Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas
The Strategy Canvas plots your offer against competitors across the factors an industry competes on, so you can see at a glance whether your curve just mirrors theirs or actually diverges.
Two lines run across the same factors, yours and a rival's, and you can see instantly where they diverge or simply overlap.
Reach for this when…
- You want to show, not just tell, how you differ from competitors.
- A team keeps investing in factors 'because everyone does', without checking if buyers care.
- You need one picture that makes a repositioning decision obvious to a room.
How to run it
- List the factors the industry competes on and invests in.
- Score your own offer on each factor, low to high.
- Score two or three competitors on the same factors.
- Plot the curves side by side and look for where yours simply tracks theirs.
- Use the Four Actions, eliminate, reduce, raise, create, to pull your curve away from the pack.
- Redraw the canvas after the change and check the new curve actually diverges.
A worked example
Situation. Ahmad Rizal runs PenangJet, a small domestic carrier in Malaysia competing against two national airlines on nearly identical factors: price, punctuality, route count, in-flight service.
Applied. Plotted on a strategy canvas, PenangJet's curve tracked the big carriers almost exactly, just lower on every factor because of scale, a losing curve to hold.
Result. He redrew it: dropped in-flight service and route count, raised punctuality hard, and created guaranteed same-day rebooking with no fee, a factor neither big carrier offered. The new curve finally looked like a different airline, not a smaller one, flying out of Penang.
The catch
The canvas is a picture, not proof, and it's easy to score your own offer generously and a rival's harshly without realising it. It also assumes the factors you listed are the ones buyers actually decide on, which is worth checking with buyers, not just the sales team.
If your curve after the redesign still has the same shape as your competitors', only shifted up, you've improved, not diverged.
Origin: W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne