersible called the Trieste during a U.S. Navy research mission. Famed film director James Cameron became the second person to visit Challenger Deep—in 2012. But both the Trieste and Cameron’s submersible sustained damage during their expeditions and could not make repeat trips. Then along came Victor Vescovo , a private-equity investor and retired naval commander, in the possibility-redefining submersible  Limiting Factor .

His groundbreaking vessel, built by Florida-based Triton Submersibles, has been the first to repeatedly visit the ocean bottom at such remarkable depths, allowing Vescovo to descend to Challenger Deep an astounding 15 times, become the first person to reach the deepest point in every ocean, and probe the world’s deepest shipwreck sites.

“It’s the Model T Ford of Hadal submersibles,” says Rob McCallum, CEO of EYOS Expeditions, which handles the logistics of Vescovo’s adventures. “It’s the pathfinder to the last frontier of exploration.” (On earth, anyway.)

More than a dozen people visited the trench and conducted scientific experiments with Vescovo, some on donated trips and others thanks to a $750,000 Mission Specialist expedition contribution, making them the first group of travelers to personally pay for a ride to the bottom of the Pacific. Going forward, however, Limiting Factor will be used purely for science under new ownership.

Travelers have also made the deep dive down to the Titanic —nearly 2.5 miles underwater in the North Atlantic—with OceanGate Expeditions . The company has taken more than 30 travelers from Newfoundland to the wreck over the past two years and is currently accepting 2023 reservations for its eight-day adventure. A $250,000 per-person fee helps underwrite the voyage, during which participants support scientists and researchers in the documentation of the rapidly decaying shipwreck and its surrounding environment. They contribute underwater or topside, working on tasks that range from conducting sonar scans from the sub to servicing the vessel post-dive.

“There are very, very few sites that get visited more than once, when you get down to this kind of depth,” says OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. But because people will pay to go to the Titanic , his company can make trips there every year. “The scientists are pretty excited, because you just don’t get that opportunity.” Previous expeditions produced the first 8K video footage of the Titanic (see video below), discovered an undocumented deep-sea reef and nearby wreck, and gathered data on environmental DNA and coral growth rates for future analysis.

If a trip down to the Titanic  in a submersible seems too much for you, OceanGate is planning less intensive options for interested ocean explorers in late 2023 and 2024: a one-day dip off Grand Bahama—starting at a cool $45,000—to support University of the Bahamas research in a deepwater basin, or an exploration of Puget Sound in Washington that costs $20,000, a tab that can be split between you and three friends.

Other wealthy travelers are skipping organized trips altogether, opting instead to play beneath the waves in their own submarines and submersibles. Submersibles are typically deployed from a large boat as, unlike submarines, they cannot maneuver at the surface. They are also substantially smaller—small enough, in fact, to fit on the deck of a luxury yacht.

“There’s lots and lots of yachts that have submersibles on board,” says Bill Streever, a former commercial diver and author of In Oceans Deep: Courage, Innovation, and Adventure Beneath the Waves . The demand for such vessels within the research community largely disappeared with the advent of underwater drones, he says, explaining: “It just didn’t make sense to put human beings down to do what a robot can do without any risk.” So submersible companies went looking for a new market and quickly found one in superyacht owners.

Such owners are “looking for the next big thing, and exploring the unknown is the ultimate big thing,” says Roy Heijdra, marketing manager at U-Boat Worx , a Norwegian company that began building submersibles for yachts 16 years ago. U-Boat Worx’s submersibles regularly descend to 1,000 feet, near the deep end of the ocean’s twilight zone; custom builds can be made to descend as much as 10,000 feet; and its five-to-eleven-passenger Cruise Series can explore more than a mile below the surface.

The basic one-seater NEMO model, small enough to tow behind a car, starts at approximately $543,000. Don’t want to commit to full ownership? Try a time-share: the brand’s new shared-ownership program , rolling out next year in the Caribbean and the South of France, will offer training and partial ownership of a sub for about $154,000.

These vessels are already popular with the cruise crowd.

“Before 2023, there will be 33 newly built expedition cruise ships on the market,” says Heijdra, and “most of these cruise ships will have one or two of our cruise subs on board.” Crystal, Seabourn, and Viking are among the cruise-liner companies with vessels already carrying at least one U-Boat Worx submersible. And you don’t have to be a cruise passenger to get a taste of a U-Boat Worx experience: its Substation Curaçao, based on the Caribbean island, offers experiences from the harbor down to 450 feet for as little as $350.

If that’s not luxurious enough, what about a full-blown private submarine? No longer the exclusive domain of the military, the Norwegian company Ocean Submarine can build you your own custom vessel, complete with a library, bedroom, chairs with leather seats, a full kitchen, trained crew, and more. Too large to be launched from even mega-yachts, these often set off from private beaches, says Ocean Submarine CEO Martin van Eijk. They are rated to more than half a mile deep.

Ocean Submarine sold six private subs between 2010 and 2020. Then demand spiked, and the company received upward of 120 inquiries from potential customers during the first year of the pandemic. “We have a lot of clients who [are] interested in something where you can safely go down under, have your own eco-assistance and control systems for all the air,” says Van Eijk.

For some deep-sea travelers, this exploration is merely a prelude to space travel. OceanGate has partnered with several space-tourism organizations to provide preflight training to the starstruck among us.

“You’re in a capsule with some people in a life-threatening or potentially dangerous environment,” says OceanGate’s Rush. “If they want to go to space, a good training exercise is [to] put them in a setup where they’re in there with four other people for 12 hours, two and a half miles away from anything. If they’re going to lose it, that’s where they’ll lose it.”

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Photography

The scene as Jeff Bezos rides Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space and returns to Earth

By Washington Post Staff | Jul 20, 2021

VAN HORN, Tex. — Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

July 20 | Van Horn, Tex.

News Channel 9 Reporter Celina Quintana Ortiz prepares to go live in front of a Blue Origin Mural depicting Mark and Jeff Bezos.

PAUL RATJE/REUTERS

Wally Funk, left, Oliver Daemen, center, Jeff Bezos, right, and Mark Bezos are seen before they leave for the first crewed flight of Blue Origin's reusable New Shepard craft.

Jose Romero/Blue Origin/AFP/Getty Images

From left: Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, Funk and Daemen travel to the launch pad.

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket sits on a spaceport launch pad.

Blue Origin/AP

From left: Wally Funk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, and Oliver Daemen ascend the crew tower.

Jeff and Mark Bezos board.

BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS

Jeff Bezos rings a bell before boarding.

Blue Origin/Reuters

Funk and Daemen enter the cabin from the crew tower.

People watch the preparations for the flight on a television screen.

The crew prepares for the flight.

Blue Origin/AFP/Getty Images

The New Shepard Blue Origin rocket lifts off.

The rocket fires its engines.

Smoke rises behind the rocket.

Spectators watch as Bezos is launched with three crew members aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.

Thom Baur/Reuters

The rocket is seen against the blue sky.

Tony Gutierrez/AP

Recent Dutch high school graduate Oliver Daemen and pioneering female aviator Wally Funk float weightlessly in their capsule with billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark after ascending in sub-orbital flight aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket over Van Horn.

Blue Origin/Via Reuters

The capsule carrying the crew members returns by parachute.

JOE SKIPPER/REUTERS

The Blue Origin New Shepard with Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen touches down on return to earth.

Blue Origin/Handout/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock

Jeff Bezos reacts inside the capsule after landing.

Jeff Bezos, right, exits after the capsule safely returned from space.

Jeff Bezos, Funk and Daemen celebrate after landing.

Jeff Bezos embraces Funk.

AFP/Getty Images

More from the Post

British billionaire Richard Branson flies above 50 miles in his space plane, becoming first ‘space baron’ to qualify for astronaut wings

Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket

The latest from The Washington Post

Photo editing and production by Troy Witcher

Blue Origin to fly another 90-year-old into outer space

Ed dwight, almost america's first black astronaut, will ride new shepard rocket.

Blue Origin has announced the crew flying on its NS-25. Former US Air Force Captain Ed Dwight is among the six aiming to travel aboard the reusable rocket past the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space.…

The sub-orbital spaceflight mission is slated to launch later this year using the New Shepard rocket.

Dwight, now 90, is a notable inclusion since he joined the Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS) in 1961 and could have been America's first Black astronaut if things turned out differently.

Dwight's bio (archived from 2018) notes that he was chosen by President John F Kennedy to enter training as an Experimental Test Pilot with a view to becoming the first African American Astronaut candidate. However, three years after the death of Kennedy, Dwight left the military and entered private life.

According to an interview with The Guardian, Dwight departed "after racial politics forced him out of NASA and back into the regular officer corps."

Had Dwight been selected, he could have been one of the third group of astronauts, which included Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.

It would be another 20 years before Guion Bluford became the first Black astronaut to travel into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Dwight is not the first almost-astronaut to finally get a chance to be launched into space atop Jeff Bezos' New Shepard rocket. Wally Funk, now 85 and a member of the Mercury 13 group of women, took a trip in 2021 as part of the NS-16 spaceflight.

He might, however, be the oldest. The current record holder is William Shatner, who was 90 years, six months, and 22 days old when he visited space. The Star Trek actor seemed especially moved by his experience back in 2021. "Everybody in the world needs to do this. Everybody in the world needs to see this," he said. "It was unbelievable."

"To see the blue color whip by! Now you're staring at a blackness...That's the thing, the covering of blue...this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue we have around us... We say, oh that's the blue sky and then you shoot through it all and then all of a sudden...you whip off the sheet... And you look down, and there's your blue down there. It's just...there is mother Earth, comfort."

Blue Origin has yet to set a date for the NS-25 flight, but with a birth date of September 9, 1933, it seems likely that Dwight might well snatch Shatner's crown. ®

Unlocking the Power of the Blue Ocean Strategy: A Comprehensive Guide for SaaS Businesses [2023]

14 min read

Blue ocean strategy has become an increasingly popular business framework over the past two decades, especially in the SaaS industry. But what exactly is it and why does it matter? This article will provide an in-depth look at the blue ocean strategy, including its origins, core principles, implementation, and measurement of success.

As experts note, while blue oceans promise lucrative opportunities, not every new market lives up to expectations. At the upcoming Product Drive Conference, seasoned entrepreneur Melissa Kwan will share invaluable insights in her talk on the potential pitfalls of over-relying on blue ocean strategy. Register here for FREE!

• Blue ocean strategy is about creating uncontested market space instead of competing directly with rivals.
• It focuses on differentiation and low cost simultaneously to break the value-cost tradeoff.
• Properly implementing the blue ocean strategy can help companies achieve rapid growth and increased profits.
• However, many firms fail at successful implementation due to common pitfalls.
• Key metrics like revenue growth, customer acquisition costs, and net promoter score can indicate the success of a blue ocean strategy.

What is the Blue Ocean Strategy? Definition and Origin

The concept of blue ocean strategy was first introduced in the 2005 book " Blue Ocean Strategy : How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant" by professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

In their book, Kim and Mauborgne argue that successful businesses should not look to beat the competition but rather make the competition irrelevant by creating "blue oceans" of uncontested market space.

This strategy rejects traditional competitive business frameworks focused on outperforming rivals. Instead, it is about capturing new demand and reconstructing market boundaries.

The terms "red ocean" and "blue ocean" are used as metaphors to describe the market universe. Red oceans represent all existing industries with defined boundaries and known rules of competition. Blue oceans denote industries not yet in existence.

Whereas red oceans are crowded with competition fighting over limited demand, blue oceans offer ample opportunity for growth and profits since demand is created rather than fought over.

Blue ocean strategy is especially relevant today as many industries are seeing declining profits and growth due to commoditization and saturation. The need to break out of hyper-competitive red oceans into blue waters where demand is untapped is rising.

As the book Blue Ocean Strategy notes, blue oceans have always been a key engine of growth for companies and entire economies. But their creation depends on the right strategic mindset and set of principles.

What is the Red and Blue Ocean Strategy? A Comparison

Red Ocean's strategy focuses on taking market share from competitors in overcrowded, saturated markets. Companies try to seize greater demand by exploiting existing offerings better than rivals.

Blue Ocean's strategy is about creating a completely new uncontested market space by reconstructing industry boundaries. The competition becomes irrelevant as new demand is unlocked.

The table below summarizes the key differences between red and blue ocean strategies:

Under the red ocean strategy, companies accept industry conditions as a given and strive to outperform competitors. The focus is on dividing up existing demand.

Blue Ocean's strategy sees market boundaries and structures as flexible and shaped by companies' actions. The focus is on developing new demand and reconstructing market landscapes to make rivals obsolete.

The Significance of the Blue Ocean Strategy

In an increasingly crowded marketplace, the blue ocean strategy offers companies the opportunity to break out of hypercompetitive red oceans. By creating new market spaces, they can unlock new demand and achieve high growth and profits.

The business world has seen numerous examples of blue ocean strategies delivering exceptional results over the past century across a range of industries from automotive to entertainment.

With globalization and advancing technology, products and services are becoming commoditized faster than ever. This makes the blue ocean strategy vital for companies to sustain high performance and carve out their blue oceans before competitors catch up.

However, adopting a blue ocean mindset requires challenging long-held assumptions about strategic planning. Companies must shift from a focus on competition to a focus on innovation.

The reward for this shift is the potential to become an industry leader and benefit from strong first-mover advantages before imitation kicks in.

Core Principles and Benefits

Now that we've covered the basic foundations of the blue ocean strategy, let's explore some of its central tenets and why it can be highly advantageous for businesses.

What Are the 4 Strategies of Blue Ocean Strategy?

The core of the blue ocean strategy is value innovation. This is about creating a leap in value for buyers and your company while also driving down costs.

Value innovation is achieved by applying the four key blue ocean strategies:

• Raise – Factors that should be raised well above the industry standard
• Reduce – Factors that should be reduced well below the industry standard
• Eliminate – Factors that should be eliminated that the industry has taken for granted
• Create – Factors that should be created that the industry has never offered

This Four Actions Framework guides companies through reconstructing buyer value elements to develop a breakthrough value proposition. It pushes businesses to question long-standing industry and strategic assumptions.

The four actions open up new value-cost frontiers by helping companies disentangle the trade-off between differentiation and low cost. Value is increased through raising and creating actions while focus and clarity are sharpened through reducing and eliminating actions.

What Are the Benefits of the Blue Ocean Strategy?

Done right, implementing a blue ocean strategy offers several compelling benefits:

• Strong profitable growth – By creating new demand, companies can achieve rapid growth and healthy profits. High perceived value allows for strong pricing power.
• New customer segments – Blue ocean strategies unlock demand from demographics outside existing industry segments. Entirely new markets can be born.
• Competitive differentiation – The competition becomes irrelevant as the company carves out its blue ocean market. Imitation is difficult due to new capabilities and branding.
• First-mover advantage – Being first in an untapped market provides advantages in branding, pricing power, proprietary assets, and cost.
• Improved value proposition – Buyer utility is increased substantially while costs are reduced. This supports premium pricing and customer loyalty.
• Long-term sustainability – Blue Oceans builds brands and high perceived value that can last for decades. Continued innovation maintains the Blue Ocean advantage.
• Enhanced employee motivation – Pursuing a transformative strategic vision can drive greater employee engagement, creativity, and morale.

Adopting a blue ocean strategy requires shifting from competitive benchmarking to a market-creating strategy. But done successfully, the payoff can be tremendous and sustainable.

However, veteran tech entrepreneur Melissa Kwan warns in her Product Drive Conference talk that the allure of undiscovered market potential can sometimes prove deceptive. Her firsthand experience offers important lessons for innovators. Register here for FREE to hear what secrets she spills!

Breaking the Value-Cost Tradeoff

A key principle of the blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost. This breaks the traditional value-cost tradeoff.

Companies can offer buyers greater value while keeping costs low by eliminating and reducing factors the industry competes on but add no real value to buyers. Higher value is created by introducing innovative new factors the industry has never offered before.

As buyer utility is increased and costs reduced, demand escalates rapidly. This results in fast growth, high profits, and barriers to imitation. Competitors struggle to replicate differentiated value propositions without high costs.

According to Blue Ocean Shift, some ways companies can break the trade-off include focusing on eliminating pain points, pursuing simplicity, embracing transparency, and more.

The most successful blue ocean strategies create “value innovation” – substantial new value at affordable pricing through a leap in buyer utility and strategic low costs.

Implementation and Examples

The principles behind the blue ocean strategy are promising. But how can companies implement the approach successfully? This section will cover techniques and case studies.

How to Create a Blue Ocean Strategy?

Creating commercially compelling blue oceans that unlock new demand and growth requires the right tools and processes.

Here are some key steps:

• Assess the current state of play in your industry using analytical frameworks like the strategy canvas.
• Understand where you can create value for current non-customers by unlocking unmet needs.
• Use the four actions framework to reconstruct elements that generate a leap in value and reduce costs.
• Develop creative “what-if” scenarios to design potential blue ocean offerings.
• Refine and select the most promising blue ocean ideas based on commercial viability.
• Build alignment around the new strategic direction and train employees on required capabilities.
• Rapidly test and refine the blue ocean offering while mitigating risk.
• Leverage first-mover advantage and partner ecosystems to scale rapidly after launch.
• Continuously improve and innovate new complementary offerings to stay ahead.

Following a deliberate process for blue ocean creation while allowing creative room for exploration is key.

What is the Blue Ocean Strategy with Examples? A Case Study

Let's examine a real-world example of successful blue ocean strategy implementation.

In the late 1990s, the circus industry was stagnant and circuses were losing money. The industry focused on traditional shows with animal acts, three rings, and concession stands.

Cirque du Soleil took a blue ocean approach by creating a new type of circus. It eliminated animals, three-ring shows, and reduced concession stands while adding artistic music, elegant acrobatics, and a crafted story narrative.

Rather than compete directly with existing circuses catering to kids, Cirque targeted adult and corporate entertainment segments willing to pay much more. It maximized differentiated value while eliminating unnecessary elements that added cost but not value.

The results were remarkable. Between 1990 and 2000, Cirque du Soleil multiplied its revenues by over 31 times from $40 million to $1.26 billion. By 2011, it achieved revenues of $850 million with only 20 shows. The approach created a highly profitable blue ocean.

