As products and services increasingly become commodities in overcrowded industries and companies, profitable growth shrinks and companies are driven to compete primarily on cost. Companies in India today are competing in the global market place, where cost arbitration alone is not sufficient to differentiate and sustain the business. Historically, recessions are times of enormous creativity and breakthrough business launches. If we look at the current Indian IT services industry, the pure outsourcing or offshore development center business models are not able to deliver sustained growth. It is time for companies in the IT services sector to look into the Value Innovation – the cornerstone of Blue Ocean Strategy.

The long term solution for creating jobs is in companies creating compelling products and services that take them out of the vicious cycle of commodity completion. Lean times create innovation that is smarter than the innovation that is generated during the fatter times. They are smarter because they are based on ideas --- not big budgets, research and development, or technological breakthroughs. Therefore, Blue Ocean Strategy is a rising imperative for CXOs.

Blue Ocean Strategy is critical in today’s business climate, because prospects in most established market spaces – red oceans—are shrinking steadily. Technological advances have substantially improved industrial productivity, permitting suppliers to produce a plethora of products and services. And as trade barriers between nations fall and information on products and prices becomes instantly and globally available, niche/monopoly markets are continuing to disappear.

The result is that in more and more industries, supply is overtaking demand. This situation has inevitably hastened the commoditization of products and services, stoked price wars, and shrunk profit margins. If we look at some of the major brands in India, a variety of product and service categories have become more and more alike. And as brands become  similar, people increasingly base purchase choices on price. In overcrowded industries, differentiating brands becomes harder both in economic upturns and in downturns.

The question one has to answer is, “Is there is a systematic approach to creating blue oceans?” The authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, Prof. Chan Kim and Prof. Renne Mauborgne, began looking at companies spanning a 100-year period. During their analysis, history reveals that there are no perpetually excellent companies. Consider In Search of Excellence, the first best selling business book published in 1982. Within just five years, two-thirds of the identified model firms in the book had declined. Likewise, for those sample companies in the book Built to Last, another blockbuster business book, it was later found that if industry performance was removed from the equation, many of the companies in Built to Last were no longer exceptionally excellent.

Therefore, one can safely conclude that there is no perpetually high performing company and likewise there are no perpetually excellent industries. If we look at the once high performing telecom industry and its aftermath over a three year period from 2000 to 2003 -- the telecom industry globally  lost half a million jobs and was the cause of tremendous personal financial loss and upheaval. Four trillion dollars of market capitalization disappeared.

Consider the IT/BPO sector in India; a few years ago it looked like there was no stopping the meteoric rise and people envied companies in that industry. Today the reverse is largely true. When companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand, product/services become commodities and cut throat competition can be termed as ‘red oceans’.

Blue oceans in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today – the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored. It is vast, deep, and powerful in terms of profitable growth and infinite.

Therefore, after extensive analysis of the industry, Blue Ocean Strategy has revealed that the ‘strategic move’, and not the company or the industry, is the right unit of analysis for explaining the creation of blue oceans and the root of profitable growth. Strategic moves are a set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering. The basis of blue ocean systematic methodology is based on study of over 150 strategic moves from over 30 industries, spanning from 1880 to 2000.

The principles of Blue Ocean Strategy apply across all types of industries - from consumer product goods, pharmaceutical, financial services, entertainment, agriculture, IT and even government. In India, we have several opportunities to leverage and apply the principles of Blue Ocean Strategy to create uncontested market space.

For example, how do we compete and transform our coffee industry in India? Although India is not a major coffee exporting country, it is still a large producer of approximately 300,000 tons a year. Ensuring profitability and success of the coffee growers in the region is of paramount importance, beyond just economic reasons. Prolonged neglect of coffee plantations will result in ecological damage to the Western Ghats as each acre sustains almost 400 to 500 shade-bearing trees. It is time for us to look at the techniques of Blue Ocean Strategy and embrace value innovation.

Similarly, in the automobile industry -- India’s success story in the electric vehicle (EV) industry where Reva has created a blue ocean for itself as an ‘idea and knowledge company in the EV space’. Instead of competing against the traditional automobile manufacturer’s product  -red ocean, Reva has focused on the EV consumer, thereby creating a blue ocean for itself.

