7 Key Blue Ocean Strategy Examples You Should Know About

History has remarkable examples of successful companies innovating by creating brand-new markets. The Blue Ocean Strategy offers a transformative approach by encouraging organizations to venture beyond traditional competition and create new market spaces, or "blue oceans," where they can thrive without the pressure of competing head-to-head. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborghe developed the theory about red oceans and blue ocean strategies in their book “Blue Ocean Strategy.”

By focusing on innovation and value creation, businesses can unlock untapped demand and redefine industries. To learn more about the topic, visit the “What is Blue Ocean Strategy: An Introduction Guide for 2025” article.

This blog post will explore seven powerful examples of companies successfully implementing Blue Ocean Strategies, leaving their competition behind and reshaping their markets.

1. Nintendo Wii

Nintendo joined the famous console wars between Sony and Microsoft, launching the Nintendo Wii. They created a device that offered unique gameplay capabilities leveraging cheap hardware components.

By creating fun motion-aware games, Nintendo Wii attracted a broader audience beyond traditional gamers. It turned gaming into a family activity or a casual exercise opportunity.

The impact was staggering. Nintendo sold over 100M consoles worldwide and is considered the winner in the console wars in the 2007-2009 timeframe. They completely crushed their competitors in a very competitive market that has a high customer loyalty factor, which is remarkable. The combination of low product prices due to cheaper components, unique hardware controllers, and targeting new customer segments created a strong unfair advantage that couldn’t be beaten.

The impact of Nintendo Wii went far beyond the company's success. Nintendo managed to change consumers' perception that games are only for gamers. Playing games became a way to be active and socialize with friends and family. That expanded the customers’ problem that the gaming console addressed and made it easier for consumers to justify their buying decisions.

2. Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat is one of the pioneers in the plant-based meat industry. At first, trying to recreate the experience of consuming meat from plant ingredients might seem pointless. However, Beyond Meat saw the opportunity in the huge customer segment of meat lovers looking for alternatives for health or environmental reasons. The company also targets vegetarians who miss the experience of consuming meat.

Beyond Meat came from the deep conviction of its founder that the meat industry needs to be revolutionized in order to become sustainable and scale further. But that will never happen until meat lovers have an alternative which create similar or better experience.

The company became obsessed with recreating a good steak's texture, scent, and taste in a healthier and more environmentally sustainable way. Its products are based on deep research and development efforts, and the end results gave remarkable results during blind tests with diehard meat fans.

Beyond Meat created a blue ocean market that was estimated at 2.25B in 2023. This seems to be just the beginning—the market is expected to increase twofold by 2029.

The Story of Beyond Meat is very interesting, and you can hear it directly from its founder and CEO, Ethan Brown, in the “How I Built This” episode.

3. Cirque du Soleil

Cirque du Soleil is much more than a circus. They transformed the whole industry by deeply understanding their market and competitors. Most circuses compared themselves to other circuses. This makes sense if you define the job-to-be-done of their visitors as “I want to watch animals and clowns doing tricks at a low cost.”

However, Cirque du Soleil saw it differently. They redefined the boundaries of their industry and created uncontested market space by changing to job-to-be-done as “I look for unique entertainment that is classy, creates lasting memories, and includes engaging art and cultural elements.” They define their competitors as theaters, cinemas, cabarets, musical concerts, etc. And decided to elevate the circus experiences to that level:

• luxury interior
• classy costumes
• no animals
• performances that focus on style and glamour in addition to acrobatics
• premium price

The result? A new life for an industry at the end of its lifecycle creates a new market for premium experiences for adults and corporate clients. The estimated annual revenue is over 1.5B!

4. Airbnb

How would you create the biggest hotel chain in the world with 7 million apartments? Maybe you go for a big bank loan, start buying land, indulge in expensive and complex construction projects, and then you are left with operating all these rooms so that your guests have the best experience every time. That’s one way to do it.

Another way is to leverage all vacation homes, investment properties, and weekend villas that are unoccupied 90% of the year and ask their owners to make sure your guests have the best experience when using their properties. That’s the Airbnb way.