Cirque du Soleil is one of the most legendary examples of a market-creating strategy done right. Its blue ocean is executed on the core principles of value innovation and strategic alignment.

Why Do Many Firms Fail to Successfully Implement a Blue Ocean Strategy?

Despite the compelling benefits promised by the blue ocean strategy, many companies fail in implementation. Common reasons include:

• Lack of understanding – Leadership does not fully comprehend the approach or commits needed resources.
• Risk avoidance – Firms are unwilling to pivot from existing business models that still produce revenue.
• Poor planning – No structured approach is taken to generate and test blue ocean ideas.
• Bias toward competition – Companies cannot shake off competitive mindsets and benchmarks.
• Imitation obsession – Attempts are made to imitate successful blue ocean models rather than innovate.
• Loss of nerve – The resolve to see the new strategic direction through wavers after initial resistance.

Executing a commercially successful blue ocean strategy requires knowledge, structured creativity, conviction, and patience. Understanding common implementation pitfalls is the first step to avoiding them.

Challenges and Measuring Success

Even with proper implementation, blue ocean strategies involve overcoming hurdles and uncertainties. We’ll cover ways to address challenges as well as measure success.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Here are some common mistakes companies make with blue ocean strategy and techniques to avoid them:

• Muddling execution – Maintain focus on the swift, flawless execution of the complete blue ocean package.
• Focus drift – Continuously improve and expand upon the initial blue ocean to stay ahead as imitators enter.
• Pricing errors – Price too high and adoption is stifled. Price too low leaves profit opportunities.
• Over-customizing – Proliferating offerings try to please everyone, diluting the blue ocean value.
• Complacency – Resting on initial success rather than continuing innovation invites new competition.
• Isolation – Collaborate with partners and suppliers to maximize reach and adoption.

Creating new market space involves trial and error. However, being cognizant of common missteps can help prevent them.

Overcoming Obstacles

Every transformative strategy meets resistance, both externally and internally. Leaders must address obstacles head-on to drive adoption.

Externally, negative press and criticisms from industry incumbents may arise. Firms should ensure customers understand the core value proposition and not get distracted by skeptics protecting the status quo.

Internally, present a compelling vision and logic for employees. Provide sufficient training and incentives. New capabilities and skill sets will need development.

There may also be inertia from established processes optimized for current business models rather than the new blue ocean strategy. Streamlining or replacing legacy systems can address this.

Key Performance Indicators

Given the risks involved, companies need to carefully monitor a new blue ocean strategy rollout. Relevant key performance indicators include:

• Revenue growth – How fast is total revenue increasing as new demand is unlocked?
• Profit margins – Are margins healthy from value-cost alignment and lack of competition?
• Customer acquisition costs – How much does it cost to acquire new customers attracted to the offering?
• Customer retention – Are new Blue Ocean customers repeat purchasing rather than one-time trying?
• Net Promoter Score – How willing are customers to recommend the product or service to others?
• Brand awareness – Is brand recognition increasing in new target segments?

Leaders should define targets and monitor KPIs to ensure successful blue ocean execution. Corrective actions can address any gaps.

Continuous Improvement

Blue Ocean's strategy requires rapid iteration after the initial launch. Leaders must continuously improve the offering, service, and business model to retain the blue ocean advantage.

Ongoing innovation keeps imitation at bay. New complementary products or partnerships further widen moats. Employees should be empowered to identify areas for improvement.

Analytics and customer insights are invaluable for guiding enhancement efforts. The initial blue ocean will eventually face competition without sustained innovation.

Companies that rest on their laurels invite new disruptive entrants. Blue ocean creators must relentlessly deepen their advantage over time.

The best tools for executing customer insight strategies

Of course, none of this is possible without choosing the right tool for the job. Let’s explore some of the options available on the market.

Userpilot – for collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer insights

Userpilot is a powerful digital adoption tool.

It allows you to easily analyze user behavior , collect customer feedback , and drive product engagement with engaging in-app experiences . This makes it a comprehensive product management solution that will satisfy the needs of most product folks.

Features and Events dashboard in Userpilot .

Userpilot also offers a powerful array of UI patterns: including modals, tooltips , checklists, slideouts, and more. What makes it particularly effective? You can build any of these without writing a single line of code.

And because Userpilot offers in-depth brand customization options, the UI patterns you create will be on-brand every time.

Microsurvey modal created in Userpilot.

Frankly, considering the value for money, Userpilot is one of the most attractive options on the market.

Amplitude – for granular customer insights analysis

Amplitude is another powerful product analytics tool offering an even more extensive range of analytics than Userpilot.

Some of Amplitude’s robust analytics features include:

• Milestone analysis
• Retention analysis
• Custom dashboards displaying the data you need
• Predictions and behavioral analytics
• User segmentation patterns
• Pathfinder (helps you find all the possible user paths leading up to an event)

Amplitude offers access to a range of these capabilities in its free plan, so you can easily try it out and see if it works for you. You can even book a live demo to get to know the product offering before you commit.

However, Amplitude doesn’t let you act on customer insights data. For the latter, you would need a separate product engagement tool.

Hotjar – for collecting qualitative customer data

Hotjar is another excellent tool for granular analysis of user in-app behavior.

The product offers two main features; heat maps and session recordings.

Heat maps are visual representations of user engagement in the product. The warmer the color of the spot on the screen, the more popular the feature is. This shows you which parts of the UI attract the most attention and which parts to optimize.

Session recordings are screen recordings of what users do. You can either use them for user testing , where they have a specific task to perform, or simply watch user interactions with the product, for example, to identify friction.

The Future and Expert Opinions

Blue Ocean's strategy has seen tremendous success over the past 20 years. How will it evolve moving forward? Let’s examine emerging trends and expert advice.

Emerging Trends in Blue Ocean Strategy

Some evolving directions related to the blue ocean strategy include:

• Adopting blue ocean mindsets in traditionally “red ocean” sectors like manufacturing and infrastructure.
• Using advanced analytics and AI to identify attractive white spaces backed by data.
• Leveraging strategic partnerships rather than going it alone.
• Taking environmental and social factors into account in the strategy innovation process.
• Tapping into growing consumer segments like older demographics and the middle class in emerging economies.
• Hybrid approaches that balance incremental improvement with big-bang disruption.

Blue ocean thinking must keep evolving as markets, technologies, and business environments change. What remains constant are the principles of breaking trade-offs and not benchmarking competitors.

Expert Opinions and Advice

Here are some tips on succeeding with blue ocean strategy from leading experts:

"Keep developing new blue oceans. Competition eventually erodes their advantages. Market-creating strategy is not a one-time effort but a continuous process." – Renée Mauborgne, Co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy

"Take small steps forward while also planting seeds for big-bang blue oceans. Not every idea will work. Build a portfolio of strategic experiments.” – W. Chan Kim, Co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy

"Rather than seeking to disrupt competitors, disrupt yourself before others do. Be willing to make your existing business model obsolete." – Mark Johnson, Seizing the White Space

"Don’t just ask people what they want. Guide them to imagine breakthrough experiences that address unarticulated needs." – Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma

Expert guidance reminds firms that a blue ocean mindset must be sustained despite early successes or failures.

To learn more about balancing blue ocean strategy with finding true product-market fit, be sure to catch Melissa Kwan's eye-opening Product Drive Summit talk "Finding PMF and Why the Blue Ocean isn't a Good Thing." Register today here for free !

As competition continues to intensify across industries, the need for companies to break out of congested red oceans is clear. Adopting blue ocean strategy principles focused on value innovation offers a pathway to finding and capturing new uncontested markets.

However, balancing differentiation and low cost to unlock new demand also requires challenging dominant paradigms. A deliberate approach must be taken to identify promising opportunities, develop commercially compelling new offerings, and rapidly iterate.

While the risks of new market creation are real, the rewards for successful blue ocean strategy implementation can also be enormous. Uncontested market space offers fast growth and strong profitability based on new demand rather than competing for existing customers.

The likes of Cirque du Soleil and Netflix found their blue oceans. With the right mindset and principles, your company can follow suit. Reconstruct existing market landscapes. Make rivals irrelevant. Develop high-value offerings at accessible price points to tap into underserved customer segments. You may just find a lucrative blue ocean.

To explore how Userpilot can empower your team in implementing the blue ocean strategy, book a demo today . Our team would be happy to discuss how our platform can help you gain clarity into your users and iterate new offerings to maximize adoption and value.

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Blue Ocean Strategy

This article is a comprehensive exploration of the Blue Ocean Strategy that provides organizations with the frameworks and analytical tools to create and capture uncontested markets and unlock vast growth opportunities.

The term Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) was first coined by Professors Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, who set out to understand what it takes in a competitive, global environment for business to not just to cope and survive but thrive.

Over three decades of their combined research culminated in the book called “ Blue Ocean Strategy ”, first published in 2005.

By definition, “Blue Ocean Strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.” [1]

What is Blue Ocean Strategy

What are oceans.

Businesses operate in two kinds of market space called oceans – Red and Blue.

Red oceans denote the known market space in which all industries currently operate. This is where industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and competitive rules are set. Companies try to outperform rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand.

This market space is crowded with competition and prospects for profits and growth are limited. Products are commoditized, and cut-throat competition turns the ocean “bloody” – hence the word Red.

Blue Oceans , in contrast, denote the unknown market space – all the industries that are not currently in existence. This is an untapped area where demand is yet to be created and opportunities for highly profitable growth exist.

In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant as the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Any business that enters this space can address the market without competition.

How effective is the blue ocean strategy?

Professors Kim and Mauborgne, in their study spanning over three decades, quantified the impact of creating blue oceans on a company’s growth in both revenues and profits.

Their analysis covering 108 companies showed that 14% of the launches that aimed at creating blue oceans contributed to 38% of the revenue and 61% of the total profits.

Netflix as an example of BOS

Blue ocean examples show around us all the time. Consider Netflix’s initial years. In an age where streaming movies was unheard of, Netflix entered a blue ocean by offering just that. It was able to create a new market space for itself by going beyond the conventional DVD rental market (red ocean).

By simultaneously offering low prices and the convenience of streaming with a vast content library, Netflix quickly become the dominant player in an uncontested market space. By the time competition followed, it was already a dominant player with an established name.

In contrast, Blockbuster – Netflix’s primary competitor swam too long in the red ocean (DVD rental market) and eventually headed towards bankruptcy.

A history of blue oceans

Though BOS is a new term, it has been a feature of business for a very long time. A hundred years ago, some of the most basic industries of today didn’t exist. Many of these started as blue ocean strategic move at some point before the boundaries disappeared and competition took over.

Ford’s Model T, introduced in 1908, is a classic example of a market-creating blue ocean strategic move that challenged the conventions of the automotive industry.

Same can be said about the future. As industries continuously evolve, operations improve, markets expand, and players come and go. In future, many of the industries unknown today will come into existence. These are the blue oceans waiting to be explored.

Why is BOS more important than ever?

Accelerated technological advances substantially improve industrial productivity. While suppliers can produce an unprecedented array of products and services, limited demand raises the bar for competition.

As globalization shrinks trade barriers between nations and regions, information on products and prices become instantly available. This breaks down niche markets that were once havens for monopoly. As brands tend to become more and more similar, consumers increasingly select based on price.

The business environment in which most strategy and management approaches of the twentieth century evolved is increasingly disappearing. As red oceans become increasingly bloody, businesses will need to focus on blue ocean strategies than competing within the saturated existing markets.

Value innovation – cornerstone of BOS

Traditionally, companies choose to either differentiate their products or services from the competition (by offering higher quality, more features, or better customer service) or to compete on price. This is known as the value-cost trade-off.

Value innovation challenges this convention by creating a new value curve that offers both higher value and lower costs than the competition.

By the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost, Value Innovation creates a leap in value for both buyers and the company.

Red and Blue Ocean – the key differences

Competition-based red ocean strategy assumes that an industry’s structural conditions are given and that firms are forced to compete within them.

Blue Ocean’s Value Innovation-based approach assumes that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.

Analytical Tools And Frameworks

The strategy canvas.

Strategy Canvas is a one-page visual analytic that depicts the way an organization configures its offering to buyers in relation to those of its competitors.

It communicates four key elements for a given business:

• The factors of competition
• The offering level buyers receive across these factors,
• Business’s strategic profiles and cost structures
• Competitors’ strategic profiles and cost structures

The Strategy Canvas of Apple’s iPhone from the early 2000s (in the figure below) shows the state of play in the handset industry (at the time). The horizontal axis shows key competitive factors the handset phone industry competed on.

In the Strategy canvas, it can be seen how Apple’s value curve differed from its competitors.

Red ocean players follow a similar profile competing on the established norms while blue ocean players stand out by creating new value areas for their customers.

The early iPhone combined PC-like performance with internet connectivity in a stylish design. It was easy to use and did not confuse buyers with too many buttons or models. It offered value in the areas the buyer cared about most and hence commanded a higher price.

Four Actions Framework

Having developed the strategy canvas, a business can use the four actions framework to challenge its strategic logic and business model.

This framework is used to reconstruct buyer value elements in crafting a new value curve or strategic profile. It poses four key questions, shown below and challenges an industry’s strategic logic.

Eliminate : This question forces to consider eliminating factors that companies in the industry have long competed on. Often, these are factors taken for granted even though they no longer offer value. Sometimes there is a fundamental change in buyer’s value perception, but companies focused on benchmarking each other fail to notice the change.

Reduce : This question forces to determine whether products or services have been overdesigned in the race to match and beat the competition. Are companies overserving customers in areas they do not care about and increasing costs for little to no gain?

Raise: The third question pushes to uncover and eliminate the compromises customers are forced to make because of the way the industry is set up.

Create: This question helps to discover entirely new sources of value for buyers and create new demand and shift the strategic pricing of the industry. (Until the company Novo Nordisk invented NovoPen, administering insulin required a visit to the doctor)

By pursuing the first two questions (eliminate and reduce), companies gain insight into how to drop cost structure vis-à-vis competitors while the last two questions (raise and create) provide insight into how to lift buyer value and create new demand.

Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid

Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create (ERRC) grid is a supplementary analytic to the Four Actions Framework that pushes companies not only to ask four questions in the framework but also to act on each to create a new value curve. It offers four immediate benefits:

• It pushes to simultaneously pursue differentiation and low costs to break the value-cost trade-off.
• It immediately flags companies that are focused only on raising and creating and thereby lifting their cost structure and often overengineering products and services.
• It is easily understood by managers at any level, creating a high level of engagement in its application.
• It drives companies to robustly scrutinize every factor the industry competes on, thus discovering the range of implicit assumptions made unconsciously in competing.

An example of the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid for Netflix’s early days when DVD rental was the norm:

Characteristics of a Good Strategy

A strategy formulated using the tools discussed thus far should exhibit three characteristics – Focus, Divergence, and a Compelling Tagline. These three criteria serve as an initial litmus test of the commercial viability of blue ocean ideas.

Focus : Every great strategy must have focus and a company’s value curve should clearly show it.

For example, Southwest Airlines emphasize only three factors: friendly service, speed, and frequent point-to-point departures. By maintaining its focus, it doesn’t make unwanted investments in meals, lounges, and seating choices and keeps its prices competitive.

Divergence : On a strategic canvas, the value curves of blue ocean strategies must stand apart.

For example, Southwest pioneered point-to-point travel between midsize cities in an industry that mainly operated through hub-and-spoke model.

Compelling Tagline : A good strategy must have a clear-cut and compelling tagline that not only delivers a clear message but also advertises an offering truthfully.

For Southwest Airline, it could be – “The speed of a plane at the price of a car – whenever you need it.”. A regular airline with a conventional offering cannot come up with such a tagline unless there is focus and divergence.

Formulating Blue Ocean Strategy

The six-path framework to reconstruct market boundaries.

Blue Ocean Strategy is about reconstructing market boundaries to break from the competition and create blue oceans. The challenge is to successfully identify, out of the haystack of possibilities that exist, commercially compelling blue ocean opportunities.

There are six basic approaches to remaking market boundaries – called the six paths framework. They are:

Path 1: Look at alternative industries:

Company competes not only with the other firms in its own industry but also with companies in those other industries that produce alternative products or services. Alternatives are broader than substitutes and include products and services that have different forms but offer the same functionality or core utility.

For example, to address their financial planning, customers could buy a financial software package, hire a professional, use a mobile app or simply use pencil and paper. Each of these have very different forms but serve the same function.

Path 2: Look across strategic groups within industries:

Strategic groups refer to a group of companies within an industry that pursue a similar strategy. Fundamental differences among industry players are captured by only a small number of strategic groups.

For example, in the US fitness industry of 1995, there were only two kinds of health clubs.

First were high-end clubs that offered both men and women a full range of exercise and sporting options at high prices. Second were low-cost home exercise programs that offered exercise videos, books, and magazines.

This changed when Curves [5] , a women-focused fitness company introduced reasonably priced clubs and built a blue ocean market for itself.

Path 3: Look Across the Chain of Buyers

Challenging an industry’s conventional wisdom about which buyer group to target can lead to the discovery of a new blue ocean.

For example, Novo Nordisk [6] , the Danish insulin producer created a blue ocean in the insulin industry by shifting their buyers from doctors to the patients themselves. With the creation of its NovoPen, the first user-friendly insulin delivery solution, patient could easily self-administer insulin safely.

Similarly, Bloomberg [7] found a blue ocean by shifting its focus from the IT managers to whom it sold trading software to actual traders and analysts.

Path 4: Look Across Complementary Product and Service Offerings

Products and services are seldom used in a vacuum. In most cases, other products and services affect their perceived value. But in most industries, rivals tend to stay within the bounds of their industry’s product and service offerings.

For example, in the airline industry, ground transportation time after flight can affect customer’s choice of whether to fly or to drive.

By thinking in terms of solving the major pain points in customers’ total solution, there could be an opportunity to create a blue ocean.

Dyson, for example, leapfrogged the competition by eliminating the need for vacuum cleaner bags and all the cost and hassle of buying new bags [8] .

