Creative Management and Marketing: Blue Ocean Strategy

Creative Management and Marketing
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Creative Management and Marketing
Blue ocean strategy refers to the process of creating new demand by concurrently pursuing market differentiation and low prices. It is focused on creating new marketplaces free of competition as opposed to contending for customers with other companies. To do this, the stratagem encourages businesses to improve on their current efficiencies and eliminate all pain points that impede market differentiation and low prices. The blue ocean strategy is derived from the Blue Ocean Strategy book by Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne where they categorize the market universe into two groups: red ocean and blue ocean. Red oceans refer to all existing industries in which market boundaries are already demarcated and accepted. Companies have to outperform their rivals to acquire a larger share of the existing customer base, resulting in bloody competition. On the other hand, blue oceans refer to all industries that are yet to be conceived or tainted by competition (Asa et al., 2021). The market boundaries are yet to be defined or accepted and there are numerous unexplored opportunities for rapid growth and revenue generation.
One blue ocean strategy in the clothing retail industry relates to the use of showrooms to deliver personalized shopping experiences to customers. The changing consumer behavior in the retail industry means that the apparel industry must embrace innovation and convenience if they want to increase their market share, profit generation, and brand recognition. The post-pandemic era has seen many cloth retailers shift from brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce. E-commerce has several advantages over traditional retail including broader access to customers, lower operational costs, greater speed and flexibility, heightened shopping convenience, customer data insights, easy scalability of operations, higher profit margins, and targeted marketing among others (Stöcker et al., 2021). However, e-commerce has several critical disadvantages including limited customer engagement, poor product information, personalization gaps, and high customer returns, all of which negatively impact brand recognition, customer trust, and overall revenues. This essay will focus on showrooms as a blue ocean strategy that complements the function of e-commerce in clothing retail while eliminating its pain points.
Showrooms can be used to fulfill online orders in terms of value-addition activities like packaging and shipping, but more importantly, they can be helpful in increasing customer engagement, heightening product information, eliminating personalization gaps, and reducing customer returns to increase brand recognition, customer trust, and overall revenues. The focus of the blue ocean strategy is to heighten customer engagement by providing personalized shopping experiences and increasing product information. The divergence of the blue ocean strategy is to reduce customer returns and associated costs of low brand recognition, poor customer trust, and limited personalization. The tagline of the blue ocean strategy is “Providing personalized shopping experiences th...