The company created a brand new market for homeowners to offer their properties, helping them improve the ROI of their spare spaces.

This attracted a new customer segment on the travelers' side as well, who could not afford a hotel room but were perfectly fine using a shared space for a few nights. This business model offered an amazing side effect—hosts and guests could socialize in a way that no hotel could offer.

In terms of scale, Airbnb achieves and operates with around 6000 employees worldwide. For comparison, Mariott International has +400K employees.

5. Spotify

The music industry was in serious turmoil in 2005. Consumers were getting tired of building and maintaining huge collections of music albums while listening to just a fraction of all the songs. Having access to your music library while on the go is nearly impossible. Constantly changing forms of media (vinyl, music cassettes, CDs, DVDs) and players made maintaining those collections more and more expensive.

Consumers needed mobility, flexibility, and cost efficiency for their music needs. This led to a surge in digital piracy, declining CD sales, and painful first steps toward the industry's digitalization.

Then Spotify came offering a subscription-based model and amazingly good technology that offered:

• Flexibility - you can pick which songs to choose at any time
• Mobility - all your music (in fact, all the music) is with you all the time
• Supreme technology - the team went far and beyond to offer instant-like music streaming services

This made all existing alternatives, like CDs, piracy, or iTunes irrelevant. Why deal with each option's compromises when you can have it all for the price of a latte per month?

The no-brainer proposition attracted multiple customer segments that were underserved by the existing alternatives.

Lately, Spotify further defined the boundaries of its market by including podcasts and audio books to their product portfolio. The thinking behind this move is “Spotify is not a music service; it’s a service for listening to things” opening a new range of opportunities to engage users and increase retention.

6. Southwest Airlines

The next example comes from the air. For decades, air travel was accessible only to the rich. The average person could afford to take the bus, train, or car to get to their destination. But ground transportation can only get you so far.

Southwest Airlines was founded by Herb Kelleher in the 1970s and aimed to serve the average traveler who couldn’t afford the traditional airline ticket. To drive down its costs, the company created a highly efficient operating model based on a single aircraft fleet. They also offered no free onboard service like meals or premium seating, which made no big difference for short to mid-range destinations anyway.

All these changes allowed Southwest Airlines to redefine its total addressable market, which included a huge number of people, and define a new category in its industry. They became the largest US domestic airline, serving more passengers than any other company.

Southwest’s success paved the way for other companies, such as Ryanair, Wizzair, and IndiGo, to follow the same business model, creating a whole industry of low-cost airlines.

7. Peloton

The fitness industry has rarely been the focus of highly disruptive companies. Even though people notoriously struggle to keep in good shape and build a habit of exercising, there haven’t been hugely successful fitness products—until Peloton came on stage.

Peloton identified the people who couldn’t afford or didn’t want to attend a gym but still wanted to take care of their health as a customer segment that they could target. They coupled traditional exercise bikes with premium training content, packaged as a premium subscription service.

Using Peloton’s services, people who want to stay active and take care of themselves can achieve their goals from the comfort of their homes and at a time that works for them. To further increase its total addressable market, the company added more products to its portfolio, like tread, yoga, and meditation classes, which diversified and increased its customer base.

Similar equipment was available before Peloton as something you could purchase, but Peloton’s innovation combined these products with a high-value subscription model that made customers loyal and generated a significant and predictable revenue stream. At the moment, the company is the dominant leader in the industry and has already become a household name.

Conclusion

The Blue Ocean Strategy might be your ticket to becoming a billion-dollar company. While creating a new market and addressing new customer segments is challenging, it comes with benefits: no competitors and huge growth potential.

Icanpreneur provides a structured approach to discovering customer problems and analyzing them to identify potential blue oceans. The unique experience is backed by AI technologies and all the needed guidance, examples, and tools to extract reliable insights based on customer interviews.

Identifying the right customer target to target is less risky when decisions are made based on conversations with potential customers and studying their underserved needs and pain points.