Episode #22: Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean Marketplace Strategy

Looking for Blue Ocean. You create Blue Ocean. So you might be thinking, well, how on earth do you create Blue Ocean? How on earth do you create a marketplace of buyers for something that you want to offer to the marketplace without trying to sell stuff that nobody's interested in? Or taking a massive gamble and trying to invent a brand new product was very, very, very simple. Take something that's in a Red Ocean marketplace and put an interesting tweak on it so it's brand new and nobody's selling it just yet. So you're essentially the first person to offer it to the marketplace.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work from there, anywhere in the world.

Hey, how's it going? What's up? E Commerce Freedom Warriors? Now, I've seen a couple posts in the group and a couple emails I've had recently. In fact, I get them all the time. People worrying about levels of competition in the marketplace and they're saying, you know, Amazon's getting really saturated. There's more sellers entering the marketplace. And you know what, first of all, I want to start off by saying, when I started selling three years ago, everybody was singing the same goddamn tune. They were worried about competition levels. Is the marketplace too saturated? And this was three years ago when the marketplace wasn't even saturated, and I guarantee three years before that the marketplace was saturated to some degree. And this is what I want you to understand about market saturation and competition levels. It's always going to be a problem. And therefore if it's always going to be a problem, then there's always going to be a solution, right? Instead of worrying about competition, obsessing over it, and thinking that the opportunity as a whole is going to disappear. What you need to understand is that pockets of the Amazon marketplace get very, very, very competitive. Like trying to sell these things. Last year was a dumb idea, right? Some people still did it. However, other areas of the Amazon marketplace are untouched. So I want to explain this concept to you using a metaphor that us marketers call Blue Ocean versus Red Ocean marketplaces. And I think it was Russell Brunson who was talking about this. The guy who owns ClickFunnels, massive marketer, owns 100 million a year company. He knows what he's talking about by the way. He sells in a marketplace. Teaching people how to do online marketing, which is most of it, is what we'd describe as a red Ocean, Very, very competitive, fierce marketplace that's very, very saturated. And yet he's built $100 million company. So how did he do this? And how can you use this metaphor to help you sell on Amazon and actually get into the areas of the marketplace where competition isn't an issue? So there's two different types of marketplace. And this is, this applies in anything you're selling, whether it's information products, whether it's E commerce stuff, whether it's, whether it's personal training, whether you're setting up a coffee shop in the town center or you're selling clothes. No matter what it is, there's going to be one of these two marketplace types. So a blue ocean is what we want. That's like the ideal place to set up a business. It's where there's no other competitors. It's very, very, very easy to go in there and offer something because you're essentially the first person to have that thing and offer to customers. So everybody just buys from you, right? This is ideal. And to be honest, most of the time this never happens. An example to explain this a little bit better would be, let's say the Marketplace, okay, it's 1990, right? And I go back in the time machine to 1990 and I show the marketplace this MacBook and I say look, look at this awesome personal computer that you can use, right? And it's like one of those big fat gray screens with like green text on it, but it's color, you can put it on your lap is unbelievably powerful and it's brand new. Well, if I was to do that, it would be a blue ocean marketplace. Nobody in 1990 was competing with me selling MacBooks, right? So that's what you want. But unfortunately a lot of the time that can't happen because what instead happens is you'll be fighting in a red ocean. If I was to come up with a MacBook or a copy of a MacBook, right now there's so many companies selling small, thin, light MacBooks that it's like trying to swim through shark infested waters, right? Trying to sell in that marketplace. So if you're trying to sell fidget spinners or fruit infuser water bottles or selfie sticks on Amazon, you're going to enter into the red ocean, it's going to be cutthroat, probably not going to make it out alive and your business is going to sink. So the question is, if most of Amazon is a red ocean, how do you find the blue ocean and Go where there's less competition. And is there anything we can do as more and more of Amazon starts to turn into Red Ocean? Well, the first thing you can do is see where there is some kind of blue ocean, right? That's the first stage of actually making this stuff work. And the way to do that is look for opportunities where there's high demand. So lots of people want to buy a product, but there's not many sellers selling it just yet. So this means products don't have too many reviews yet. Okay, so maybe under 400 reviews will be a good thing to aim for because that means that the products aren't too established and the sellers aren't too established and they haven't been selling them for too long. So that's one thing you can do. Look for for opportunities where there already is a blue ocean. Now as the marketplace gets more and more saturated and more and more sellers sell on Amazon, more areas are going to be red oceans. So instead of looking for blue ocean, as it gets more and more scarce, maybe like the next five years, instead of looking for blue ocean, this is how you completely eliminate the market saturation issue for good. Ready to hear this solution? Instead of looking for blue ocean, you create Blue Ocean. So you might be thinking, well, how on earth do you create Blue Ocean? How on earth do you create a marketplace of buyers for something that you want to offer to the marketplace without trying to sell stuff that nobody's interested in or taking a massive gamble? And trying to invent a brand new product was very, very, very simple. Take something that's in a red ocean marketplace and put an interesting tweak on it so it's brand new and nobody's selling it just yet. So you're essentially the first person to offer it to the marketplace. This would be the equivalent of offering a MacBook to someone in the 1990s. Right? Because you're the only person selling this thing. Now this doesn't have to be too complicated. It doesn't have to be too tough. One way you can do this for an example, someone to model is the Dollar Shave Club, right? Let me just pull up their marketing campaign for what they did. What they essentially did is created a blue ocean out of a red ocean. How many companies out there are selling shavers and razors? And you've got companies like Gillette, you've got like all the big like Braun selling the electric shavers. So what Dollar Shave Club did was instead of just offering like another razor into the Red Ocean Marketplace, where it's just completely cutthroat and the prices of everything keeps going down. They created a razor subscription service so you could get blades sent directly to your house every or every month as you needed them. This was a brand new idea for the marketplace and therefore, because they were the only one doing it, like me selling a MacBook to people in 1990, they had entered a blue ocean. So when you're creating a brand or thinking about launching a private label product, I want you to think about how you can create a blue ocean to go and compete in by thinking about a red ocean, something that's already being offered, changing it somehow, making it brand new to create your blue ocean. That is how companies completely obliterate the issue of market saturation and levels of competition. And this is how you can dominate Amazon and take your business to the next level. So next time somebody starts worrying about levels of competition in the marketplace, plan this video and show them that there's nothing to worry about. Thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you very soon.