How can you use the Blue Ocean Strategy to differentiate your startup?

2 How to use the Four Actions Framework?

The Blue Ocean Strategy provides a tool called the Four Actions Framework, which helps you analyze your current value proposition and identify how to create a new one. This framework consists of four questions: What can you eliminate that the industry takes for granted? What can you reduce that is less important to your customers? What can you raise that is more important to your customers? And what can you create that is new and valuable to your customers? By answering these questions, you can eliminate or reduce factors that are irrelevant or costly, and raise or create factors that are valuable or innovative. This way, you can lower costs and increase value, creating a blue ocean.

3 How to use the Strategy Canvas?

The Blue Ocean Strategy provides the Strategy Canvas, a graph plotting key factors of competition on the horizontal axis and the level of offering on the vertical axis. It helps you visualize your current position and your desired position in the market. To use it, you need to draw the value curve of your current offering, competitors, and new offering after applying the Four Actions Framework. This will enable you to identify factors that can be eliminated, reduced, raised, or created. The Strategy Canvas helps you see gaps and opportunities in the market and how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors.

4 How to use the Buyer Utility Map?

The Buyer Utility Map, provided by the Blue Ocean Strategy, is a matrix that assesses how your new offering creates utility for customers. It plots the six stages of the buyer's journey on the horizontal axis and the six utility levers on the vertical axis. The buyer's journey stages include purchase, delivery, use, supplements, maintenance, and disposal; while the utility levers are customer productivity, simplicity, convenience, risk, fun and image, and environmental friendliness. To use this tool, you need to identify points of pain or dissatisfaction that customers experience at each stage and for each lever; points of delight or satisfaction; and points of differentiation or innovation that your new offering provides. This map helps you see how your new offering creates value for customers and how to communicate it effectively.

5 How to use the ERRC Grid?

The ERRC Grid is an effective tool to summarize and communicate your Blue Ocean Strategy. It is a table that displays the four actions of the Four Actions Framework (Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create) on the columns, and the key factors of competition on the rows. To utilize the ERRC Grid, you should list the key factors of competition from the Strategy Canvas on the rows. Then, fill in the columns with the factors that you chose to eliminate, reduce, raise, or create based on the Four Actions Framework. Finally, emphasize the factors that are most distinctive and compelling for your new offering. This grid helps you observe how your new offering differs from yours and competitors' existing offerings, and how to concisely convey your value proposition.

6 How to test and execute your Blue Ocean Strategy?

Once you have developed your Blue Ocean Strategy, you need to test and execute it in the market. To do this, validate your assumptions and hypotheses about your new offering and your target market using experiments, surveys, interviews, or other methods. You should then refine and improve your new offering and value proposition based on the feedback and data from the validation process. Once that is done, launch your new offering in a small scale or a niche market to test the market response and the viability of your business model. Finally, scale up your new offering and marketing efforts to reach a larger market and generate more revenue and impact. Testing and executing your Blue Ocean Strategy helps to reduce risks and uncertainties of entering a new market while increasing the chances of success and sustainability.