Home | Subscribe | Contact Us | Advertise

Is Your Ocean Red or Blue?

Most of the books I read these days fall into my hands randomly, but they end up speaking to me on a personal level. One of these happy accidents recently happened when I borrowed Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. The book’s premise is that most companies in a given industry compete head-to-head. They follow the same conventional wisdom about what it takes to be successful. In the printing industry, for example, you have to offer high-quality products, great service and competitive pricing. When companies compete along narrow lines, executing the same fundamental strategies, the differences between them are superficial. They end up in bloody “red oceans” of fierce competition. It takes unconventional thinking to create blue oceans of “uncontested market space.”

The book charges readers to look across industries and groups for new ways of doing business. It also urges readers not to rely on conventional wisdom. A good example of the way this is practiced in our industry are the cues some distributors have taken from advertising agencies and marketing communications firms. They’ve integrated their manufacturing expertise with creative services. The conventional wisdom—that price is paramount—doesn’t apply in these models.
At Print Solutions, we believe our audience benefits from reading about innovative, successful business models, strategies and applications so they can work towards making their own competition irrelevant. More than ever, digital printing plays a role in the stories we write. This is the third annual issue in three years that Print Solutions has devoted to trends and applications in digital printing. If you thought pURLS were as sophisticated as digital print applications could get, think again. From transpromo statements (page 15) to personalized catalogs (page 40), the opportunities to reinvent your company with value-added solutions are vast.

Andy Brown
Managing Editor
abrown@PSDA.org