Make your competition irrelevant!

Your sales are stagnating or already decreasing. Your market is saturated. All of the key players in the market have started a (severe) price war. Your margins are gone and there is no growth. If someone wins, someone else must loose. You are stuck in “red ocean” of bloody competition. Advice: get out of the red ocean and float yourself to untouched blue ocean market.

Of course it is not easy. If it was, everyone would do it all time. Actually many businesses do it all the time. Let me explain what I mean. As many of my readers are from telecom industry I will give you an telecom example. I am intentionally not using the Apple iPhone or iPad as an example as there are plenty of other examples that are known less known. One of them is this.

Huawei mobile

Huawei mobile is a Chinese electronics manufacturer. They started, in area of telecom, in the producing telecom network infrastructure. Which they did well and they are still doing well. Couple of years back Huawei was planning to enter the cellular handset market. They tried it but the success was rather poor. This market was globally dominated by Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG. There was hardly room for the big four, therefore it is needles to say that Huawei was not exactly successful. Instead of entering that market they figured out something else – in collaboration with cellular network operators.

The new emerging market was mobilizing data. Now comes the crucial point what made the difference in succeeding in this market. The big four shared a vision that mobile data would be driven my cellular handsets. All of them believed that the consumers would immediately buy expensive smart phones and start using them for email, internet and synchronizing their personal data. Huawei had another vision. They had a vision that the data market would be driven by mobilizing the Laptops first. This was crucial decision for Huawei. With that decision they entered an untouched new market, where was literally no competition. They had the required technology already, as well as manufacturing capacity and contacts to the potential buyers. By choosing to build USD data sticks they would be able to mobilize a huge quantities of already existing laptops. The USB data sticks from Huawei became a global success and a niche where Huawei is still holding nearly monopolistic market position. Lesson to learn here is: do not kill yourself by introducing new me too products or small improvements to existing products to the market which is saturated. Focus, think and re-think which are the underlying fundamentals of human behavior. Then develop appealing, focused and truly new products which hit these fundamental needs.