Late last fall I received an e-mail from Harvard Business School Publishing announcing a new book. The title of the book was so compelling I immediately paid $6.00 to download an excerpt and read more. What compelled me were the breathtaking assertions in the title that you can create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant. The folks at HBSP tend to be a reserved lot so I figured there must be fire under this smoke. This is how they described the book:

Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in
head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth.
They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share,
and struggled for differentiation. Yet, these hallmarks of competitive
strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In
a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the
requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renee Aubergine
argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red
ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study
of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and 30
industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from
battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans"–untapped new
market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves–which the authors
call "value innovation"–create powerful leaps in value that often
render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy
presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and
outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture
blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about
strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future. W.
Chan Kim is the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair
Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD. Renee
Mauborgne is the INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Strategy
and Management.

The excerpt provided more detail on both the problem and approach – but nothing I could characterize as new or breakthrough to support a claim of creating uncontested market space. In fact it seemed as if the authors were simply repackaging long held notions about market niches. Which led me to establish contact with the authors via the following e-mail:

Renee, Chan,

Mike Smock here.

I¹m the managing director of vSente the San Francisco based marketing consultancy.

We have developed and practice a form of marketing campaigning designed to attack and dislodge the larger competitor.

So you can probably guess that your Blue Ocean piece caught my attention.

Especially since we draw on many military theories
for our practice and consider Porter¹s Competitive Advantage and
Competitive Strategy as foundations for successful marketing strategy.

Competitive cycles today have been compressed to days
and hours. All of the cases you cited were created back when
competitive cycles were months and years. A blue ocean strategy could
be executed with a reasonable expectation that your competition would
take years to respond to you.

Today, the internet, Fedex, Blogs, etc., has reduced
the vast blue ocean that once existed to a pond. There isn¹t a place
you can hide or operate today without attracting the attention of other
competitors. The blue ocean is actually a small pond and it is full of
blood-thirsty sharks.

I would like to propose a challenge for your
consideration. Have you ever done any war-gaming or strategy
simulations? What I’m proposing for your consideration is a game
situation that involves your group developing a Blue Ocean strategy
case. My group will then develop an Attack case to see if we can
dislodge you.

We have a relationship with The Alidade Group who
stages war games and simulations for both business and the defense
sector. This is their web

site:  http://www.alidade.net.
I think Alidade would find this to be a compelling proposition. They
could stage this as a full-on game with participants and observers or
we could host the game via the Internet.

Any interest?

I’ve had a couple of interesting e-mail exchanges with Chan and will continue to pursue the notion of a challenge. Interestingly enough, Chan is also the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD.

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