Using Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas in Proposition Development

The market for products and services, especially in the tech space, is highly congested.   To engage your audience with messaging that resonates, you’ll need to expose the big advantages of your offer over rivals. One way to do that is a Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas.

Blue ocean strategy explained

Where Blue Ocean came from

It was a marketing theory that led to a book published in 2004 and written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, professors at the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (INSEAD).

Blue Ocean Strategy is a way to describe disruptive business strategies. A disruptive strategy is one that breaks the current rules of the market and provides the enterprise adopting it with an opportunity to disrupt the competitive landscape that exists.

The digital era redefines the potential of market disruption

For decades, businesses would operate within the rules of the markets they served. A marketing guru, Michael Porter, wrote plenty of books on how best to compete against rivals within the confines of their market.

The digital era changed all that. In today’s world, digital technologies are giving entrepreneurs many new tools to play with to disrupt the very structure of markets. Insurance companies can offer maintenance services, logistics companies can offer video subscriptions, software companies can sell taxi rides and bring food to your door, food retailers can sell mobile phone contracts and holidays… that sort of thing.

Why do you want to disrupt a market?

Not every company needs or wants to be disruptive. There are many happy business existences that thrive in the good old way of serving a mature market by offering a better product, more personalization, and/or great service. The thing is, in some markets, if you’re not the disrupter, your business is the one that gets disrupted.

How to disrupt

Creating a market disruption is done by first interpreting what the competitive levers of the market are—I.e., those aspects of propositions that customers use to make the decision of which offering to buy.

Having understood what factors go to influence buying decisions, suppliers have an opportunity to decide to do one of four things to their offering to make their offer more competitive/disruptive, namely to:

#1  ADD something

#2  GROW something

#3  REDUCE something

#4  REMOVE something

Put another way, any business has the opportunity to design a business model with the aim of maximizing or minimizing the position of its offer for any given competitive lever.

A blue ocean strategy canvas is a great way to articulate what makes you different to customers, investors and staff

Blue ocean is a fantastic instrument for exposing on a single page those things that make your offer different to that of your rivals, in situations where your offer is disruptive.  And I plan to show that with a worked example that highlights the point beautifully, I think.

Your customer value on a single page (a great way to expose your USP)

In this case, Encanvas wanted to create technology to democratize IT for digital workers looking for the autonomy to manage, process and present data within data-rich, but highly regulated corporate environments.

Encanvas is in the enterprise computing market, serving the longtail of demand for rapid applications developments, a space that’s increasingly served by low-code and no-code software development applications and cloud-native platforms.

Encanvas wanted to disrupt this market by giving digital workers the ability to work largely autonomously; to serve themselves with the data management, processing and publishing tools they needed to discharge their roles, without having to code or go begging to IT. This, when ‘documents’ haven’t moved on from the analog era.

The solution, Encanvas realized, was to invent a digital document for the digital era.

The competitive levers of this market are illustrated in the X-axis of the Strategy Canvas below, the Y-axis shows the variance between the traditional ERP systems of record, low-code rapid applications development, and the digital document offering of Encanvas.

In short, it shows the blue ocean between the various market offerings.

Final thoughts—How startups can leverage their blue ocean strategy

Sometimes, the idea of competition is scary to entrepreneurs. But competitors aren’t that scary really—they just hold a different set of cards. And, in reality, your customers probably don’t know ALL of your competitors.

In my experience, you only need to concentrate on being better than your closest competitor; the one that’s most likely to take your business away from you when it comes down to the wire.

Further Reading