Path 5: Look Across Functional or Emotional Appeal to Buyers

Some industries compete principally on price and function largely on calculations of utility – their appeal is rational. Other industries compete largely on feelings; their appeal is emotional.

Over time, functionally oriented industries become more functionally oriented and emotionally oriented industries become more emotionally oriented. When companies challenge this functional-emotional orientation of their industry, they often find blue oceans.

Japan’s QB House (Quick Beauty) [9] for example, did just that. When it started in 1996, the time it took for a haircut was over an hour due to a long process of ritualistic activities. This also led to higher prices, typically between 3,000 to 5,000 yen ($27 to $45).

QB recognized that many, especially working professionals, did not wish to waste an hour on haircut. By stripping away the emotional (ritualistic) elements, and staying focused on speed, it saw immense success for decades. Prices too dropped to 1,000 yen ($9).

Likewise, Starbucks [10] did the reverse and turned the commoditized coffee industry (rational) into an emotional experience. Customers now choose Starbucks to spend quality time and socialize over a good cup of coffee.

Path 6: Look Across Time

By looking across time from the value a market delivers today to the value it might deliver tomorrow, businesses can actively shape their future and enter a new blue ocean. Usually, these are driven by a discontinuity in technology, rise of a new lifestyle, or a change in regulatory or social environment.

For example, in the late 1990s, Apple observed the flood of illegal music on file sharing platforms like Napster. [11] With the technology allowing anyone to digitally download music free instead of paying $19 for an average CD at the time, the trend toward digital music was clear.

In response, Apple launched iTunes [12] which offered legal, easy-to-use, and flexible à la carte song downloads. With a collection of over two hundred thousand songs, consumers could download an individual song for as low as 99 cents or an entire album for $9.99. For Apple, this was a blue ocean that shaped consumer habits.

Likewise, using this path, CNN created the first real-time twenty-four-hour global news network based on the rising tide of globalization.

Summary of the Six Paths

The process of discovering and creating blue is a structured process of reordering market realities in a fundamentally new way. By reconstructing existing market elements across industry and market boundaries, businesses can free themselves from head-to-head competition in the red ocean.

Focus on the big picture, not the numbers

While most managers have a strong impression of how they and their competitors fare within their scope of their responsibility, they often fail to see the overall industry dynamics. BOS provides a four-step strategy visualization tool that serves to unlock people’s creativity.

Step 1: Visual Awakening

This involves comparing a business with its competitors by drawing “as is” strategy canvas and finding where the strategy needs to change. Asking executives to draw the value curve of their company’s strategy brings home the need for change. It serves as a forceful wake-up call for companies to challenge their existing strategies.

Step 2: Visual Exploration

This step is about going into the field to explore the six paths to create blue oceans. By observing the distinctive advantages of alternative products and services, businesses can realize what factors to eliminate, create, or change.

Sending a team into the field puts managers face-to-face with what they must make sense of and helps realize how customers use or don’t use their products or services. A company must avoid outsourcing this step or substituting it with intelligence reports.

Step 3: Visual Strategy Fair

This step involves drawing the “to be” strategy canvas based on insights from field observations and getting feedback on alternative strategy canvases from customers, competitors’ customers, and noncustomers. This feedback will then be used to build the best “to be” future strategy.

Step 4: Visual Communication

This last step involves distributing the before-and-after strategic profiles on one page for easy comparison. The new strategic profile should become the reference point for all investment decisions. It is important to support only those projects and operational moves that allow a business to close the gaps to actualize the new strategy.

The Pioneer-Migrator-Settler (PMS) Map

Assessing a company’s portfolio offerings according to the innovative value they offer to buyers lets a company see how strategically vulnerable or healthy its portfolio is. The pioneer-migrator-setter map helps achieve this by dividing a company’s offerings into three segments: Pioneers, Migrators, and Settlers.

Pioneers are businesses that offer unprecedented value. These are the blue ocean offerings that are the most powerful sources of profitable growth. These businesses have a mass following of customers and their value curve diverges from the competition on the strategy canvas.

Settlers are the other extreme businesses whose value curves conform to the basic shape of the industry’s. As me-too businesses, Settlers will not generally contribute much to a company’s future growth. They are stuck within the red ocean.

Migrators lie somewhere in between. These businesses extend the industry’s curve by giving customers more for less, but they don’t alter its basic shape. These businesses offer improved value, but not innovative value. These are businesses whose strategies fall on the margin between red oceans and blue oceans.

If a company’s current portfolio and planned offerings consist mainly of settlers, the company has a low growth trajectory, is largely confined to red oceans. If it consists of a lot of migrators, reasonable growth can be expected.

Companies must strive to push their businesses toward pioneers.

Reach Beyond Existing Demand

Challenging the conventional strategies.

Maximizing the size of a newly created blue ocean requires reaching beyond the existing demand. This requires challenging the two conventional strategies:

(1) Focus on existing customers: Instead of concentrating on existing customers, companies need to look to noncustomers.

(2) Drive for finer segmentation to accommodate buyer differences: Instead of creating finer segmentations, companies must build on powerful commonalities around what customers value. That allows them to reach beyond existing demand to unlock a new mass of customers that did not exist before.

For example, when the US golf industry fought to win a greater share of existing customers, Callaway [13] created a blue ocean by asking why sports enthusiasts and people in the country club set had not taken up golf as a sport. It found that hitting the golf ball was perceived as too difficult with the small size golf club.

By offering a golf club with a large head, it converted noncustomers of the industry into customers. Even the existing customers, who took the norm for granted were pleased with the new offering.

The three tiers of Noncustomers

Noncustomers fall under three categories.

Tier 1 : “Soon-to-be” noncustomers who are on the edge of the market, waiting to jump ship. These are the closest to the current market. They sit on the edge of the market and are buyers who minimally purchase an industry’s offering out of necessity but are mentally noncustomers of the industry. They are waiting to jump ship and leave the industry as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

However, if offered a leap in value, not only would they stay, but also their frequency of purchases would multiply, unlocking enormous latent demand.

For example, Pret [14] , a British fast-food chain (with focus on fresh food) expanded its blue ocean by tapping into the huge latent demand of tier-1 noncustomers who were professionals frequenting restaurants for lunch. The appeal of fresh food served in under 90 seconds and at a reasonable price captured the restaurant-goers’ attention who otherwise did not consider fast food.

Tier 2 : “Refusing” noncustomers who consciously choose against the market. These are people who either do not use or cannot afford to use the current market offerings because they find the offerings unacceptable or beyond their means. But, harboring within these is an ocean of untapped demand waiting to be released.

For example, JCDecaux [15] , a vendor of French outdoor advertising space pulled the mass of refusing noncustomers into its market by creating a new concept in outdoor advertising called “street furniture”. Up until then, the outdoor advertising industry was about billboards (usually installed on city outskirts) and transport advertisement that exposed people for a very short time to get influenced by advertisements.

JCDecaux realized this was the key reason the industry remained unpopular and small. It found that municipalities could offer stationary downtown locations, such as bus stops, where people tended to wait a few minutes and hence had time to read and be influenced. It introduced street furniture with integrated advertising panels that were offered free to municipalities including maintenance and upkeep. Mass of refusing noncustomers flocked towards JCDecaux and the idea took-off as a profitable medium of advertisement.

Tier 3 : “Unexplored” noncustomers who are in markets distant from the one in question. These are the farthest from the market and have never thought of the current market’s offerings as an option.

Typically, these unexplored noncustomers have not been targeted or thought of as potential customers by any player in the industry. This can be because their needs and the business opportunities associated with them have somehow always been assumed to belong to other markets.

For example, for a very long time, tooth whitening was a service provided exclusively by dentists and not by oral care consumer-product companies.

While there is no hard-and-fast rule as to which tier of noncustomers a company should focus on and when, companies must focus on one that represents the biggest catchment and is close the capability to act on.

Getting the strategic sequence right

Buyer utility, price, cost, and adoption.

Companies need to build their blue ocean strategy in the sequence of buyer utility, price, cost, and adoption.

Buyer Utility is the starting point. Does the offering unlock exceptional utility? Is there a compelling reason for the target mass of people to buy it? Without this, there is no blue ocean potential to begin with. In this case, either park the idea, or rethink it until an affirmative answer is reached.

Arriving at the right strategic Price is the second step. A company does not want to rely solely on price to create demand. The key question here is this: Is the offering priced to attract the mass of target buyers so that they have a compelling reason and ability to pay? If it is not, they cannot buy it.

Together, these first two steps address the revenue side of a company’s business model.

Cost is the third step. Can the company produce its offering at the target cost and still earn a healthy profit margin?

Costs should not drive prices, nor should the utility be scaled down because high costs block the company’s ability to profit at the strategic price. If the target cost cannot be met, the company must either forgo the idea or innovate its business model to hit the target cost.

The last step is to address Adoption hurdles. What are the adoption hurdles in rolling out the idea? Are they addressed up front? Because blue ocean strategies represent a significant departure from red oceans, it is key to address adoption hurdles up front.

Buyer utility map

The buyer utility map helps to think from a demand-side perspective. It outlines all the levers companies can pull to deliver exceptional utility to buyers as well as the various experiences buyers can have with a product or service. This mindset helps managers identify the full range of utility spaces that a product or service can potentially fill.

It has two dimensions: The Buyer Experience Cycle (BEC) and the Utility levers.

The six stages of the buyer experience cycle

A buyer’s experience can usually be broken into a cycle of six stages, running sequentially from purchase to disposal. At each stage, managers can ask a set of questions to gauge the quality of buyers’ experience.

For example:

The six utility levers

Cutting across the stages of the buyer’s experience are six utility levers: Productivity, Simplicity, Convenience, Risk Reduction, Fun & Image, and Environment friendliness.

Together, these help companies explore ways to unlock exceptional utility for customers.

Simplicity, fun and image, and environmental friendliness are self-explanatory. A product must reduce a customer’s financial, physical, or credibility risks. It must also offer convenience by being easy to obtain, use, or dispose of.

The most used lever is that of customer productivity, in which an offering helps a customer do things faster or better. Companies must check whether their offering has removed the greatest blocks to utility across the entire buyer experience cycle for customers and noncustomers. The greatest blocks to utility often represent the greatest and most pressing opportunities to unlock exceptional value.

From exceptional utility to strategic pricing

To secure a strong revenue stream for its offering, a company must set the right strategic price. This step ensures that buyers not only will want to buy its offering but also will have a compelling ability to pay for it.

Companies can also take a reverse course, first testing the waters of a new product or service by targeting novelty-seeking, price-insensitive customers and drop prices later on to attract mainstream buyers. (Example: Tesla electric vehicles)

There are two reasons for this change.

First, companies discover that volume generates higher returns than it used to. For knowledge-intensive products (like software), companies bear most of their costs in product development than in manufacturing which makes volume the key.

A second reason is that to a buyer, the value of a product or service may be closely tied to the total number of people using it. Online auction / networking sites fall under this category.

If a company’s offering belongs to the category of knowledge-intensive products, the pricing must also consider the potential for free riding.

In some cases, free riding can be protected by the nature of the goods/services (difficult to replicate, investment heavy etc.) or by the legal systems like patent protection, but most business innovations cannot eliminate free riding. Strategic price must not only attract buyers in large numbers but also help to retain them. Earning a reputation quickly is also a key. Companies must therefore start with an offer that buyers can’t refuse and keep it that way to discourage any free-riding imitations.

Setting the strategic price

Price corridor of the target mass is a tool managers used to determine the right price to unlock the mass of target buyers. When setting a strategic price for a product or service, it is important to evaluate the trade-offs that buyers consider when making their purchasing decision, as well as the level of legal and resource protection that will block other companies from imitating its offering.

Source: SlideTeam.net [16]

Step 1: Identify the price corridor of the target mass.

In setting a price, companies look first at the products and services that most closely resemble their idea in terms of form. While looking at other products and services within own industries is a necessary exercise, by itself, it is not sufficient. Customers will compare the new product or service with a host of very different-looking products and services offered outside the group of traditional competitors.

A good way to look outside industry boundaries is to list products and services that fall into two categories:

Category 1 : Those that take different forms but perform the same function. For example, the horse-drawn carriage had the same core utility as the car: transportation for individuals and families. But it had a very different form: a live animal versus a machine.

Category 2 : Those that take different forms and functions but share the same overarching objective. For example, bars and restaurants have few physical features in common with a theater but might compete for customers’ time.

Step 2: Specify a level within the price corridor.

How high a price a company can set within the corridor without inviting competition depends on two principal factors.

The degree to which the product or service is protected legally through patents or copyrights and the degree to which the company owns some exclusive asset or core capability, such as an expensive production plant or unique design competence that can block imitation.

Companies with their offerings falling under this category can use upper-boundary strategic pricing to attract the mass of target buyers. As for companies that have no such protection, lower-boundary strategic pricing becomes necessary.

From strategic pricing to target costing

To maximize the profit potential of a blue ocean idea, a company must start with the strategic price and then deduct its desired profit margin from the price to arrive at the target cost.

This price-minus costing, and not cost-plus pricing, is critical to arrive at a cost structure that is both profitable and hard for potential followers to match. This also forces a company to strip out unnecessary costs.

To achieve the cost target, companies have three principal levers:

First – streamline operations and introduce cost innovations from manufacturing to distribution.

The second – partnering with other companies to secure needed capabilities by leveraging other companies’ expertise and economies of scale.

The third – achieve the desired profit margin without compromising on the strategic price. NetJets, for example, changed the pricing model of jets from complete ownership to time-share based to profitably deliver on its strategic price. Freemium is another pricing strategy that companies use (typically for a digital offering such as software, media, games, or web services) where a service is provided free of charge to pull in the target mass, but a premium is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods.

The profit model of the blue ocean strategy

From Utility, Price, and Cost to Adoption

Before companies go public with an idea and set out to implement it, making a concerted effort to communicate to employees is crucial. It is important that employees are aware of the threats posed by the execution of the idea.

When Netflix was transitioning from a DVD-by-mail business to providing video streaming, great emphasis was put on engaging employees by explaining the necessity of the shift, what it means to them, and preparing them for the change.

Business Partners

Potentially even more damaging than employee disaffection is the resistance of partners who fear that their revenue streams or market positions are threatened by a new business idea. Openly discussing the issues with partners and convincing them to see the value in the shift is equally crucial to ensure business co-operation.

The General Public

Opposition to a new business idea can also spread to the public, especially if the idea threatens established social or political norms. The effects can be dire. For example, when Monsanto [17] , (An agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation, now part of Bayer) introduced genetically modified crop seeds, debate on genetically modified foods intensified around the globe, with Monsanto often at the heart of the attacks.

Executing Blue Ocean Strategy

Compared to red ocean, blue ocean strategy represents a significant departure from the status quo. It hinges on a shift from convergence to divergence in value curves at lower costs thus raising the bar of execution challenge.

Overcoming organization hurdles

The four organizational hurdles to strategy execution.

Cognitive hurdle : The challenge of waking employees up to the need for a strategic shift. While red oceans may not be the paths to future profitable growth, they feel comfortable and have served organizations well thus far. Hence rocking the boat becomes difficult.

Resource hurdle : The greater the shift in strategy, the greater is the need for resources to execute it. But resources are often cut and not raised.

Motivation hurdle : How to motivate key players to move fast and tenaciously to carry out a break from the status quo? Sometimes it takes years, and companies don’t have that time.

Political hurdles : Getting shot down before you stand up.

Use of tipping point leadership

Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance. The key is conserving resources and cutting time by focusing on identifying and then leveraging the factors of disproportionate influence in an organization.

Breaking the Hurdles:

Build execution into strategy.

A company needs to invoke the most fundamental base of action – the attitudes and behavior of its people. This creates a culture of trust and commitment that motivates people to execute the agreed strategy not just in letter, but in spirit. In blue ocean, this challenge is heightened.

Fair Process

Fair process is a key variable that distinguishes successful blue ocean strategic moves from those that failed. The presence or absence of a fair process can make or break a company’s best execution efforts.

Fair process builds execution into strategy by creating people’s buy-in up front. By exercising fair process in the strategy formulation phase, people develop trust that a level playing field exists, inspiring voluntary cooperation during the execution phase.

Three mutually reinforcing elements define the fair process:

Engagement : Involve individuals in the strategic decisions that affect them by asking for their input and allow them to refute the merits of one another’s ideas and assumptions. This communicates management’s respect for individuals and their ideas.

Explanation: Everyone involved and affected should understand why final strategic decisions are made as they are. This allows employees to trust managers’ intentions even if their own ideas have been rejected. It also serves as a powerful feedback loop that enhances learning.

Clarity of expectation: After a strategy is set, managers must clearly state the new rules of the game. Employees should know up front what standards they will be judged by and the penalties for failure. It is important to clearly communicate the goals of the new strategy, its targets, and milestones and who is responsible for what.

The consequences of the presence and absence of fair process:

Aligning Value, Profit, and People Propositions

At the highest level, there are three propositions essential to the success of strategy: the value proposition , the profit proposition , and the people proposition .

Figure below explains each of these propositions and how they play out differently in a blue ocean strategy vs a red ocean strategy.

Source: http://kimboal.ba.ttu.edu [19]

In red ocean strategy, the three strategy propositions need to be aligned with the distinctive choice of pursuing either differentiation or low cost within given industry conditions. Here, differentiation and low cost represent alternative strategic positions in an industry.

In a blue ocean strategy, an organization achieves high performance when all three strategy propositions pursue both differentiation and low cost. It is this alignment in support of differentiation andlow cost is critical to success and sustainability.

For example, consider Napster and Apple’s iTunes in the digital music industry. Both started out to create and capture uncontested market space with digital music. Napster had a clear first-mover advantage, pulled in over 80 million registered users, and was generally loved for its value proposition, but its strategy ultimately failed. It had no sustainability.

In contrast, iTunes achieved sustainable success and both dominated and grew the blue ocean of digital music.

What was lacking in Napster was its failure to align external people – its partners to support the compelling value it unlocked. When the record labels approached Napster to work out a revenue-sharing model, Napster balked while Apple partnered with major music companies.

