Quotes About Differentiation

We live in a niche world.

A small company like Nichia should do niche products.

It took me years to separate Nick Foles the person from Nick Foles the football player.

If you're selling the same merchandise that's commonly available, and you've got no point of differentiation, you're dead.

All these years Litvinoff had imagined he was so much like his friend. He'd prided himself on what he considered their similarities. But the truth was that he was no more like the man fighting a fever in bed ten feet away than he was like the cat that had just slunk off: they were different species.

It's easier to know what you're not than what you are.

We have already seen that certain organisms, such as man, tend for a time to maintain and often even to increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the general stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation. Life is an island here and now in a dying world.

Mrs. Bennet, Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris, Mrs. Elton, the Steele sisters, Fanny Dashwood, Elizabeth Elliot, Mrs. Clay, Lady Catherine de Bourgh … all differentiated, all unique in their unpleasantness.

But differentiation loses its meaning when the features and functionality have exceeded what the market demands.

Functionality still matters, of course. But competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many manufacturers can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance, as traditionally defined. In a crowded marketplace, aesthetics is often the only way to make a product stand out.

It is conventionally believed that companies can either create greater value to customers at a higher cost or create reasonable value at a lower cost. Here strategy is seen as making a choice between differentiation and low cost.21 In contrast, those that seek to create blue oceans pursue differentiation and low cost simultaneously.

Blue ocean strategists do not seek to beat the competition. Instead they aim to make the competition irrelevant.

Never use the competition as a benchmark

Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, something that improves value but is not sufficient to make you stand out in the marketplace.

Companies should strive to make the competition irrelevant by offering buyers a leap in value.

It is important to distinguish between value innovation as opposed to technology innovation and market pioneering.

To stand apart in these overcrowded markets, you need to be creative through value innovation.

To maximize the size of their blue oceans, companies need to take a reverse course. Instead of concentrating on customers, they need to look to noncustomers. And instead of focusing on customer differences, they need to build on powerful commonalities in what buyers value.

In this way, blue ocean strategy makes sense of the strategic paradox many organizations face: the more they focus on coping with the competition, and striving to match and beat their advantages, the more they ironically tend to look like the competition. To which blue ocean strategy would respond, stop looking to the competition. Value-innovate and let the competition worry about you.

your offering needs to stand out as never before.

Value innovation is not the same as technology innovation.

At the same time, by eliminating many of the most costly elements of the circus, it dramatically reduced its cost structure, achieving both differentiation and low cost. Cirque strategically priced its tickets against those of the theater, lifting the price point of the circus industry by several multiples while still pricing its productions to capture the mass of adult customers, who were used to theater prices.

To produce a high-performing and sustainable blue ocean strategy, you need to ask the following questions. Are your three strategy propositions aligned in pursuit of differentiation and low cost? Have you identified all the key stakeholders, including external ones on which the effective execution of your blue ocean strategy will depend? Have you developed compelling people propositions for each of these to ensure they are motivated and behind the execution of your new idea?

Once a company creates a blue ocean and its powerful performance consequences are known, sooner or later imitators appear on the horizon.