The success of IPL is yet an example of how a successful blue ocean has been created by reducing  spectator time, reducing the emphasis on classic batting and bowling techniques, raising the pace of the game and emphasis on athleticism, increasing the entertainment quotient via Bollywood and cheer leaders and overall creating a unique city/regional sports loyalty and entertainment experience.
We can, therefore, apply the principles and techniques of Blue Ocean Strategy to transform our healthcare industry via remote healthcare/diagnostics i.e. deploying networked MRI’s in tier2/rural India and providing affordable MRI services – Imaging as a Service. Educating the rural masses in India by looking at a unique way to reach out to them besides traditional brick and mortar institutions. Can we leverage remote education and create collaborative educational communities?

A rich array of companies have created blue oceans across diverse, and unexpected, industry domains from NetJets in jet travel, to NABI in the municipal bus industry, to Cemex in Cement, to Joint Striker Fighter in defense, to Cirque du Soleil in entertainment.

Whereas Blue Ocean Strategies create new market spaces and change industry dynamics, they are not necessarily initiated by new entrants to an industry. Blue oceans are created by both industry incumbents and new entrants. Therefore, CXOs at large and established corporations should find it comforting to note that blue oceans are created by both industry incumbents and new entrants – startups do not have natural advantages over established companies in creating new market space. Large R&D budgets are not the key to creating new market space. The key is making the right strategic moves. Companies that understand what drives good strategic moves will be best positioned to create multiple blue oceans over time, thereby continuing to deliver high growth and sustained profits. Therefore, creation of blue oceans is a product of strategy and as such is a direct result of managerial action, and not the size or age of the firm. CXOs are empowered to leverage the principles and techniques offered by Blue Ocean Strategy to enable transformative moves within their respective organizations.

India, with its explosive growth across industries, presents a very attractive market for increasing the Top Line for companies building products and solutions. In this context, India can no longer be viewed only as the provider of inexpensive technical and IT resources, but as a strategic market that is poised to take off and cannot be ignored. The growth in the Indian market spans across all verticals with spending increasing in double digits in many cases.

Non-Indian companies who wish to sell in these markets need to understand local practices and culture. As one would expect, selling in any market requires attention to certain Maslow elements like product quality, industry knowledge, and price / performance. But, a successful sale often happens with a strong influence from factors other than the three listed above. How often have we seen that a higher priced or a lower quality vendor walks away with a sale? Or even worse, when you think you have a sale in sight, for the situation to unravel for seemingly unknown reasons? These unknown reasons frequently have much to do with local factors, such as personal relationships between decision makers, understanding of cultural nuances of how to articulate business questions, and familiarity with local practices that engage organizational bureaucracies. 

Nonetheless, the fundamental questions still remain about selling: Is selling is an art? Or is it a science? Is it all about having the best relationships or having the best knowledge? Or having the best prices in relation to your competition? Is selling the same in every country globally and in every culture or sub-culture? Is it different selling high priced complex solutions versus simple commodity products?

None of these questions have obvious answers, and the answers could vary based on product complexity, customer situation, and cultural differences.  A successful salesperson will have to look at each of the variables, identify which ones are in play in any given situation, perceive who the decision makers are at various levels of the process, know when to press forward aggressively and when to scale back the forcefulness of rhetoric. In the West, once the initial contact has been made with a client or account, mutually defined contractual frameworks come into play, and these govern the trajectory of the relationship moving forward. Though, of course, comfort and mutual goodwill operate in every situation, the degree to which these undefined and intangible variables play a part is very context-specific. It is not that India does not have contract-driven business relationships, but in India the contractual obligations are reinforced and strengthened at every stage by cultural variables.

One may argue that the language of business is worldwide and that a business person in, say, Russia speaks the same language as a business person in Nigeria. There is certainly a great deal of truth in this perspective. A very successful businessman in the United States, the owner of a multigenerational furniture company, once told me that what he learned from his father is that a businessman’s success is always based on the integrity of his word. If you are known as someone whose word is not to be trusted, you will never be successful in entering markets or forging relationships.  This is indeed true, but in order for you to be perceived as “trustworthy,” you must know how to present yourself as such. And the presentation modes can vary from culture to culture, country to country. An executive who invests in multiple companies said, “We will never enter a market unless there is a trusted local partner who can help us navigate through local business practices.”

Therefore, small and medium companies who want to take advantage of the Indian market will do well to engage the help of a local partner, one they can trust to communicate the strengths of their products and services.  A potential local partner could use this current opportune moment to establish certain key infrastructures in preparation to act as the vanguard into the Indian market.  Some components of the infrastructure include a talented workforce, a strong network of local contacts, an understanding of local business practices, familiarity with government regulations, and ethics and integrity. These elements will all play a crucial role in expediting the journey from concept to cash. The above factors are wholly incorporated in ABOVE.

Kannankote “Sri” Srikanth
Member – Board of Directors
www.above-inc.com