Renew Blue Oceans

Creating a blue ocean is a dynamic process. Once a company creates a blue ocean and its powerful performance consequences are known, imitators appear on the horizon. If the imitators succeed and expand the blue ocean, competition intensifies and eventually turns the ocean red.

Hence renewal is key to ensure that the creation of blue oceans is not a one-off occurrence but is institutionalized as a repeatable process in an organization.

A blue ocean strategy brings with it considerable barriers to imitation that effectively prolong sustainability. These are:

Eventually, almost every blue ocean strategy will be imitated. If the company is obsessed with hanging on to existing market share, it tends to fall into the trap of focusing on the competition, and not the buyer. With time, the shape of its strategic canvas will begin to converge with those of the competition.

To avoid this trap, monitoring value curves on the strategy canvas is essential. These value curves signals when to value-innovate and when not to. It alerts a company to reach out for another blue ocean when its value curve begins to converge.

For more details on Blue Ocean Strategy, refer the author’s published book and official website. An online course is also available on the official website.

1. “WHAT IS BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY?”. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-strategy/ . Accessed 03 Jun 2023

2. “ABOUT THE BOOK: BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY”. Blueoceanstrategy.com, https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/books/blue-ocean-strategy-book/ . Accessed 03 Jun 2023

3. “Winning the Customer Journey Battle: Netflix vs Blockbuster Case Study”. Strategyjourney.com, https://strategyjourney.com/winning-the-customer-journey-battle-netflix-vs-blockbuster-case-study/ . Accessed 02 Jun 2023

4. “The Strategy Canvas of Apple iPhone”. Blueoceanstrategy.com, https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/blog/strategy-canvas-examples/ . Accessed 03 Jun 2023

5. “Women’s Health & Fitness Clubs”. Curves, https://www.curves.com/ . Accessed 06 Jun 2023

6. “What we do”. Novonordisk, https://www.novonordisk.com/about/what-we-do.html . Accessed 06 Jun 2023

7. “Bloomberg Terminal”. Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/solution/bloomberg-terminal/ . Accessed 06 Jun 2023

8. “vacuum-cleaners”. Dyson, https://www.dyson.com/vacuum-cleaners . Accessed 06 Jun 2023

9. “SERVICES”. QB House, https://qbhouseusa.com/ . Accessed 06 Jun 2023

10. “Our Heritage”. Starbucks, https://www.starbucks.co.id/about-us/our-heritage . Accessed 06 Jun 2023

11. “Napster”. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster . Accessed 06 Jun 2023

12. “iTunes”. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes . Accessed 06 Jun 2023

13. “Homepage”. Callawaygolf, https://www.callawaygolf.com/ . Accessed 07 Jun 2023

14. “About Pret”. Pret, https://www.pret.com/en-US/about-pret . Accessed 07 Jun 2023

15. “OUT-OF-HOME ADVERTISING”. Jcdecaux, https://www.jcdecaux.com/group/activities . Accessed 08 Jun 2023

16. “BUYER UTILITY MAP”. SlideTeam.net, https://www.slideteam.net/blue-ocean-strategy-price-corridor-of-the-target-mass-ppt-powerpoint-presentation-icon-guidelines.html . Accessed 07 Jun 2023

17. “Monsanto”. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto . Accessed 07 Jun 2023

18. “TIPPING POINT LEADERSHIP”. Blueoceanstrategy.com, https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/tools/tipping-point-leadership/ . Accessed 07 Jun 2023

19. “Align Value, Profit, and People Proposition”. Danielle Bodette, Cole Tacker, D’Vonta Hinton, Joey King, http://kimboal.ba.ttu.edu/MGT%204380%20Fall%2008/New_Folder2/Team2_10am_BOS_10222018.pdf . Accessed 07 Jun 2023

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What Is Blue Ocean Strategy — and Where Does It Go Wrong?

Hint: remember to include your non-customers in your market research.

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Blue ocean strategy is a landmark business idea – first introduced in 2004 in an HBR article . But its co-creator Renée Mauborgne , a professor of strategy and management at INSEAD, tells IdeaCast host Sarah Green Carmichael that it’s not a guaranteed win.

“What we’ve found is that managers’ existing mental models, the assumptions about what works in competing in existing industry space — they often apply to their efforts to create new markets. And that creates the failure,” Mauborgne explains.

They discuss what specifically can go wrong when you try to implement blue ocean strategy, including the common traps managers fall into. And why it’s so important to know who your non-customers are and include them in your market research.

Key topics include : blue ocean strategy, competitive strategy, growth strategy, and innovation, Ralph Lauren, Salesforce, product and service design, making your own market, innovation, sector growth, and strategy canvas.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

• Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: Blue Ocean Strategy and Red Ocean Traps (March 2015)
• Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast .
• Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org .

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy , case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. What do Ralph Lauren, Salesforce.com, and Cirque du Soleil have in common?  Give up? They’re all brands that have successfully created “blue oceans” – uncontested, new markets where success is all about differentiation and lower costs. Blue ocean strategy is a landmark business idea, first introduced in 2004 right here at HBR. But its co-creator Renée Mauborgne says it’s not a guaranteed win. Today, we bring you a conversation about what can go wrong when you try to implement blue ocean strategy. You’ll learn about some of the common traps managers fall into – like trying to please existing customers OR focusing on adjacent market niches. AND why knowing who your non-customers are is as valuable as knowing your customers. This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in March 2015. And just a note — we recorded this by phone. While the audio quality isn’t great, the conversation is. I think you’ll enjoy it. Here it is.

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. Today I’m talking with Renee Mauborgne. Professor at INSEAD and co-author with W. Chan Kim of the bestselling and newly updated and reissued Blue Ocean Strategy. They’re also the authors of a new article in HBR called Red Ocean Traps. Renee, thank you so much for talking with us today.

RENEE MAUBORGNE: Thanks, Sarah.

SARAH GREEN: So many of those listening may already know, but some may not know, what is blue ocean strategy?

RENEE MAUBORGNE: So Blue ocean strategy is about how can any company or organization break out of the red ocean of bloody competition or existing market space, which tends to be very crowded and competitive these days, and create uncontested market space where you make your competition irrelevant. So it’s really about how do you create uncontested market space and align your value profit and people proposition to achieve that around differentiation and low cost, and thereby you create a win for the market, a win for the company, and a win for your employees as well.

SARAH GREEN: So in the article especially, you’re identifying several traps that managers fall into when they’re trying to do this, to create and execute a blue ocean strategy. And it seems like one of the common ones is trying to focus on making existing customers happier. So tell me a little bit about why is that a problem? Why does that not help you reach the blue ocean?

RENEE MAUBORGNE: So in the expanded edition of Blue Ocean Strategy, we’ve actually added about two, really almost three new chapters to it. And one of the critical ones is what we call this red ocean traps, which is also the focus of the new Harvard article. And what we found is that many managers increasingly recognize obviously, the need to break out of red oceans of bloody competition. But that despite putting funding behind it, and having an intent to do it, they often find that they’re unsuccessful in that achievement. And what we’ve found is that managers’ existing mental models, the assumptions about what works in competing in existing industry space, they often apply to their efforts to create new markets. And that creates the failure. The issue is, creating new markets isn’t about better satisfying, necessarily your existing customers, it’s about creating all new demand. And to create all new demand, your aim is, of course, talking to noncustomers of the industry. So, if you look at the case of e-readers, Sony came out and they thought, you know this new e-reader technology, let’s unlock the mass of buyers to start using e-readers for reading books. And they went to the existing early adopters of e-readers, who were the customers of that small industry. And they said, how can we make you happier? And what they said is, the device is a bit clunky and the reading screen, it doesn’t work very well. Can you make it have a slicker image, a slicker look and be better to handle. And they did that and they actually made existing customers very happy. The problem is, that wasn’t the reason the majority of people didn’t come to the industry. And as we know, Kindle then went with Amazon, looked to noncustomers and they found out the real reason wasn’t the screen of the existing e-readers. It’s just that there were no titles and you couldn’t download them effectively. And so what did Kindle do? Of course they created a lot more titles, today of course, over 2 million titles and they made it very easy to download. And today, Kindle sets the standard of the industry and has exploded the amount of e-reader users for books as we all know. And unfortunately, in the case of Sony, they have exited that industry. So that’s the kind of insights you get by looking to noncustomers.

SARAH GREEN: So do most companies even know what their noncustomers want and how might you get a better handle on what noncustomers want?

RENEE MAUBORGNE: Well, the truth is you’re right. I think most companies really aren’t clear on who their noncustomers are. And when they think of noncustomers, it’s sort of a big blob out there of everyone else. But that’s not true. So in our book, the first critical thing is, how do you define your noncustomers? And in the expanded edition, we have a chapter focused on defining the three tiers of noncustomers out there. And the first tier is people that occasionally use their product. How can I get them to use it much more? Second tier is people who refuse your industry. So they’ve thought about patronizing it, but they choose against it. And the third tier, unexplored. So the book really provides a strong conceptual framework any company can look at or organization to define who are the nontiers. That’s the first thing, who they are. Then the second is that your rightful point is, how do I then know what to do to unlock them. And in our book as well, we have two analytic tools that empower executives in terms of finding those pain points, blind spots, and points of intimidation. And one is called the buyer utility map. And that really allows you to map out and identify those points that keep people away from the industry. But beyond that, we have a supplementary tool called the Six Paths Framework. And that allows us to reframe the question from existing customers to noncustomers and think about, could I take a functional industry and make it emotional, to pull in young people that care about cool, hip things for example. So really to empower executives to act on that concept, the book goes beyond the red ocean traps to the three tiers to help you identify who they are, and then provides two very powerful and practical analytics that you can work with your executives or your team around to start to find these pain points. And I think, usually it creates an exciting conversation and a lot of insights in its application.

SARAH GREEN: So when some companies are sort of working through this and trying to identify those blue oceans, it seems like one of the things that they try to do is try to find an adjacent niche. Companies are always talking about adjacent niches. But one of the things that I sort of picked up on in the revised edition of the book and the article is that that’s not actually always a safe bet. So maybe just walk us through some of the dangers there.

RENEE MAUBORGNE: Yeah. I think that first of all, carving out a niche is how you create a unique space in the existing market space. But that’s not the same thing as creating new market space and growing all new demand for an industry. And what you find is that when companies think of new markets, they often do think of niche intuitively. Because that’s how you create small safe havens within an existing industry space. But the issue is, the more that you think about a niche, and the more we look for differences, the more we tend to find them, which leads to smaller and smaller segments of the industry. And the second thing as well as often, especially when higher fixed costs are involved to go after the niche, the niche is too small to support it and you can not only not create a niche, but you can’t justify the cost. So if you look at Delta Airlines, for example, they launched Song Airlines. And it was a concept, and they said, well, no one has looked at high-moving, fast-advancing professional women. What do they want? They fly more. What are they looking for? No one in the industry has focused on that distinct segment of fliers. And they created a product and a service with Kate Spade uniforms and designer cocktails on the flight and they gave exercise bands for women. And while in the low cost segment, that did well, the size of the market wasn’t big enough to support the cost structure. And in the end, I think it was after 36 months, they had to close that airline down. And so the issue is, has the niche become too small to support the cost? And the second thing is, are we really growing it? And what we found, companies that create new markets, what they do is, instead of looking for differences across segment customers, they look for commonalities. And in doing that thinking about not segmentation or niching, but desegmenting and industry. And that is what we found is how you create these broader market segments and grow demand for an industry.

SARAH GREEN: That’s really interesting. And I find that Delta Song example one that’s sort of really puzzling and perplexing. Because on the one hand, I think you’re totally right. It seems like they were focused on this niche that wasn’t necessarily big enough to support what they were doing. On the other hand, when you sort of hear that what their big plan was of the flight attendants were going to be wearing Kate Spade uniforms, I mean as a woman who travels for business, I don’t think I particularly care what my flight attendant is wearing. I mean, so I wonder to what extent is that really an execution problem and to what extent is it really a strategy problem?

RENEE MAUBORGNE: Well, I think that the airline, it was not– of course, Kate Spade is something I’m mentioning now, is much more than just Kate Spade to be fair to the airlines. So they had a number of different elements which I think were interesting. And I think the airline was fairly well-received by people that used that airline. It was just too small a segment for them in and a bit too focused at that price point that they were after.

SARAH GREEN: So I guess one of the questions that I think I’ve heard people ask in regard to this idea is, like wait a minute, when you’re talking about market creation, is that the same thing as differentiation or are they different themselves?

RENEE MAUBORGNE: That’s a great question. That’s a point of confusion sometimes. So market creation is not the same thing as differentiation, just as it’s not the same thing as a niche strategy. If you think about it in academic terms, differentiation is really a position, what economists call the productivity frontier, which is the range of value cost trade offs available to any company. Given the industry structure and best known practices at the time. And basically, differentiation is really about offering premium value on that curve. And when you do, your cost structure tends to go up and so that’s the price point of an industry. Market creation however, market creating strategies, are really about breaking the trade off by reconstructing industry boundaries. So if you think about Yellow Tail, one example in the book, or part of our database, is it the most differentiated wine out there? Is it a differentiated wine? You bet it is. But is it low cost? Yes, it is. Salesforce.com, is it differentiated in what they did in the software industry? Yes, it is. But is it also low cost? Yes, it is as well. And the issue with differentiation alone, which is a very effective strategy in existing market space, is that it tends to allow you to carve out a premium position in the existing industry. And what you tend to do is focus only on what you can raise and create, which is what lifts your price structure, your cost structure. And you forget about what you can eliminate and reduce simultaneously to drop your cost structure as well and really shift that productivity frontier as opposed to positioning on it. So they are not the same. Market creation is about differentiation and low cost at any price point in the marketplace, market creating strategies, versus being a premium player in the existing market as well.

SARAH GREEN: OK. So I just want to sort of hover over this topic for just another moment here because I think it’s interesting to think about the need to be differentiated and cost competitive. I guess I’m wondering is it possible, if there’s someone listening who’s in, say a business that’s a premium product or a high end business, is it possible for that person to be doing blue ocean strategy or are they doing something different according to different rules?

RENEE MAUBORGNE: So you can– the same logic applies, whether you want to create a blue ocean at the high end of the market or low end of the market, so you can think of Cirque de Soleil, right, listed as the price point of circuses multiple times versus a Ringling Brothers Circus. And what they did effectively– it’s one of those Six Paths I was talking about to pull in noncustomers. –is they looked across alternative industries of theater, opera, and ballet versus circus, they priced against it. Are they the most differentiated player? Yes, of course, they’re out there. But to drop their cost structure, in doing that of course, they eliminated animals, which has insurance implications, food implications, travel implications, and star performers as well. So they were high priced, differentiated low cost. Ralph Lauren did the same thing. They created a whole new blue ocean at the high end by taking the best of haute couture, which is a designer name, not the name of a house, using fine materials and they had a higher price point as well, and not a low cost price point. Ralph Lauren, to keep his cost structure reasonable at the time, of course, unlike an haute couture house, which is having seamstresses, he, of course, used more factory manufacturing and the details of course, might have been some done touched by hand in the very higher price points, but most of it was done lower cost via factory. So he had a price point of a Brooks Brothers at the time and of course the name brand, the allure, the image, all of that of a high end and the beautiful fabrics, creating at the high end of the market. So if you look at expanded edition of Blue Ocean Strategy, you’ll find we are talking about companies that create blue oceans at the high end of the market using the logic, at the low price point of the market, and the right smack in the middle price points of an industry.

SARAH GREEN: So, Renee, one of the things I’m kind of noticing as we’ve walked through a number of examples and talked about this is that I don’t think any of these examples so far has been technological examples. And I find that remarkable, just because so often when people are talking about strategy today, they’re sort of talking about innovation and technology innovation. And people seem to sort of conflate all these things together. And yet it seems like here we’re not really talking about break through technologies, so why when we’re talking about the need to create new markets, do we so often end up focusing on technological innovation instead of actually just strategy?

RENEE MAUBORGNE: Well, I think you make a great point. So the key to opening up new markets, it can be with or without technology. And technology’s purely a huge trend in the marketplace today that a lot of companies can act on to open up new market space. But what matters systematically is whether we lock it to value. And that’s where the discrepancy often occurs. So if you look at Apple, why do we love their products and services? They have highly technologically advanced products and services. It’s not because of the technology per se, it’s because actually they’ve made those products so stylish, fun, easy to use, reliable, they make us productive, that we love them. In fact, they make the technology almost disappear. Salesforce.com is a technology company that created a blue ocean, but again, the software very effectively linked to value. And I think the problem for organizations becomes when they see this technology and they think that’s a trend in the market you can act on to create a blue ocean, but it’s not what unlocks the blue ocean per se. What unlocks it is whether or not a company systematically unlocks and links it to value for the buyer groups that you’re going for in the marketplace. So we always say it’s value innovation, not technology innovation. And in our book, we have the buyer utility map which I mentioned earlier, which really allows you to assess, am I linking that technology to value to what people care about. And in essence, I think most ionization, technology innovations which unlock value they almost make the technology disappear from buyer’s mind. It’s so seamlessly done from a customer’s perspective. Intuit’s Quicken, it has such a wonderful user interface. And it even mimicked the initial checkbook when they came out, making it so intuitive for people to use, people fell in love with it. And so that’s the challenge for organizations.

SARAH GREEN: So I’m wondering, this idea of blue ocean strategy has become one of the classic ideas that HBR has ever published. The book sells ridiculously well. Why update the book? I mean, what was your sort of process like? Why come back to this idea? Why keep fleshing it out? There are many, many, many business books out there that don’t get updated and people continue to refer back to them. So why did you guys decide to sit down and do that and how did you do it?

RENEE MAUBORGNE: Well, thanks for that question. First, we’ve never stopped our research on blue ocean strategy. It’s a very long journey for us. If anyone wants to visit our blueoceanstrategy.com website, we have videos on there and we have an e-library with all companies around the world that have been applying the ideas. So obviously it’s a passion. We don’t see the idea of blue oceans going away at all. In fact, we’re growing. And really our research has not stopped. So we’ve been talking with companies around the world. And whether they were applying blue ocean or just in this space wanting to, we were documenting what their struggles were in trying to create new markets. What were the areas? Were there questions they had left unanswered? So, we went much more in the new book about, how do you align the organization, the people proposition, to execute on that? So, it’s not just about the analytics of strategy. We had a part about humans and execution in the initial book. But we really wanted to go much more in that to create sustainability. So this value profit in people, we really developed more. And then we saw companies putting the money behind this red ocean trap idea. But they would go in it to apply blue ocean strategy or any idea and they were talking to the same customers. And they were coming back with modified versions or improved of the existing offering of the industry and not breaking out or not going to too small niches. So this whole idea, as you just last questioned, technology innovation, they’re getting so excited about technology, they’re winning awards, but they’re not unlocking markets because it’s not linked to value for buyers. We don’t understand how to use it or there’s no ecosystem. So that was obviously a really critical impetus for us as well in thinking about it. And the third is people are saying to us, well, what if I create a blue ocean? Many them, like JCDecaux, the blue ocean that was created and has expanded since, some of them have lasted 50 years. Now some of them 30, some of them 20. So the companies have all done quite well, even though our unit of analysis strategic move that company.

That said however, people are saying well, what? Because imitation occurs for everybody, right? Every blue ocean eventually becomes red. So they said, can you expand on how do I, as an organization, institutionalize this as a systematic process? And we thought, that’s very valid. So, we talked more about barriers to imitation, how do you build those? But more also at the corporate level, for a multi-business firm and at the individual level, how do you know when to reach for a new blue ocean? What kind of tool and framework can you, to channel and have discussions with your head business leaders on doing it? So, the book really came out to our continuing conversation and our growing database of companies applying the ideas and governments, nonprofits, in action, and our curiosity to understand what were their stumbling blocks and where could we add further value. So it’s just sharing some of the conversations and our passion and our growing research database made us want to do this.

SARAH GREEN: Well, Renee, thanks again for talking with us today.

RENEE MAUBORGNE: Well, thank you very much for having us. And I’m sorry my colleague, Chan Kim, could not be a part it, but it is long career journey we’ve gone on together and we look forward to continuing that with passion. So thank you for the time and thank you for every one that has been interested in Blue Ocean Strategy.

HANNAH BATES: That was Renée Mauborgne, co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy – in conversation with Sarah Green Carmichael on the HBR IdeaCast . If you liked this episode, check out HBR IdeaCast wherever you get your podcasts.  We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about business strategy from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review. If you’re looking for another weekly dose of hand-curated business and management expertise, check out HBR On Leadership to help you unlock the best in those around you. We’re a production of the Harvard Business Review – if you want more articles, case studies, books, and videos like this, be sure to subscribe to HBR at HBR.org. This episode was created and produced by Anne Saini, Ian Fox, and me, Hannah Bates. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Adi Ignatius, Karen Player, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.

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What Is Blue Ocean? Definition in Markets and Characteristics

What Is Blue Ocean?

Blue ocean is an entrepreneurship industry term created in 2005 to describe a new market with little competition or barriers standing in the way of innovators. The term refers to the vast "empty ocean" of market options and opportunities that occur when a new or unknown industry or innovation appears.

The term "blue ocean" was coined by INSEAD business school professors Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in their book  Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (2005) . The authors define blue oceans as those markets associated with high potential profits.

Key Takeaways

• A blue ocean is considered (from a marketing standpoint) a yet unexploited or uncontested market space.
• The term was coined by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in the book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant.
• Blue ocean firms tend to be innovators of their time.
• Blue oceans are contrasted with "red oceans," characterized by cutthroat competition and crowded markets.
• In their book, Kim and Mauborgne wrote about 150 blue ocean strategies that have been undertaken by companies over about 100 years.

How a Blue Ocean Works

In an established industry, companies compete with each other for every piece of available  market share . The competition is often so intense that some firms cannot sustain themselves. This type of industry describes a red ocean, representing a saturated market bloodied by competition.

Blue oceans offer the opposite. Many firms choose to innovate or expand in the hopes of finding a blue ocean market with uncontested competition. Blue ocean markets are also of high interest to entrepreneurs .

Overall, blue ocean markets have several characteristics that innovators and entrepreneurs love. A pure blue ocean market has no competitors. A blue ocean market business leader has first-mover advantages, cost advantages in marketing with no competition, the ability to set prices without competitive constraints, and the flexibility to take its offering in various directions.

Business leaders with innovative products and services who can identify blue ocean markets have endless opportunities.

Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean Strategies

In contrast to a blue ocean, a red ocean describes an environment of cutthroat competition among many industry players. Because the marketplace is crowded with rivals, new companies must fight fiercely for a share of any profits.

Companies in a red ocean business environment will use very different business strategies than those that have a marketplace to themselves. Rather than try to create demand, red ocean companies try to attract existing consumers through marketing, lower prices, or improved products. For example, consider the marketplace for car insurance : most insurers sell nearly-identical products, and try to capture market share by offering a more attractive deal than their competitors.

Examples of Blue Ocean Companies

A blue ocean is specific to a time and place. Ford and Apple are two examples of leading companies that created their blue oceans by pursuing high product differentiation at a relatively low cost, which also raised the barriers for competition. They also were paradigmatic of burgeoning industries at the time that were later exemplified and emulated by others.

Ford Motor Co.

In 1908, Ford Motor Co. introduced the Model T as the car for the masses. It only came in one color and one model, but it was reliable, durable, and affordable.

At the time, the automobile industry was still in its infancy with approximately 500 automakers producing custom-made cars that were more expensive and less reliable. Ford created a new manufacturing process for mass-producing standardized cars at a fraction of the price of its competitors.

The Model T's market share jumped from 9% in 1908 to 61% in 1921, officially replacing the horse-drawn carriage as the principal mode of transportation.

Apple Inc. found a blue ocean with its iTunes music download service. While billions of music files were being downloaded each month illegally, Apple created the first legal format for downloading music in 2003.

It was easy to use, providing users with the ability to buy individual songs at a reasonable price. Apple won over millions of music listeners who had been pirating music by offering higher-quality sound along with search and navigation functions. Apple made iTunes a win-win-win for the music producers, music listeners, and Apple by creating a new stream of revenue from a new market while providing more convenient access to music.

Another example of a blue ocean firm is Netflix , a company that reinvented the entertainment industry in the 2000s. Rather than enter the competitive marketplace of video rental stores, Netflix created new models of entertainment: first by introducing mail-order video rentals, and later by pioneering the first streaming video platform paid for by user subscriptions.

Following their success, many other companies have followed in Netflix's footsteps. As a result, any new company trying to launch a video subscription model will find itself facing a red ocean rather than a blue one.

The Bottom Line

A blue ocean describes an entrepreneur's dream: an unexplored market, without any competition, allowing innovators to create and introduce new products that capture a large share of the market. However, a blue ocean is not always easy sailing. Entrepreneurs who seek to employ a blue ocean strategy must first create their own market, attract customers and develop a product that has never been tried before. For that reason, successful blue ocean opportunities can be rare and far between.

What Are the Steps to Implement a Blue Ocean Strategy?

In Blue Ocean Shift , Kim and Mauborgne lay out a five-step process for a company seeking to pivot to a blue ocean strategy. In short, they are:

• Start the process: choose a starting point and create the right team.
• Understand where you are now: identify the current state of play for your team, including strengths and weaknesses.
• Imagine where you could be: determine hidden pain points, and identify the non-customers you would like to reach.
• Find how you get there: develop alternative options and start reconstructing market boundaries.
• Make your move: formalize a big-picture model and rapidly test your blue-ocean move.

Why Is a Blue Ocean Strategy Difficult to Implement?

Blue ocean strategies are difficult to implement for a simple reason: if it were easy, someone probably would have already done it. Since blue ocean strategies require identifying untapped markets, and sometimes reinventing the market itself, a blue ocean strategy is a high-risk play that does not always pay off. When it succeeds, however, the rewards are considerable.

What Was JCPenney’s Failed Blue Ocean Strategy?

In 2011, JCPenney made a spectacular strategic blunder under its new CEO, Ron Johnson, who attempted to pivot the company towards a blue ocean strategy. At the time, JCPenney had some financial struggles but was still regarded as an industry leader for value shopping. Johnson attempted to differentiate JCPenney to a more upscale clientele, with in-store boutiques and exclusive merchandise. At the same time, he did away with the clearance racks and coupons that attracted the company's most loyal customers.

To make matters worse, rather than testing the changes on a small group of experimental stores, Johnson implemented them in all 1800 JCPenney stores. After less than 18 months at the helm, JCPenney fell out of the S&P 500 Index and Johnson was fired.

Blue Ocean Strategy. " What is Blue Ocean Strategy? " Accessed July 13, 2021.

W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne. "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant." Harvard Business Review Press, 2005.

Ford. " Company Timeline ." Accessed July 13, 2021.

Blue Ocean Strategy. " Blue Ocean Strategic Moves ." Accessed July 13, 2021.

Blue Ocean Strategy. " iTunes ." Accessed July 13, 2021.

Blue Ocean Strategy. " Five Steps to Making Your Blue Ocean Shift ." Accessed Jan. 14, 2022.

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Blue Ocean Strategy: Meaning | Types | Examples | Challenges

“Blue Ocean Strategy” is a business theory that suggests companies are better off searching for ways to gain “uncontested market space” rather than competing with similar companies. The term is derived from the book “Blue Ocean Strategy,” written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne and first published in 2005.

The core concept behind the Blue Ocean Strategy includes:

• Creating New Market Space:  The strategy emphasizes the importance of creating new market spaces (or “blue oceans”) rather than competing in existing industries (referred to as “red oceans”). Market boundaries are defined and known in red oceans, and companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a more significant share of the existing market. By contrast, blue oceans are characterized by untapped market space, demand creation, and highly profitable growth opportunities.
• Value Innovation:  This is the cornerstone of the blue ocean strategy. It focuses on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for the company and its customers. Value innovation is achieved when a company aligns innovation with utility, price, and cost positions.
• Eliminate: What factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
• Reduce: Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard
• Raise: Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
• Create: Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?
• Non-Customer Focus:  The strategy also involves focusing on the needs and wants of non-customers to draw them into the market and create new demand.
• Overcoming Key Organizational Hurdles:  The strategy addresses the challenges companies face when implementing these strategies and suggests ways to overcome them.

The blue ocean strategy is particularly notable for shifting the focus from competitive rivalry and market share battles to ‘value innovation’ and exploring new opportunities. Companies across different industries have applied this strategy for substantial profit and growth.

Red Ocean Strategy: Meaning | Types | Examples | Challenges

Types of Blue Ocean Strategy

The Blue Ocean Strategy, as conceptualized by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, is not explicitly categorized into different “types.” Instead, it is applied through various principles and frameworks. However, the strategy can be interpreted and implemented in several ways depending on the context and objectives of a business. Here are some common approaches or interpretations that could be considered as “types” of Blue Ocean Strategy:

• Market Creation Strategy:  This involves creating an entirely new market space or category. Companies following this approach are looking to serve existing customers better and create new demand by introducing innovative products or services that the market has not seen before. Market Creation Strategy: Meaning | Types | Examples  
• Value Innovation Strategy:  This is the core of the Blue Ocean Strategy and involves simultaneously pursuing differentiation and low cost. The goal is to create high value for both the company and its customers, making the competition irrelevant. Value Innovation Strategy: Meaning | Framework | Examples
• Diversification Strategy:  This type involves expanding into new areas or industries the company does not serve. A company can create new blue oceans in unrelated or loosely related markets by leveraging existing capabilities or developing new ones. What is a diversification strategy | Explained with Types
• Niche Market Strategy:  While this might seem counterintuitive to the Blue Ocean philosophy of targeting mass markets, some companies successfully create blue oceans by targeting underserved or niche segments, offering highly specialized and innovative solutions. Niche marketing strategy: Explained with examples
• Strategic Pricing Strategy:  This involves innovating not just the product or service but also the pricing model. Companies might find blue oceans by changing how they charge for their products, such as through subscription models, pay-per-use, or other novel pricing strategies.
• Technology Innovation Strategy:  Leveraging cutting-edge technology to create products or services that redefine the market, often creating a new industry or sub-industry.
• Service Innovation Strategy:  Focusing on creating blue oceans by providing exceptional service experiences that set a company apart. Service strategy: Explained with Examples
• Process Innovation Strategy:  Innovating in how products or services are created and delivered can lead to new market spaces and operational efficiencies.

Each approach requires a deep understanding of the market, customer needs, and the company’s capabilities. The essence of the Blue Ocean Strategy is to break away from traditional competitive strategies and find new uncontested market space where competition is irrelevant.

Examples of Blue Ocean Strategy

The Blue Ocean Strategy has been employed by various companies across different industries to create new market spaces and achieve high growth and profits. Here are some notable examples:

• Cirque du Soleil:  Cirque du Soleil successfully blended opera, ballet, and traditional circus to create an entirely new form of entertainment. They eliminated costly elements like animal shows and star performers and focused on a unique combination of music, dance, and acrobatics. This innovative approach helped them create a new market space distinct from traditional circuses and theater productions.
• Apple’s iTunes and iPod:  Apple created a blue ocean by combining the iPod with iTunes, revolutionizing how people bought and listened to music. They made legal music downloading easy and convenient, creating a new market and making illegal downloading less attractive.
• Southwest Airlines:  Southwest Airlines redefined air travel by positioning itself as a low-cost, no-frills airline focusing on short hauls. They eliminated traditional services like assigned seating and in-flight meals to offer low prices and convenient, frequent flights, thus creating a new market space.
• Nintendo Wii:  Unlike its competitors, who focused on enhancing the gaming experience for hard-core gamers, Nintendo Wii opened up a whole new market by targeting casual gamers. They introduced motion-sensing controllers, creating a new form of family entertainment that appealed to a broader demographic, including those who had never been interested in video games.
• Dyson:  Dyson transformed the vacuum cleaner market by introducing bagless vacuum cleaners. They focused on powerful suction technology and a unique design, creating a premium segment in a previously considered mature and low-innovation market.
• Uber:  Uber created a blue ocean in the personal transportation industry by introducing a ride-sharing app that connected drivers with passengers. They eliminated the need for traditional taxi-hailing and centralized dispatch systems, offering convenience, competitive pricing, and an easy-to-use platform.
• Warby Parker:  Warby Parker redefined the eyewear industry by offering designer eyeglasses online at a fraction of the cost of traditional retail outlets. They bypassed intermediaries, offered free home try-on, and focused on a customer-friendly return policy, creating a new space in the eyewear market.
• Netflix:  Netflix first transformed the home entertainment industry by offering DVD rentals by mail with a no-late-fee model and then by pioneering the streaming of movies and TV shows. They created a new market space by providing an extensive library of films and shows available on-demand, fundamentally changing how people accessed and watched content.

Each of these examples demonstrates how companies can achieve success by competing within existing markets, creating new market spaces, and making the competition irrelevant.

Challenges with Blue Ocean Strategy

While the Blue Ocean Strategy offers a compelling approach to market innovation and business growth, it also presents several challenges and potential pitfalls. Here are some of the critical challenges associated with implementing a Blue Ocean Strategy:

• Identification of New Market Spaces:  One of the biggest challenges is identifying unexplored market spaces that can be turned into blue oceans. This requires deep insight, innovative thinking, and a thorough understanding of customer needs, often beyond what current market research can reveal.
• Execution Risk:  Implementing a blue ocean strategy often involves venturing into uncharted territory. This can carry higher risks than operating in a well-understood and established market. There’s always uncertainty about customer acceptance, market dynamics, and the economic viability of the new space.
• Organizational Resistance:  Changing a company’s strategic direction towards a blue ocean can meet with significant internal resistance. Employees and management may hesitate to embrace radical changes, especially if it means moving away from established practices and norms.
• Resource Allocation:  Developing a blue ocean requires significant time, capital, and resources investment. Companies face challenges allocating these resources effectively, especially if they still manage their operations in existing markets.
• Sustainability of Competitive Advantage:  Once a blue ocean is created, it can attract competitors, turning it into a red ocean over time. Sustaining a competitive advantage in the newly created market space requires continuous innovation and staying ahead of imitators.
• Balancing Differentiation and Cost:  Achieving the right balance between differentiation and low cost can be challenging. There’s a risk of over-innovating and creating products or services that are too sophisticated or expensive for the target market.
• Market Understanding and Customer Acceptance:  There’s a risk that the new market created may not be accepted by customers. Misjudging customer needs or failing to educate the market about the value of the new offering can lead to failure.
• Regulatory and Legal Hurdles:  New market spaces can often face unforeseen regulatory challenges. Innovations might not fit into existing legal frameworks, leading to regulatory hurdles that can be time-consuming and costly.
• Scalability and Growth Management:  Even if a blue ocean strategy is initially successful, scaling the business and managing growth in the new market space can present significant challenges, particularly if the market dynamics are not fully understood.
• Cultural Fit and Adaptation:  The strategy must align with the organization’s culture. Misalignment can lead to difficulties in adoption and execution, as the organizational ethos plays a crucial role in implementing and embracing strategies.

Successfully navigating these challenges requires a robust strategy, a clear vision, strong leadership, and an organizational culture that embraces innovation and change.

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Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean Strategy (Overview with Examples)

Plenty more fish in the sea? It depends on the ocean. Or at least that’s what companies that use the blue ocean strategy would tell you.

In 2004, Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, caused waves in the business world. Their idea was simple: why compete for market share when you can create your own?

This guide will cover everything you need to know about the blue ocean and red ocean strategies, provide real examples, and show you how to execute these strategies in your organization.

• Blue ocean is a business strategy focusing on creating new market spaces rather than competing in existing ones.
• A red ocean is an existing market with many competitors, while a blue ocean is a market yet to be discovered with no competitors.
• Best for companies with a serious commitment to aligning their efforts and prioritizing transparency
• Blue ocean redefines how businesses can look at success and offers a unique approach to growth.
• Companies must consider a large amount of risk with blue ocean initiatives.

⚠️ Chart a new course! Find uncontested markets, but don't get lost at sea. Cascade Strategy Execution Platform bridges the gap between blue ocean discovery and execution. Book a demo and see how to translate insights into a clear roadmap for achieving sustainable growth.

Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean: Main Differences

The analogy of red and blue oceans describes markets and industries.

Red oceans are existing industries with demand and cutthroat competition. The color red denotes the bloody battle for revenue, existing market space, and success between companies. For example, the fashion industry.

Blue oceans are industries that don’t exist yet, with untapped potential for growth and success, which companies must find or create. For example, personal computing in the 1970s.

Five main differences between the red ocean and the blue ocean strategy. Image source: blueoceanstrategy.org

What Is Blue Ocean Strategy?

The blue ocean strategy aims to shift strategic imperatives from outperforming competitors in existing markets to creating new industries, thereby making the competition irrelevant. Companies may use this strategy when the current supply in their existing market exceeds demand or if turnover has increased and profit margins are diminishing.

Blue ocean companies focus on creating uncontested market space with new demand for products or services that don’t exist yet by simultaneously pursuing the following:

• Differentiation

Value innovation is the process of reducing costs and increasing buyer value by creating elements that were not previously available in the industry.

Advantages of blue ocean strategy: 

• Businesses can create uncontested markets that have new opportunities.
• This framework offers a new perspective and encourages unorthodox thinking about creating consumer value.
• The Blue Ocean process helps companies understand customer needs and desires more deeply.
• It moves strategic imperatives away from competition and towards differentiation.

Disadvantages and possible limitations of the blue ocean strategy: 

• There is a risk that efforts won’t result in the creation of a blue ocean. This strategy's success depends on an organization’s resources, talent, and position in the market.
• Balancing dual strategic imperatives (cost reduction and buyer value) can take time and effort for organizations.
• Organizational hurdles, such as scarcity of resources and a lack of strategic alignment, can impact the outcomes of the blue ocean strategy.
• Businesses must attract enough customers to generate economies of scale and dissuade immediate competition.
• Blue ocean markets will eventually become red oceans as competitors appear.

What Is Red Ocean Strategy?   

Red ocean strategies are the opposite of the blue ocean strategy. They describe business strategies organizations use to grow and succeed in established markets.

However, there are significant pitfalls to pursuing a red ocean strategy:

• Red oceans are filled with businesses competing for the same customers.
• Maintaining growth becomes increasingly tricky as profits diminish in red oceans.
• Red ocean markets force enterprises to choose between cost leadership or differentiation.
• Success in red ocean markets requires simultaneous exploitation of demand and beating your competitors.
• Red ocean markets need greater resources and scale to compete effectively. 

But before you start despairing, it’s important to note that red ocean strategies aren’t always a bad move. Red ocean companies can and still do experience great success in red ocean markets with high levels of competition. 

Some examples of when a red ocean strategy may be a better choice include when:

• A company has experience, knowledge, or skills that it can leverage in the existing market.
• There are limited resources, and they can’t afford to spend significant capital on finding blue oceans or capitalizing on them. 
• An organization has a low-risk tolerance or is in a period of stabilization.
• A company has a good position and level of profitability in an existing market.

How to Make the Shift From Red Ocean to Blue Ocean (in 6 Steps)

Adopting a blue ocean strategy can have significant long-term benefits when done correctly. But, to get the red-blue shift right, you’ll need to approach the process systematically. 

The steps and concepts below are just a summary of the approach created by the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy. We’ve included an additional sixth step because it’s crucial but often overlooked.

1. Start planning your blue ocean initiative 

Begin by defining the scope of your blue ocean initiative. Next, identify which SBUs, services, or products will benefit the most from a blue ocean shift. 

To assist in this process, Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest using a pioneer-migrator-settler map to rank multiple strategic business units (SBUs) on value and innovation.

Image source: blueoceanstrategy.org

• Pioneers: SBUs offering unprecedented value.
• Migrators: SBUs offering better value than the market.
• Settlers: SBUs offering the same value as other competitors.

If you want a more comprehensive picture, you can combine this analysis with other strategic frameworks such as SWOT analysis , Porter’s Five Forces , or GE Matrix .

Use this information to identify which SBUs to target and create a team of people to carry out the blue ocean initiative. This step is vital to ensure you aren’t overambitious with your plans and that they fit your broader portfolio goals.

“ When you are bringing on new team members, it's not just about bringing folks on so that they can do the job today. It's about bringing folks that can adapt and change into the strategy and the decisions that you will make six months, nine months down the line. ” - Div Manickam , Portfolio Marketing Leader, Lenovo.

2. Understand the current situation

Create an overview of the competitive landscape by filling out a strategy canvas. A strategy canvas is a visual representation of the factors an industry competes on (Competing Factors), what consumers get (Offering Level), and the strategic profile of major players (Industry Value Curve).

List factors that businesses in your industry compete on for a share of the market. For example, a mobile phone manufacturer could list ease of use, design, performance, business applications, camera quality, product range, etc.

Remember, the strategy canvas serves two purposes: to capture the current competitive landscape and propel your organization into action. This step will inform your organization how it currently competes and give a baseline for competition in your industry. 

💡Tip: As an alternative, you can also use a strategic group analysis. You can read more about it in our in-depth overview of six competitive analysis frameworks .

3. Imagine where you could be

Next, it’s time to consider the assumptions and limitations in your current industry. These factors are the springboards you’ll need to find to envision a better target market and break past industry boundaries.

If you don’t know where to begin, the blue ocean strategy suggests creating a Buyer Utility Map to think about your industry from a demand-side perspective.

A Buyer Utility Map visually represents how companies provide utility for their customers through various stages of the buying experience. 

Utility levers are how businesses unlock utility for their customers with their products or services:

• Productivity
• Convenience
• Risk Reduction
• Fun and Image
• Environmental Friendliness

The Buyer Experience Cycle outlines the consumer experience in six stages:

• Maintenance

Use your team’s knowledge, experience, and other strategic analysis tools to identify opportunities to break away from competitors, provide pioneering value, and open up new customer bases.

“Co-creation is a really important one I think for all businesses. It’s about getting the right people in the right room and creating that space. And, ultimately, the reason we see it as most important is a lot of these people are going to be the ones executing the strategy.” - Jordan Colreavy , Head of Category Strategy, L'Oréal.

4. Formulate your business strategy

You’ll need to bring this vision to reality. This part of the process can be likened to “opportunity solving.” It’s about figuring out how your business will get from A (red ocean) to B (blue ocean).

For example, your company may need more capital or resources to achieve specific improvements, or there may be several steps you need to do first before you can realize a larger goal. 

The authors of Blue Ocean Strategy suggest using a Four Actions framework. It will help you identify how factors must change to shift your product, service, or business and prescribes four types of actions for businesses.

• Eliminate: Which factors that the industry has long competed on should be eliminated?
• Create: Which factors that the industry has never offered should be created?
• Raise: Which factors should be well above the industry’s standard?
• Reduce : Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?

By answering these questions, companies can refine and build new offerings and set objectives that will put them in a class of their own.

For example, if a company were to go back in time and use the blue ocean in developing personal computers, their Four Action Framework might suggest: Price → Reduce

Size → Reduce

Features → Create

Business-only applications → Eliminate

User Experience → Raise

5. Launch your blue ocean strategy

With your potential opportunities and paths in place, it's time to begin executing your blue ocean strategy. The creators of the Blue Ocean Strategy suggest using an iterative three-phase approach to do this:

• First, select your move, goal, and direction. Make sure you are specific and clear. 
• Prioritize speed over perfection. Rapidly test new products or features in the market. 
• Finally, refine it to maximize potential. Adapt your strategy based on the results.

6. Maintain execution momentum

The blue ocean strategy offers businesses a unique perspective on opportunity, growth, and competition. If executed correctly, it can lead to impactful shifts that will help your organization grow to new levels. 

However, the blue ocean strategy requires the simultaneous pursuit of multiple strategic initiatives. This can be extremely tricky if you’re using tools like Excel, Google Sheets, and PowerPoint. Your teams don’t have access to the latest data and you don’t have a real-time overview of what’s happening with your strategy. This usually results in delayed results, wasted resources, and failed strategies. 

You need a single place where you can keep track of all initiatives, align cross-functional teams, and hold them accountable for progress. 

A better way is to supplement your blue ocean strategic planning with a powerful strategy execution platform like Cascade . It has all the tools and features you’ll need to track progress , maximize the impact of your strategy, and maintain consistent performance across the organization.

Blue Ocean Strategy Example: Spotify

The majority of profits from the music industry have come from the physical sales of CDs, tapes, and records. However, the introduction of digital shifted this trend in the early 2000s, with companies like Napster, The Pirate Bay, Apple iTunes, and Pandora dominating the digital music industry.

However, a small startup from Stockholm had other plans. When Spotify launched in 2006, it had a specific vision of what the music industry should be. Up until then, consumers had to:

• Purchase songs and albums to listen to them.
• Own specific devices, such as iPods, to use certain platforms
• Illegally download or copy songs.

Spotify looked at these pain points and built a strategy around them. They came up with a better way of listening to music by offering:

• An affordable subscription-based business model that allowed consumers to legally listen to unlimited amounts of music on any device with an internet browser. And they compensated the artists for their work.

The result wasn’t just out-competing existing companies. Instead, Spotify leap-frogged them and created a blue ocean by:

• Redefining the level and kinds of utility and value.
• Offering a new way of commercializing music streaming.
• Pricing their streaming service to make the current competition irrelevant.

📚 Recommended reading: 

Strategy study: How Spotify Became The Standard In Convenience And Accessibility

Strategy study: How Amazon Conquered the E-Commerce and Tech Industries Worldwide

Lead Transition with Strategy Execution Software

All companies need a healthy balance of innovators, migrators, and settlers to ensure continued stability, growth, and success.

If most of your SBUs operate in industries with high levels of competition and decreasing profit margins, it’s time for a change, and you should consider using the Blue Ocean Strategy to make it happen.

If you’re busy creating your own blue ocean, a robust strategic planning and execution platform like Cascade will fuel your success. 

Focus on impact, improve your execution, and deliver business results with the No. 1 strategy execution platform in the world. Take it for a spin for free or book a call with Cascade expert.

FAQs about Blue Ocean Strategy 

What is the difference between the blue ocean strategy and the differentiation strategy.

Differentiation strategy focuses on gaining a competitive advantage in the current market with no focus on cost. Blue ocean strategy focuses on creating an entirely new market through differentiation and cost leadership.

What is Strategy Canvas in the Blue Ocean? 

A strategy canvas is a strategic planning tool designed to help strategic thinkers visualize the competitive landscape of an industry and inspire role players to take action.

What is Blue Ocean Strategy's Four Actions Framework?

The Four Actions Framework is a simplified approach to turning pain points, conditions, and existing constraints into opportunities. According to the Four Actions Framework, each factor from your vision should be either raised, reduced, created, or eliminated.

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A guide to the Blue Ocean Strategy

Creating or revamping a business is challenging, given the increased competition in most fields. When there are hundreds or thousands of brands in every industry, how do you compete?

Do you try to challenge the existing competitors, or do you create your own market based on innovation?

The Blue Ocean Strategy is a business strategy that focuses on creating a new problem that your product can solve. Using this method, you can outdo your competitors and create a market that you can dominate.

To help you formulate an effective business strategy, we’ll explain the Blue Ocean Strategy, its key frameworks, and how you can implement it.

• What is the Blue Ocean Strategy?

The Blue Ocean Strategy is a way for organizations and entrepreneurs to create a new market space that makes the competition irrelevant. The strategy was developed by INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne in their 2004 bestseller titled “ Blue Ocean Strategy .”

In this concept, existing industries in the market today are known as the red ocean. In a red ocean, companies use strategic moves to outdo each other to get customer attention and profits.

Rather than creating another product that struggles in the red ocean, businesses and entrepreneurs can create a new and uncontested market space called the blue ocean.

In a blue ocean, your product or service is the first of its kind, making the competition irrelevant. Much like the unexplored ocean, this marketplace has no set rules, is vast, and has a high potential for profitable growth.

• The Red Ocean Strategy

The red ocean encompasses all industries known today. This ocean or marketplace has market boundaries and rules that are well known and accepted, both by businesses and consumers. So a new business in the red ocean is just another drop. You’re creating a product or service that’s adding to existing resources.

Existing markets are filled with hundreds or thousands of similar products. As a result, brands within this ocean struggle to grow and profit due to the cut-throat competition, hence the term red ocean.

The main focus of the Red Ocean Strategy is on gaining a competitive advantage through better products or lowered pricing. Growth is limited in this marketplace because thousands of other ‘fish’ occupy the same space.

The Blue Ocean Strategy is focused on innovation. It aims to get past existing industry structures and tap into a new market with plenty of demand.

• The differences between the Blue Ocean Strategy vs. the Red Ocean Strategy

There are key differences between these two strategies. Let’s take a look:

• Existing vs. new market: Businesses can use the Red Ocean Strategy to participate in the known market space. In the blue ocean, you can build a new market.
• Competition vs. innovation: The Red Ocean Strategy is about beating your competitors in the market to get a greater share of a shrinking profit pool, whereas the Blue Ocean Strategy focuses on innovation.
• Current vs. new demand: The Red Ocean Strategy is about capitalizing on existing demand, while the Blue Ocean Strategy creates new demand.
• The value-cost trade-off: Brands in the red ocean have to make the value-cost trade-off, where they either offer greater value at higher prices or create reasonable value at lower costs. Businesses in the blue ocean do not have to stick to this trade-off.
• Systematic alignment: A red ocean company has to choose (to an extent) between differentiation or low cost and align its whole system with that choice. A company in the blue ocean can do both at the same time.
• Examples of effective implementation of the Blue Ocean Strategy

Many companies have flourished by using the Blue Ocean Strategy. Uber and iTunes are two great examples:

Uber revolutionized how people travel by inventing an online taxi service. Although it’s not a completely new product, Uber eliminated the inconvenience of waiting for taxis on the street. It also introduced ride tracking, solved payment problems, and implemented instant customer service.

They use technology to make life more comfortable for both drivers and customers. Drivers also get convenient access to their earnings online and are shown exactly how much they earn from each ride.

Apple brought music online with iTunes and changed how people listen to music forever. They launched iTunes in 2003 to capitalize on the then-growing trend of people trading music online and mp3 players that could play online music.

They let people buy and download music online while simultaneously providing music labels with another source of income. This eliminated the customers’ inconvenience of buying entire CDs to get one or two songs that they liked.

iTunes also eliminated the market for illegal music downloading by pricing songs reasonably and creating intuitive search and navigation options. So, they created a market for themselves with little to no competition.

• Blue Ocean Strategy frameworks

There are several vital frameworks and analytical tools in the Blue Ocean Strategy. Let’s delve into the most important ones:

Value Innovation

Value Innovation is a framework that focuses on the simultaneous pursuit of both innovation and low cost. It’s a better option than the value-cost trade-off, where your products are either high value at a high price or lower value at a lower cost.

Companies don’t need to pick between cost and value in the Blue Ocean Strategy. Instead, they can aim to create a high-value product at a reasonable or low cost in a completely new and unknown market space. To achieve this:

• Redundancies in existing processes are eliminated to lower costs.
• Value is increased by offering something that has not been in the market before.

Value Innovation is driven by market pioneering, technology, or futuristic products. Much like how iTunes received pushback from users in the early stages, in a value innovation-based framework, entrepreneurs may end up creating products that buyers are initially reluctant about and unwilling to pay for.

Strategy Canvas

The Strategy Canvas is a simple graph that helps you understand the current marketplace and the prospects for your organization. It is key for building a robust Blue Ocean Strategy.

In a Strategy Canvas, the x-axis or horizontal axis lists the different factors that companies within an industry are competing on. On the y-axis or vertical line, you can indicate the buyer’s value for each of these factors.

For every factor, the value it offers could be low, high, or somewhere in between. Mark these on the graph. Use one line to track the industry’s value curve and another to track the value curve of your company’s products.

In an excellent Blue Ocean Strategy, the value curve for your product must be higher than that of the industry going forward.

Do you like the idea of this canvas?

Using an online diagram maker like Miro, teams can easily create a Strategy Canvas that shows how your competition is performing, what they offer, and what buyers really want.

When multiple top competitors in the industry have the same value curve, it’s easy to see what their common strategies and products are and how you can escape the red ocean.

Four Actions Framework

To create a value innovation-based strategy, you can use the Four Paths Framework , which is based on four crucial questions:

• Are there factors in the industry that should be eliminated?
• Which factors should be raised above industry standards?
• Which factors can be reduced below industry standards?
• What elements or factors can be created that the industry has never seen before?

Answering these questions helps businesses grasp existing industry strategies and create a business model based on the Blue Ocean Strategy, where there is no trade-off between value and cost.

The Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create (ERRC) Grid is an analysis tool used with the Four Actions Framework. While the Four Actions Framework asks crucial questions, the ERRC grid helps you put it into action to create a new blue ocean.

With the grid, you can delve into each one of the four questions by arranging them in separate boxes.

Here’s an example of an ERRC grid for a virtual training program:

With an ERRC grid, you can analyze your strategy and industry to:

• Identify companies that are focused on beating the competition. These companies often focus on raising cost or value.
• Define how you can break the value-cost trade-off.
• Thoroughly analyze every factor in the strategy canvas.

You can create an ERRC grid like this in minutes and get your whole team involved with our collaborative visual workspace tool that has strategic planning meeting kits to help you.

Six Paths Framework

The Six Paths Framework is another option to create a blue ocean business model. It enables you to look within an industry’s strategic boundaries and see how you can reconstruct them.

Here are the six paths for you to explore:

• Path 1: Look across alternative industries

Rather than limiting your products or services to your industry, explore alternative, related industries. Yakult, for example, identifies as part of the health drink, juice, and pharma industries. However, none of these industries consider Yakult to be direct competition. Yakult has thus created a blue ocean to thrive in.

• Path 2: Look across different strategic groups

Strategic groups in your industry are companies that are using the same or similar strategy. When you identify these strategies, you can also formulate how to go beyond them and create a blue ocean.

• Path 3: Redefine the industry buyer group

All the top organizations within an industry usually have the same target buyer persona. Analyze this persona and then identify other buyer groups within your industry that you can target to create a blue ocean.

