Tero Isokauppila explains Blue Ocean strategy through Four Sigmatic's mushroom coffee: instead of fighting in crowded markets, combine unexpected categories to solve real problems. Mushrooms add health benefits while masking their bitter taste, creating space where no one else competes.
Blue Ocean strategy is a famous concept created by two professors at Insead, just south of Paris in a fancy MBA school. And it talks about how instead of fighting in the red ocean with a lot of competition, you want to be in the blue ocean where there is no competition. And they set out a few different strategies on how you accomplish it. In order to find the blue ocean, you need to think about something you consciously are better than others, consciously worse than others, and then you create something new that doesn't exist in the category, and you cut something out that someone else does, and they give a bunch of examples. In the case of four sigmatic, it's coffee plus mushrooms and the mushrooms support with the health benefits of the coffee, making the coffee healthier and better. But also the coffee helps to mask the bitter flavors of the mushrooms that otherwise people don't enjoy. Combine two known things, but it has to start with the mindset of like in the main category, in our case like coffee, you look at like, what are the pain points for those consumers and what can we borrow from something totally random to help solve those pain points.
