interesting and timely piece for me as we’re working on a marketing approach for a new set of capabilities. So I’ve been thinking a lot along these lines. Reading your post, I think the analysis is interesting, but from my current perspective, it seems there’s a gap. Of course, I could be wrong or misunderstanding what’s been written. Two things which frequently happen. With that caveat, here is my thinking.

Blue Ocean:
To me, what one is looking for are “ideal customers”. An ideal customer is one that has a problem (pain) that we can solve with a solution we’ve already developed or understand how to solve with capabilities we already have.

Persona/stereotype:
The types of people one’s likely to encounter at an ideal customer. If you can imagine how that person feels the pain we are trying to address. The more refined our understanding of that persona, the more sensitive we will be and the more likely we are to recognize it.

Marketing:
(This is the gap I’m thinking about) Good marketing should allow each persona to identify how our solution addresses their pain clearly enough that they want to find out more about our solution.

For me, marketing materials are very specific.
1. 30 second pitch.
2. 1 page brochure (both sides with meaningful pictures and < 200 words)
3. Case study (3 or 4 pages with pictures and < 1,000 words)

I’m a firm believer that one should innovate marketing rapidly and refine it based on the feedback from potential customers. As an engineer whose been burned, my experience has taught me not to innovating products until customers have signed on the dotted line.

In today’s world, it costs less than $300 (check out crowdSPRING http://www.crowdspring.com/) and a couple days to create professionally designed and targeted brochures. Refining costs nothing other than printing at Kinko’s.

To me, that is where one should focus their innovation efforts. The innovation should be based on the feedback from potential customers. From that, refine your understanding of stereotypes, messages and materials.

That is my thinking. Your combination of Blue Ocean and Personas was helpful, but where the payoff should be is in refined marketing materials.

Best wishes and eternal thanks from your loyal reader,

Andy

“Blue Ocean” says to find the over-served consumer. Doing so means that you would write personas only on the over-served consumer. That would give you far fewer personas. Christensen focused on the over-served consumer while Moore focused on the non-customer. Both Christensen’s and Moore’s
approaches are excluded since they are how you commercialize a technological innovation, the birthing of new categories, rather than the blue ocean remix of existing categories.

In one of Moore’s books, maybe “Dealing with Darwin,” he mentioned how technology adoption lifecycle startups get M&A’ed by the blue chips. This after the startup’s offer is well into a red ocean play.

As for analysis, I’d suggest that doing a factor analysis for each persona population is the way to go. These analyses would differ in terms of the variance covered by a given factor, hence the factors would occur in different sequences as well.

While “Blue Ocean” might seem reverse engineered, it claims that it provides an actionable receipe. From my reading, I agree, that the book provides an actionable receipe, although, I would hate to be in a situation where I needed to do that. Instead, I would opt for technical innovation. “Blue Ocean” is really something that the blue chips would concern themselves with, not a startup. It’s what you do when the realities of cost management against the need for wealth creation is recognized, and when you have firmly bought into the orthodoxy that discontinous innovation is risky. In real life, when does the former happen? Rarely. And, when does the latter happen? Being orthodoxy, this falsehood is bought into all the time.

The Wikipedia entry for “Crossing the Chasam” claims that Moore didn’t provide information about resource allocation. I could have swore that he did address these issues. In later books and consulting efforts, Moore did discuss resource allocation. That a book isn’t translatable into orthodoxy seems to be the claim that enables the dismissal of a book. I know that my first reading of “Blue Ocean,” long ago, earned it a dismissal. My later reading got my attention, because I had begun to focus on the red ocean problems faced by startups.

Are you going to do value-based pricing, mass customization, value merchant, one-to-one, and demand-side services while you bring up your second technology? Or, will you skip all of that and create a blue ocean?

I found the last appendix to be brilliant in regards to category determinism. I’ve always seen Moore’s technology adoption lifecycle, birth and life of a category, as a deterministic process.