For example, if you create medical products that are typically targeted at hospitals and doctors, imagine the same product from the patient’s perspective and see if and how the product can be improved.

• Path 4: Explore complementary products or services

Delve into what your customers do before, during, and after using your product. Identify any minor inconveniences they face, and address them using a complementary product/service or an existing product update.

• Path 5: Rethink the functional-emotional orientation

For any product, there is an emotional appeal and a functional appeal. The emotional appeal is how a customer feels when they use your product, whereas the functional appeal is the benefit from using the product.

Understanding how the functional and emotional appeals relate to each other in your industry can help you redefine it. For example, if everyone focuses on functionality, maybe you can focus on emotion.

• Path 6: Shape external trends over time

Every industry is affected by external strategies. Instead of simply reacting and making small changes to adapt, a Blue Ocean Strategy can be built by understanding what trends are coming up and then gearing your products or service toward those trends.

Strategy Sequence

Creating a Blue Ocean Strategy requires a definite sequence to identify if it’s actually a viable idea. The sequence follows this order:

• Buyer utility: Does your product or service provide a compelling reason for customers to buy it?
• Price: Is your product priced to attract your target buyers? If not, it cannot create buzz or lead to purchases.
• Cost: Does the cost of producing the product still help you earn a good profit margin?
• Adoption: Are there hurdles that your customers will face when adopting your product?

This sequence is a step-by-step process that helps you see if your idea leads to a competitive strategy. Every time you fail one step in the sequence, it’s time to rethink.

• How to start a blue ocean initiative for your business

Here’s a general guide to starting a blue ocean shift within your organization:

1. Understand your current situation

You can’t start a new product without understanding your current industry. List all the features, along with the pros and cons of your current product or service. You can also analyze your employees and work processes.

Get your team involved. Ask them what is working well, which process can be improved, and if there are any defects in the product. Brainstorming together can lead to a unique idea — ones you might not have thought about on your own.

Sometimes, creating blue oceans calls for a significant change in work systems. This could lead to employee doubts and uncertainty. However, when you include the employees in the creation process, it could help alleviate their fears.

2. Identify new opportunities

Use the frameworks to identify current problems in your industry, alternate industries you can target, and creative ways to solve existing customer pain points.

You can use your company’s strengths to identify new ideas. Analyzing your competitors and any common strategies they use can also help you go beyond self-imposed industry boundaries.

3. Create new offerings

Once you’ve identified the new market to target, think about the new product or service you need to create. You can either modify your existing offerings or create a whole new one.

If, for example, you’re releasing a modified version of an existing product, then you need to see what elements or features are redundant. Add any new required features as well.

It’s worth noting that your new product can alienate existing customers, especially in the initial stages. In this scenario, you can either see it as a worthy risk for your innovation and hope it pays off later, or you can create complementary services that might help retain your highest-paying customers.

4. Test new products

Create prototypes of new products for your Blue Ocean Strategy. Use focus groups, social media, surveys, demos, and more to see if your customers will actually like your product or if more changes need to be made.

Take the feedback from this stage seriously. It can make or break the formulation of your Blue Ocean Strategy. Feedback can also help your team come up with new features.

5. Promote new products or services

After you’ve created your Blue Ocean Strategy and product, it’s time to promote your new offerings and attract a new audience segment.

Use market research and customer segmentation to create content and social media marketing campaigns that increase product reach and build brand awareness.

Your marketing strategy needs to be sustainable, so you can seize new growth and build on it. If customers don’t know about your product, they can’t use it. Marketing also informs noncustomers of your products, boosting sales.

• Use the Blue Ocean Strategy to outsmart your competitors

Creating your own blue ocean lets your business focus on solving new problems in innovative ways rather than getting stuck in the rat race of the red ocean.

Depending on your initiative and strategy execution, you can leave your competitors in the dust and capture a large market share. You can use Miro to collaboratively build, visualize, and optimize your blue ocean frameworks online.

Curious to see what apps Miro integrates with?

Get started today, miro is your team's visual platform to connect, collaborate, and create — together..

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This lesser known European beach has the bluest water in the world

When picking the perfect locale for a beach vacation, travelers often seek out the bluest waters to frolic in and relax.

It’s no wonder why. Research shows that being near, in or under water offers a slew of benefits for our well-being . Blue spaces have a calming effect, helping to lower stress and anxiety and provide a respite to the over-stimulated states of mind we often find ourselves in. 

To help travelers pick their perfect beach with stunning blue water, London-based travel agency CV Villas conducted a study in March to find the beaches with the bluest waters, according to scientific color theory. To do this, the team analyzed the RGB color codes of unfiltered Google map images of 200 popular beaches worldwide to see how close they compare to the YInMn Blue, an intensely vibrant blue shade discovered in 2016. 

While most people imagine the most azure waters to be somewhere tropical like Maldives or Bora Bora, the research revealed that some of the bluest waters can be found in Europe, especially around Greece. (Nevertheless, travelers to the tropics will still find the water just as beautiful and relaxing.) 

“Not only does our research highlight the stunning coastal destinations that Europe has to offer, but it also reinforces the allure of lesser-known gems like Pasqyra Beach in Albania,” said Ben Briggs, CV Villas’ head of marketing, in a statement. “We hope that our study gives recognition to the natural beauty that lesser-known destinations can offer to travellers who are seeking an unforgettable seaside experience – and getting the chance to say they have officially swam in the world’s bluest water.”

Learn more: Best travel insurance

Here are the beaches with the bluest waters.

Itching for a beach vacation? Cheap airline tickets to nab this Spring and Summer

10. Los Lances Beach, Spain

With vast sandy areas and dunes, the sprawling Los Lances Beach is aptly located on the Costa de la Luz, meaning the Coast of Light, in southern Spain. Situated along the Atlantic Ocean, the beach’s waters are a clear, deep blue. On a clear day, beachgoers can spot the silhouette of Morocco in the distance. 

9. Ombros Gialos, Greece

On the Greek island of Sambros, Ombros Gialos Beach is ideal for adventurers as the hidden cove is only reachable by a winding road or boat. Although mostly rocky and sometimes with rough conditions, the small beach has a dock for swimmers or snorkelers to launch themselves into the bright turquoise sea. 

8. Praia do Carvalho, Portugal

Surrounded by dramatic golden cliffs and a rock formation out at sea, this quiet beach is beloved for its clear turquoise waters. To access the beach, visitors need to walk through a man-made tunnel and stairs, where a tranquil sandy beach awaits on the other side. 

7. Foki Beach, Greece

Situated on the Ionian island of Cephalonia, Foki Beach is named after the monk seals who used to frequent the beach. Flanked by olive and pine trees, the pebble beach features clear blue waters for swimmers and snorkelers. Visitors can meander around the beach via nearby trails. 

6. Voulisma Beach, Greece

Also known as Golden Beach, this crescent-shaped beach is one of the most popular destinations in eastern Crete. With soft white sand and calm azure water, beachgoers enjoy spending the entire day there, stopping at nearby snack stands or renting umbrellas for respite from the sun. 

5. Kaputa Beach, Turkey

As one of the most popular beaches along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, Kaputa Beach is known for its gold sand and crystal clear waters. Nestled between two cliffs, the beach is only accessible by descending a steep flight of stairs that have been carved into the cliffside. Visitors can rent sunbeds and umbrellas to enjoy the beach.

4. Plage de la Verne, France

In the South of France's Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, Plage de la Verne is a charming pebble cove on the Saint-Mandrier-sur-Mer peninsula. Visitors can reach the beach via a coastal path. With just a little space for beachgoers to relax under the sun, the water is beautifully blue but not very swimmable. 

3. Kassiopi Beach, Greece

Corfu’s Kassiopi Beach is a stunning bay with a white pebble beach and water so clear that people can see the fish right below the surface. Guests can enjoy sunbathing, swimming, snorkeling, paddleboarding or jet skiing, or wandering along a charming waterfront promenade with cafes and tavernas. 

2. Paralia Mpouka, Greece

Located on the Ionian Sea, Paralia Mpouka is a spacious resort-laden beach with stunning water in various shades of bright blue. It’s also a popular beach destination, where guests frolic in the shallow water, kayak or paddleboard. Once the wind picks up in the afternoon, the favorite beach pastime activity is windsurfing. 

1. Pasqyra Beach, Albania

Landing the top spot for the bluest water is Pasqyra Beach, or Mirror Beach. The beach earned its name for its crystal clear water reflecting the sun like a mirror. The coastline is known to be breathtaking, surrounded by rock formations and mountains. Visitors to the beach take a dirt road and descend a rocky path. While the water is beautiful, it’s known to get pretty crowded as the day goes on.

Kathleen Wong is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in Hawaii. You can reach her at [email protected] .

Maps of the April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse

By Jonathan Corum

On April 8, the moon will slip between the Earth and the sun, casting a shadow across a swath of North America: a total solar eclipse.

By cosmic coincidence, the moon and the sun appear roughly the same size in the sky. When the moon blocks the glare of the sun, the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, will be briefly visible.

Below are several maps of the eclipse’s path as well as images of what you might experience during the event.

Where Can I See the Total Eclipse?

The eclipse will begin at sunrise over the Pacific Ocean, then cut through Mexico and cross the United States from Texas to Maine. Most of North America will see a partial eclipse, but viewers within the deepest shadow — a band sliding from Mazatlán, Mexico, to the Newfoundland coast near Gander, Canada — will experience a total solar eclipse.

Percentage of

the sun obscured

during the eclipse

Indianapolis

Little Rock

San Antonio

Viewers inside the path of the total eclipse may notice a drop in temperature , a lull or shift in the wind , the appearance of bright planets in the sky, and the quieting of birds and other wildlife.

Many cities lie inside the path of the total eclipse, as shown below, the width of which varies from 108 miles to 122 miles.

5:13 p.m. NDT

20% partial eclipse

NEWFOUNDLAND

SASKATCHEWAN

Fredericton

4:33 p.m. ADT

3:26 p.m. EDT

3:20 p.m. EDT

Minneapolis

3:18 p.m. EDT

3:13 p.m. EDT

San Francisco

90% partial eclipse

3:05 p.m. EDT

Los Angeles

1:51 p.m. CDT

1:40 p.m. CDT

1:33 p.m. CDT

12:16 p.m. CST

12:12 p.m. CST

11:07 a.m. MST

Mexico City

EL SALVADOR

12:23 p.m. CST

1:36 p.m. CDT

3:09 p.m. EDT

3:27 p.m. EDT

Explore our interactive cloud outlook for eclipse viewing times and average cloud data at your location.

What Will I See?

A composite image of the 2017 solar eclipse over Madras, Ore.

Aubrey Gemignani/NASA

If the sky is clear, viewers in the path of the total eclipse should see a “diamond ring” effect a few seconds before and after the total eclipse, as the edge of the sun slips in and out of view.

The “diamond ring” effect during the 2017 solar eclipse.

Rami Daud/NASA, Alcyon Technical Services

The sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is normally hidden by the sun’s glare. These tendrils and sheets of gas, heated to a million degrees Fahrenheit or more, are in constant motion and shaped by the sun’s swirling magnetic field.

The sun’s corona during the 2017 solar eclipse.

The sun is relatively active this year and is nearing the expected peak of its 11-year solar cycle . Researchers at Predictive Science are using data about the sun’s magnetic field to predict and model a dramatic corona for the April eclipse.

A prediction of how the sun’s corona might appear during the April 8 total eclipse.

Predictive Science

What Colors Should I Wear?

As the sky darkens, light-sensitive cells in human eyes become more sensitive to blue and green hues than to reds and oranges. This shift in color perception is known as the Purkinje effect , after a 19th-century Czech scientist, and is typically seen at twilight.

Watching the 2017 total eclipse at Southern Illinois University.

Andrea Morales for The New York Times

To take advantage of the Purkinje effect, Solar Eyeglasses suggests wearing green clothes or a contrasting combination of greens and reds. Blue-green colors (shorter wavelengths) will appear brighter, while red colors (longer wavelengths) will appear to recede into the darkness.

What If I Miss It?

The next two total solar eclipses in the United States won’t occur until 2044 and 2045 . But eclipse chasers might catch one in 2026 in Greenland, Iceland and Spain; 2027 along the coast of Northern Africa; 2028 in Australia and New Zealand; or 2030 across Southern Africa and Australia.

A Total Solar Eclipse Is Coming. Here’s What You Need to Know.

These are answers to common questions about the April 8 eclipse, and we’re offering you a place to pose more of them.

By Katrina Miller

What’s the Cloud Forecast for Eclipse Day? See if the Weather Is on Your Side.

April 8 could be your best opportunity to see a total solar eclipse for decades. But if clouds fill the sky, you may miss the spectacle.

By Josh Katz, K.K. Rebecca Lai and William B. Davis

• Share full article

Our Coverage of the Total Solar Eclipse

Dress for the Occasion:  What should you wear for the eclipse? Our fashion critic weighs the options , including an unexpected suggestion from scientists.

Free to View:  Six inmates in upstate New York prisons who sued the state won their lawsuit to view the eclipse , arguing it “is a religious event.” But a statewide prison lockdown during the eclipse will remain in place.

Hearing the Eclipse:  A device called LightSound is being distributed to help the blind and visually impaired experience what they can’t see .

Sky-High Hotel Prices: One Super 8 hotel in the eclipse’s path is charging $949 a night . Its normal rate is $95.

Animal Reactions : Researchers will watch if animals at zoos, homes and farms act strangely  when day quickly turns to night.

A Rare Return:  A total solar eclipse happens twice in the same place every 366 years on average. But people in certain areas will encounter April 8’s eclipse  about seven years after they were near the middle of the path of the “Great American Eclipse.”

 No Power Outages:  When the sky darkens during the eclipse, electricity production in some parts of the country will drop so sharply that it could theoretically leave tens of millions of homes in the dark. In practice, hardly anyone will notice  a sudden loss of energy.

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Stay near popular pashkovskiy attractions.

• SBS Megamall

You can browse for the perfect souvenirs at SBS Megamall during your stay in Krasnodar. Amble around the area's parks or experience its theater scene.

Catch an event at Ice Palace during your trip to Krasnodar. Make some time to visit the casinos while you're in the area.

Kuban Stadium

Catch an event at Kuban Stadium during your trip to Krasnodar. Amble around the area's parks or experience its theater scene.

• FC Krasnodar Stadium

Catch an event at FC Krasnodar Stadium during your trip to Krasnodar. Amble around the area's parks or experience its theater scene.

Kuban State University

Take a campus tour or just explore the area of Kuban State University, during your travels in Krasnodar. Amble around the area's parks or experience its theater scene.

You can do some window-shopping at OZ Mall during your trip to Krasnodar. Discover the area's theater scene and casinos.

Pashkovskiy Travel Info

Frequently asked questions.

Apartment on Dushistaya street : Visitors like this Pashkovskiy vacation home rental. It offers a balcony, a garden, and air-conditioning to help you feel perfectly comfortable in your new surroundings. Kitchen amenities include a fridge, an oven, and a microwave. See all vacation rentals in Pashkovskiy .

Yes, most hotel bookings are refundable provided that you cancel prior to the accommodation's cancellation deadline, which is often 24 or 48 hours before the scheduled arrival. If your reservation is non-refundable, you might still have the option to cancel and be given a refund within a 24-hour period of booking. Filter your search by fully refundable to find flexible hotel deals in Pashkovskiy.

For additional details about updating your trip to Pashkovskiy or cancelling it, go to https://www.expedia.com/service/ .

Hotel Chekhov is a favorite 4-star hotel with our travelers looking for a stylish accommodation, featuring 64 guestrooms, a restaurant, and a bar.

Hotel Marton Lion is a highly recommended spa hotel with a bar. Kick back and relax in the sauna. See all spa hotels in Pashkovskiy .

Aerootel Krasnodar is a popular 3-star hotel featuring free WiFi and free parking. It's located a short 0.9 mi (1.5 km) from Krasnodar Intl. Airport. Other good options near the airport are Hotel Kruiz and 8 Avenue .

Visitors can enjoy all that Pashkovskiy has to offer including the theaters, museums, and shopping. In Pashkovskiy, there are 16 hotels and other accommodations to choose from. Find out more about Pashkovskiy .

Favorite places to visit include OZ Mall , Kuban Postal Museum , and Krasnodar musical theatre of " Premiere" Creative Group named after L. Gatov . You'll also find Safari Park and SBS Megamall in the area. Check out what more to see and do in Expedia's Pashkovskiy guide .

The hottest months are usually August and July with an average temp of 75°F, while the coldest months are January and February with an average of 39°F. Average annual precipitation for Pashkovskiy is 28 inches.

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• Krasnodar musical theatre of Premiere Creative Group named after L. Gatov
• Concert Hall of the Kuban Cossack Choir
• VKK Expograd South
• GBUZ NII-KKB No1
• Krasnodar Safari Park
• FC Krasnodar Park
• Krasnodar Expo
• Balneo Sanatorium
• Basket-Hall Krasnodar

Hotels near Pashkovskiy Airports

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Watch CBS News

Earthquake maps show where seismic activity shook the Northeast today

By Lucia Suarez Sang

Updated on: April 5, 2024 / 7:51 PM EDT / CBS News

Residents across the Northeast were rattled by a  4.8 magnitude earthquake that shook  the densely populated New York City metropolitan area and much of the surrounding region on Friday morning. The U.S. Geological Survey was quick to release maps showing the spot where the quake was centered, in New Jersey, and the area where it was felt.

The USGS reported the quake occurred about 7 miles north of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. It indicated that the quake might have been felt by more than 42 million people. There were several aftershocks later in the day, including one with a magnitude of 4.0.

People in Baltimore , Philadelphia , New Jersey, Connecticut, Boston and other areas of the Northeast reported shaking. Tremors lasting for several seconds were felt over 200 miles away near the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border.

The map below shows the seismic intensity of the earthquake. The map, which is mostly a lighter shade of blue, shows that the intensity was light to weak, depending on the distance from the epicenter. 

Another map released by the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre on X, formerly Twitter, highlights the eyewitness reports of shaking and possible damage levels during the seismic event. 

