Blue Ocean Strategy

What most people mean

Kim and Mauborgne’s 2005 framework. Stop competing in “red oceans” (crowded markets with bloody competition). Create “blue oceans” (uncontested market space where competition is irrelevant). Sounds beautiful in a business school case study.

Where the definition breaks

Forget about finding that mythical blue ocean where you’re the only fish swimming. It’s a mirage.

The romantic version: find a market nobody has thought of, define it, own it. The reality: a market with zero competition usually has zero demand. And zero demand means you’re not building a business. You’re building a hobby.

I spent 18 months learning this. I tried to sell CRO services in Dublin. Nobody was doing it. Blue ocean, right? Turns out nobody was doing it because nobody wanted it. I was trying to convince Irish tourists to try snails with garlic-herb butter when all they wanted was lasagna.

A market full of competitors (both direct and indirect) is a good thing. It means there’s real demand, a hunger for what’s being offered. The energy is there. The category is alive.

The blue ocean narrative also misreads what the actual success stories did. Most “category creators” didn’t invent demand from nothing. They repositioned in adjacent, existing categories. The air fryer didn’t create a new appliance category. SEB took something people already knew (a fryer) and added a twist (cooking with air instead of oil).

How we define it at STFO

Don’t swim in empty water. Surf where the wave is forming.

Your goal is to find a category that’s in demand and that your segment both understands and wants. Think of it like surfing. You want to be on the wave as it’s forming, not as it’s fizzling out.

Standing out in a crowded market is a better problem than standing alone in an empty one. In a crowded market, you have existing demand, existing customer behaviour, and existing language that people use to describe what they need. Your job is to find the ignored struggles within that crowd. To solve problems the crowd is leaving unsolved.

A crowded category with proven demand + meaningful differentiation through ignored struggles is more powerful than an empty category where you have to explain what you even are.

Lucky you if you’re in a “boring” industry. It means there are more opportunities to stand out because companies tend to play safe. When I hear “boring,” it usually means a sector that’s been around for a while, with proven demand and established competition.

What it is NOT

• Not a strategy for most businesses (it’s a framework for MBA case studies)
• Not evidence that competition is bad (competition signals demand)
• Not what the cited examples actually did (most repositioned in existing categories)
• Not a reason to avoid crowded markets (the crowd is your opportunity)
• Not the opposite of the STFO approach (STFO finds new space within existing demand, not outside it)