Red Ocean Traps

As established markets become less profitable, companies increasingly need to find ways to create and capture new markets. Despite much investment and commitment, most firms struggle to do this. What, exactly, is getting in their way? World-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, the authors of the best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy have spent over a decade exploring that question. They have seen that the trouble lies in managers' mental models--ingrained assumptions and theories about the way the world works. Though these models may work perfectly well in mature markets, they undermine executives' attempts to discover uncontested new spaces with ample potential (blue oceans) and keep companies firmly anchored in existing spaces where competition is bloody (red oceans). In this bound version of their bestselling Harvard Business Review classic article, they describe how to break free of these red ocean traps. To do that, managers need to: (1) Focus on attracting new customers, not pleasing current customers; (2) Worry less about segmentation and more about what different segments have in common; (3) Understand that market creation is not synonymous with either technological innovation or creative destruction; and (3) Stop focusing on premium versus low-cost strategies.

The Harvard Business Review Classics series offers you the opportunity to make seminal Harvard Business Review articles a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world--and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne are Professors of Strategy at INSEAD and Codirectors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. They are the authors of the New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, BLUE OCEAN SHIFT and the international bestseller BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, which is recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written. Blue Ocean Strategy has sold over 3.6 million copies, is being published in a record-breaking 46 languages, and is a bestseller across five continents. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne rank in the top 5 management gurus in the world in the Thinkers50 list, a title they have held for ten straight years, and are the recipients of numerous academic and management awards around the world including the Nobels Colloquia Prize for Leadership on Business and Economic Thinking, the Carl S. Sloane Award by the Association of Management Consulting Firms, the Leadership Hall of Fame by Fast Company, and the Eldridge Haynes Prize by the Academy of International Business, among others. They are Fellows of the World Economic Forum and the founders of the Blue Ocean Global Network. For more on these authors and their new book, BLUE OCEAN SHIFT, see blueoceanstrategy.com.