#Earthquake 18 mi W of #Plainfield (New Jersey) 23 min ago (local time 10:23:20). Updated map - Colored dots represent local shaking & damage level reported by eyewitnesses. Share your experience via: 📱 https://t.co/IbUfG7TFOL 🌐 https://t.co/wErQf69jIn pic.twitter.com/jBjVw1ngAD — EMSC (@LastQuake) April 5, 2024

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams have been briefed on the quake. 

"We're taking this extremely seriously and here's why: There's always the possibility of aftershocks. We have not felt a magnitude of this earthquake since about 2011," Hochul said. 

People across the region were startled by the rumbling of the quake. One New York City resident told CBS New York's Elijah Westbrook, "I was laying in my bed, and my whole apartment building started shaking. I started freaking out," 

It's not the first time the East Coast and New York City have been hit by an earthquake. 

A 5.0 quake was measured in New York City in 1884. 

The shaking stirred memories of the Aug. 23, 2011, earthquake that jolted tens of millions of people from Georgia to Canada. Registering magnitude 5.8, it was the strongest quake to hit the East Coast since World War II. The epicenter was in Virginia.

That earthquake left cracks in the Washington Monument, spurred the evacuation of the White House and Capitol and rattled New Yorkers three weeks before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

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More from CBS News

How are earthquakes measured? How today's event stacks up to past quakes

What causes earthquakes? The science behind why they happen

Earthquake snarls air and train travel in the New York City area

NYC, New Jersey earthquake witnesses share first-hand accounts

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Roza Hutor i Krasnaja Poljana

Još jedan kišni dan je doneo prostor za dublja istraživanja. Sedam u gradski autobus i pravac poslednja stanica Roza Hutor. To je onaj autobus koji sam već spominjao koji ide i na aerodrom, i bilo mi je jasno da je u pitanju ogromna gradska linija. Aerodrom je nekih 40 km od Sočija. A bus ide dalje. Cena karte mi je samo podgrejala sumnju. Gde će ovo da me odvede? Suviše lenj, da bih guglao unapred.

Posle aerodroma, autobus kreće uzbrdo i više se more ne vidi i ogroman venac planina ispred. Tunel. I ualzimo u klimatološko-vegatitvnom smislu u drugi svet. Dobro je niko ne traži pasoš, što će reći da smo još uvek u Rusiji. Svestan kavkaske nestabilnosti, ne mogu reći da mi je svejedno. Ali ne izlazim iz autobusa. Autoput pored reke i idemo uzbrdo. Nalazimo se u zoni gde su održane Olimpijske igre, bar oni sportovi na otvorenom i koji zahtevaju sneg, i tada mi postaje jasno šta je u stvari bilo.

Poslednje od svih naselja je Roza Hutor. Nekih 110 km, od Sočija. Planinski kraj sa vrhovima od preko 2.500m, idealno za zimske Olimpijske igre. Logično je i bilo da kandiduju to mesto. Kvaka je bila u marketingu, kao da smo mi proglasili da su naše Olimpijske Igre bile održane u Splitu ili Dubrovniku, a prećutimo informaciju da su skijaške staze 200km dalje u Sarajevskim planinama.

Najrealnije bi bilo da su nazvali Olimpijada u Krasnoj Poljani – koje je najveće mesto u toj dolini, ali širi kontekst investicije je nadležne jednostavno podestio da se može reći da je Olimpijada u Sočiju. Rečeno-učinjeno!

Pet mesta jedno za drugim, a osim spomenutih vredno pomena je Gazpromneft gorod – ime sve kaže. Sve u svemu desetine hiljada apartmana, hotela, najnoviji i najveći centar zimskog turizma i Rusiji, koji tek počinje da se zahuktava, sa svom potrebnom infrastrukturom, organizacijom i estetikom. Definitivno se nema utisak da si u Rusiji. Ipak slovenska duša vrlo brzo nađe prostor da se pokaže u svoj svojoj veličini.

Dolazim do sistema žičara u Rozi Hutor, kabine koje voze do vrha gde ima dobar restoran, koji mi se učini kao dobra varijanta za popiti kafu na letnjem godišnjem. Naročito sam o tome razmišljao dok sam posmatrao tablu sa meteorološkim informacijama. Vi kako hoćete, ali ja nikad nisam na letnjem godišnjem pio kafu, a da je napolju padao sneg i bilo minus dva.

Međutim, nedostatak turističke koncepcije, nezainteresovanost radnika da objasni, niti na bilo koji drugi način da saznam, me ostavljaju bez najbolje kombinacije. A to je žičara do vrha, ručak u restoranu uračunat u cenu, a posle povratak peške kroz šumu nizbrdo po skijaškim stazama. Nažalost! Ovako su me izbacili na sredini žičare uz komentar da dalje žičara ne radi, tj radila je, ali treba uzeti još jednu kartu – koja je sama po sebi skuplja nego opisana kombinacija u jednom pravcu! – nešto sam ja sa indignacijom odbio.

Nemadoh druge nego sam po kavkaskoj šumi i po kiši da prošetam nadajući se da kavkaski ovčari ne hodaju slobodno, a da su medvedi već pojeli dovoljno ruskih turista i da nisu gladni. Za one koji ne znaju, medved nikad ne napada, osim kad mečka brani mečiće. Tako uplašen i pokisao nalećem na mladi bračni koji se pojavio iz nekog šumarka.

„Dobar dan!“

„Da li mogu s vama dalje da se šetam, strah me?“

„Naravno, i nas je same strah. Odakle ste, lepo govorite ruski?*“

„Iz Srbije!“ – brzo odgovorih da prekratim nepotrebna objašnjenja.

„Izvinite za Borisa Jeljcina. Neće nam se ponoviti! A i Klintonovima smo odbrojali dane.“

Na dalje je razgovor tekao kao da se znamo sto godina. Oni su iz Kirova, to je negde na severu Rusije, rade u naftnom sektoru – jok sadiće banane, i u Rozi Hutor su da iskoriste nekih par dana slobodnih između dve bušotine. Karijerni inženjer i doktorka.

Kafa sa šlagom, keksom i bocom toskanskog vina.

Vrh! U svakom smislu.

Da je moglo, biti pametan pa tada završiti godišnji, no ja hteo da isprobam i ruski voz.

Tačno je svako budala ko je ikad pričao o Rusiji, a nije naglasio ovo što sada sledi. Ljudi, jeste li vi normalni? Jeste li vi ikad videli normalnu zemlju? Da li ste ikad bili u Evropi, da ne kažem sad u Sloveniji ili Hrvatskoj?

„Ruski voz, to je romatika. Ko nije probao ruski voz ne zna šta je lepota zivljenja.“ Floskula do floskule.

Da odmah stavim tačku: Voz je ono što ima u Nemačkoj, Španiji, Francuskoj,Holandiji…

Kakva Rusija ,kakav voz? Vi svi niste normalni.

Dodjem na stanicu, dajte mi jednu kartu do Kransodara. Poče ona sa pitanjima, kušet, ovo-ono, daj ženska glavo, jednu normalnu kartu i da krećem. Dade ona, kada karta jedno tri eura skuplja od one cene koju su mi rekli u Krasnodaru. Ima i numeracija, bilo mi je jasno da tu moram i sesti, nema veze, čekam na platformi, voz kasni 10 minuta, ali na tabli piše da je na vreme ( duša slovenska!) i uđem.

Na ulasku u vagon,gospođa u uniformi, sprovodi do kupea. Kupe liči na normalan, dole sedišta, sa tapacirungom iz ’74, a gore gde mi držimo torbe, kreveti umesto prostora za torbe. Sam sam u kupeu pa me boli uvo za torbu. Voz ide brzo, ali staje veoma često, u skoro svakom mestu, i tu onda stoji, pa stoji, na nekim mestima dvadeset minuta bez nekog vidljivog razloga. Jasno mi postaje kako ide 300 km 6/7 sati. Između stanica ide 100 na sat, ali zato stoji na stanicama toliko da mu je prosečna brzina kretanja oko 50 km/h.

Opušten, ja samo do Kransodara, i mislim se u sebi koja budala ide do Sankt Peterburga – preko 48 sati za nepunih 2.500 km . Malo spavao, malo čitao,proći će. Kad u poslednjoj stanici na moru, ulazi stariji bračni par, ja ioanko sedim u ćošku, ne smetam nikome. Gospođa posle dobar dan, krene nešto da komentariše svom mužiću. Pokuša on meni nešto da objasni, ja koliko sam razumeo objasnim njemu da imam kartu za taj kupe, da sedim na jednom sedištu i da mi nije jasno šta hoće reći. Pozva on domaćicu vagona. Krene objašnjavanje. Oni su kupili karte za donji red sedišta a ja za krevet gore.

Kažem ja da jesam turista, ali nisam glup. Tražio sam normalnu kartu, koju sam platio i koji evrić preko cene koja mi je rečena i šta sad oni tvrde da sedim na pogrešnom mestu? Farbajte vi nekog drugog! Sediš na pogrešnom mestu, to nije sedište idiote turistički nego luksuzni krevet, a ti si platio jeftiniju kartu, i trebaš da ležiš na onom gore krevetu. Nismo se razumeli, nisam tražio kušet kola, nego normalnu kartu i normalno sedište, i neću se pentrati na krevet, hoću da sedim kao normalan čovek. Da bi sedeo trebalo je da kupiš skuplju kartu tj kartu za donji red sedišta, e onda u toj prvoj klasi imaš pravo da sediš ili ležiš na donjim sedištima.

Jeste li vi svi normalni šta pričate? Već i ova karta nije puno jeftinija od aviona, a kamoli da sam još platio koji evrić više, mogao sam biznis klasom leteti. Ne znamo mi ništa, dodade gospođa koja je već krenula da gricka iz pune švercerske torbe – pa sam ja shvatio da ona putuje vozom da bi mogla da izgricka celu švercersku torbu do St Peterburga. Ne postoji drugi racionalni razlog, pošto su oni definitvno platili voznu kartu više od avionske.

Vidi domaćica, da se stvari otimaju kontroli, i preporučenom ponašanju od strane nadležnog proleterskog komiteta, pa me pozva u svoj kupe i ponudi mi da sednem na recimo normalno sedište. Skuva i kafu (koju mi je posle uredno naplatila) i počnemo razgovor. Razgovor koji je meni najviše otvorio oči. Razgovor koji me je spustio sa krasnodarskih naftaških solitera, Sočanskih vila, Olimpijskog glamura i mermera Moskovskih terminala.

„Ajde malo prošetaj da vidiš drugu i treću klasu voza, taman dok skuvam kafu“, reče domaćica.

Strašni sude, u drugoj klasi imaju samo kupei sa krevetima kakvi su bili ona dva na gornjem nivou u mom kupeu, a u trećoj klasi leže na nekim drvenim klupama. Urednost svega, kao i putnici i sve vizuelno je u skladu sa nazivom – druga i treća klasa.Tu je ona cena što su mi bili rekli. Brzo se vratim i pitam kako vi nemate normalne vozove.

„Pa nema normalnijih, to je normalan ruski voz.“ Domaćica je još uvek ljubazna.

Sednem, kafa je na stočiću, srknem da dođem sebi.

„Da li ovakav voz ide transsibirskom?“

„Kvalitetniji i skuplji polasci da. Ostali su u lošijem standardu.“

„To je naša zemlja, mi je volimo, tako živimo i kome se ne sviđa, može da ide gde god hoće.“

„Da li znaš ti da ovi moji ludaci ubiše sa pričom o romatičnim ruskim vozvima, o duši putovanja po Rusiji?“

„To ti je Rusija, a ne Pulmanov hotel i staza Formule 1 u Sočiju. Dobro su ti rekli.“

„Pa oni su svi ludaci, šta je tu romantika? Umesto sat i po, voz ide 6 sati, skuplji od aviona, stoji, gužva, nema normalna sedišta, kasni, ovo ono, ukršta se s nečim u crnoj šumi….“

„Upamti, to je Rusija.“

„Ajd dobro, nek sam to i video, već sam bio počeo da se kolebam da možda EU nije zlatna. Evropo, volim svaki tvoj milimetar.“

„Srkni još koji gutljaj kafe biće ti bolje“, ljubazno se osmehnula domaćica.

„A ti, šta radiš u ovom vagonu?“

„Ja sam domaćica, brinem o bezbednosti, dočekujem i ispraćam putnike, na celoj dužini puta.“

„Hoćeš da kažeš da ti pratiš ovaj vagon i njegove putnike od granice sa Abhazijom do Sankt Peterburga?“

„Pedeset sati, na svakoj stanici staješ ulaziš/izlaziš, služiš…?“

„Kad spavaš?“

„Ima par stanica posle Rostova, kada ima malo veći razmak među stanicama pa mogu malo odspavati u tom kupeu.“

„Kako održavaš higijenu?“

„Tim kuvalom što sam tebi skuvala kafu, zagrejem vodu pa se u toaletu malo operem ispod miške, posle u Sankt Peterburgu ima za nas mogućnost da se sredimo i malo odmorimo.“

„Leti bude vrućina?“

„Plus četrdeset i gužva.“

„Erkondišn?“

„Vi Evropljani ste stvarno rasipni ludaci.“ Široko se nasmejala.

„Koliko dana budeš u S.Peterburgu?“

„Dana? Ti si definitivno lud. Stižemo pre podne tamo, a uveče nazad.“

„Čekaj, radiš puna dva dana i noći, pa onda odmaraš par sati, pa nazad opet isto, dva dana i dve noći?“

„Koliko onda dana budeš slobodna?“

„Naredni dan nastavljam neku drugu turu.“

„Hoćeš reći naredni dan, ideš do Vladivostoka? Deset dana i noći radiš?“

„Ne baš, moja železnička kompanija radi linije samo do Irkutska. Četiri dana i ćetiri noći.“

„Dobro četiri dana do St Peterburga i nazad i još osam do Irkutska i nazad i onda si dva meseca slobodna, zar ne?“

„Ne, onda idem ponovo za St Peterburg.“

„Da li imaš muža, decu, porodicu?“

„Imam. Žive u nekom selu 100km zapadno do Krasnodara.“

„Kad ih viđaš?“

„U zimskom periodu radim u proseku dva meseca, pa budem 10 dana slobodna.“

„Hoćeš reći, da leti radiš više?“

„Naravno, kapaciteti železnice nisu dovoljni i nemamo ljudi, pa leti radimo po tri meseca, a onda budemo nekoliko dana slobodni.“

„To je naša zemlja, mi je volimo, tako živimo i kome se ne sviđa, može da ide gde god hoće.. Mi nikad nismo imali mnogo. Dovoljno je da imam posao, da jedemo i pijemo – predaleko je zapadnjački luksuz od naših očiju.“

„Ajd dobro sad to, ali kakav vam je ovo sistem vozova. Ide sto na sat, a onda čeka po dvadeset minuta na nešto?“

„Mora da čeka, nema između stanica dva koloseka. Prevelika je Ruska železnička infrastruktura da bi bili dupli koloseci. Propuštamo jedan drugog, na drugarskoj osnovi. Svi čekaju po malo.“

„A što su spojeni lokalni, regionalni i vozovi dugih relaciji.“

„Ne pratim te?“

„Na primer u Nemačkoj i mnogim drugim normalnim zemljama, postoje vozovi na duge relacije, pa regionalni, pa lokalni. Ima voz Minhen – Hamburg, koji ide dvesta na sat, i staje na par stanica. Takav voz bi ovu relaciju Abhazija  -St Peterburg cepio za desetak sati. Recimo da bi on stajao u Krasnodaru, Rostovu i jos jedna dve stanice. A onda ako ideš u srednje mesto sedaš u tim glavnim stanicama u regionalni ili lokalni voz, i opet stigneš brže do krajnje destinacije nego ovako. Ne drndaš dugolinijske putnike zbog kratkolinijskih putnika.“

„Nepopravljiv si. Nikad u svojoj istoriji infrastruktura Rusije nije mogla da isprati potrebu sistema i naroda, uvek kaskamo. Treba nam hiljadu novih vozova svake godine, a i uz svo odricanje svih proletera ne uspevamo da napravimo više od petsto, i tako redom 200 godina od kada je izmišljem voz, ili sto od prvog aviona i tako dalje. Preveliki smo.“

„Sestro slatka…“

„Aj priznaj da u nemačkim vozovima i nije tako ukusna kafa, niti si sa ikim razgovarao?“

„Eto vidiš šta je ruska duša?“, osmeh joj je igrao u uglu oka.

„Vidim. To će ujedno i biti zaključak reportaže.“

„A on je: Posetite majku Rusiju!“

„Nije u duhu mog poimanja putovanja i pisanja o istima reći da je majka, a prećutati da je i maćeha živa. Rusija, ili privatan avion ili proleter na uranilovci.“

„Da li ide još nešto uz tvoje reportažice?“, poigrala se kažiprstom i maramom.

„Što se tiče javnosti, ne.“

Iskoristio bih ovu priliku da se zahvalim još jednom svom profesoru ruskog iz Vazduhoplovne gimanazije, pokojnom Miladinu Tomoviću, koji mi je dao i znanja i logike i hrabrosti da krenem u Rusiju sa školskim znanjem jezika. Iako je postojala vremenska distanca od gotovo 23 godine od srednje škole, ostalo je dovoljno znanja za preživeti i uživati. Na par mesta sam se setio najdirektnijih saveta i priča. Uvek je dobro u dubini nepoznate teritorije imati adekvatan citat iz literature kojim se ostvaruje strateški napredak u konverzaciji i kada se iz defanzivne pozicije prelazi u nadvišenje i ofanzivu (Ne napada se uzbrdo – Sun Cu).

Autor putopisa i fotografija je Aleksandar Kuzmanović. Još njegovih tekstova možete pročitati na blogu Vamos Tamos .

2 Komentara

7. novembar 2023.

Aleksandre, hvala Vam na ovoj predivnoj reportazi.

15. novembar 2023.

Postovani, znate Li mozda neku agenciju koja se bavi izdavanjem kuca ili stanova u Krasnodara? Hvala unapred..

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