The best kind of new market a
company can enter is one that it creates. This is so-called Blue Ocean
Strategy. How best to create new markets? Well, your existing customers
can tell you – if you’re sufficiently engaged with them.
Blue Ocean markets, in the scheme most recently brought up to date (by Kim and Mauborgne) from the original Harvard Business Review
premise, contrast with Red Oceans, which are markets already known,
mapped, and saturated with competitors fighting over finite profits.
Louis
Columbus points out what some organizations are already beginning to
learn, that going far beyond conventional notions of feedback and
inviting your customers to share in your developmental thought process,
can open up entire new vistas of opportunity for you. As Columbus
concisely summarizes:
“Competing for customers has never been more
challenging, intensely focused, or costly for manufacturers globally.
Instead of relying on plunging prices or continually adding in product
line extensions to marginally increase a given product’s market size
and potential sales, manufacturers must get back to what made many of
them successful to begin with, and that is concentrating on knowing the
unmet needs of customers and responding to them with innovative
products and solutions better than any competitor globally.” – Listen to Your Customers to Find the Blue Oceans
It may come as a surprise to some, but most
companies create blue oceans from their core businesses and strengths.
Columbus warns that blue ocean markets can’t be bought in, and new
technology doesn’t create it. What’s required is a degree of humility,
a throwing off of the idea that you already know the best way to
service your customers or your markets, and to initiate a strong Voice
of Customer (VoC) listening program.
One additional way to listen to the heartbeat of potential markets, he says, is through the blogosphere:
“There is an exponential growth of content being
generated by bloggers and many of them are hinting at the next blue
oceans in key markets. In addition many manufacturers have set up blogs
and even defined blogging policies for their employees. Using blogs as
a means of connecting with customers needs to be down with
transparency, honesty and directness. No sugar-coating problems, not
dodging customer complaints, but ownership and sincerity are critical
in the blogosphere. Start tracking what bloggers are saying about your
company, the industry, and what is going on in related areas as well,
as this is a great way to stay on the pulse of what one form of
exponentially growing voices of customers is saying.” – ibid
