CHAPTER 8
Uncovering the Hidden Pain Points That Limit the Size of Your Industry
WITH THE AS-IS STRATEGY canvas in hand, everyone can see the big picture—the current state of play in the industry. This gives the team a commonly agreed-upon baseline to assess new ideas against. Now the challenge is to develop an equally clear, big-picture view of the ways in which the underlying assumptions and boundaries that define the industry also limit its appeal and size by causing what we call “pain points.”
Pain points are just what the name implies—aspects of a business, product, or service that buyers, knowingly or not, are forced to put up with, and which either diminish its utility in their eyes or are so inconvenient that noncustomers turn to alternatives. While utility captures the satisfaction a business, good, or service provides to buyers, blocks to utility reflect just the opposite—the difficulties an industry imposes on buyers, or pain points. In the blue ocean shift process, pain points—which are often hidden—are not constraints. They are blatant opportunities to change the playing field of strategy. But most industries become blind to them, just as buyers often become numb to them, because they assume that’s simply the way things are.
Take the US wine industry. Despite the country’s relatively high per-capita alcohol consumption, there are still few wine drinkers. Of all alcohol sales in the United States, wine accounts for a mere 15 percent of the total. If you wonder why, ask yourself how easy it is to choose a wine, given the thousands of wineries, the hundreds of varieties, and the tens of thousands of complicated labels. For that matter, how easy is it even to open a bottle of wine if you’re one of the 80 percent of American consumers who don’t own a corkscrew? Or to embarrass yourself in front of guests by choosing the wrong wine or chilling it improperly.
To help teams get a snapshot of the practices in their industry that are blocking utility for buyers and narrowing the basis of the industry’s appeal, we developed the buyer utility map. This tool gives team members a platform for developing a deep understanding of the ways in which an industry, even an intensely competitive one, limits its demand by creating pain points for current and potential buyers. As team members work with the map, they begin to objectively register that blue ocean opportunities exist, and that they just might have what it takes to create them.
Ensuring that the team really begins to internalize this perspective is critical, because at this juncture the members are typically experiencing two powerful streams of emotion. Having drawn the as-is strategy canvas, they have likely come to understand that maintaining or tweaking the status quo will not put their organization on a strong, profitable, growth trajectory. To get out of head-to-head competition and into the blue ocean, something different will have to be done. Along with this sentiment comes another underlying, but almost always unvoiced, question, namely: If blue ocean opportunities exist, why has everyone in our industry missed them? Which is to say, the team’s new awareness goes hand-in-hand with that nagging self-doubt we’ve spoken about before as to whether they—this team—can actually create a blue ocean.
What the team leader should not do is ignore these reservations. Pretending they do not exist simply allows them to fester below the surface. Then even a slight bump in the journey—and there will be bumps—can easily shake the team’s confidence further. That said, acknowledging these doubts and asking people to suspend them doesn’t work either. They always resurface. What you have to do instead is nip these doubts in the bud and continue building the team’s collective confidence by allowing the members to keep on discovering their own capabilities and creativity.
How? The team has already begun to experience the process of firsthand discovery through the work of drawing their industry’s as-is strategy canvas. Now they will have the opportunity to deepen it, as they systematically uncover opportunities the industry has left on the table or, more aptly, created via the self-imposed boundaries and assumptions its players act under. This may seem counterintuitive. But by gaining a deep understanding of the accepted “truths” that define their industry, the team begins to see who its pain points are forcing out, and who the noncustomers they never thought were even in the picture might be. The buyer utility map is the tool we’ve developed to help teams generate these insights.
The Buyer Utility Map
The buyer utility map helps team members see that almost every industry—including theirs—has significant problems worth solving. The map outlines the full range of experiences buyers have in using your industry’s offering. In so doing, it reveals the problems the industry has failed to address, creating pain points worth solving and, conversely, the levers that could be pulled to address them and unlock exceptional utility. This lets the team identify not only the full range of ways an industry delivers utility to buyers, but also, importantly, where it blocks utility, producing hidden opportunities to break away from the competition and expand the size of the market. Let’s see how this works, by looking at the map’s dimensions in detail.
The Six Stages of the Buyer Experience Cycle. The map begins by outlining the full breadth of buyers’ experience, which is almost always wider than the view most industries hold. As the horizontal axis in figure 8-1 shows, a customer’s experience can be broken down into a cycle with six distinct stages, running more or less sequentially from purchase to delivery, use, supplements (that is, other products or services needed to make yours work), maintenance, and disposal. Each stage encompasses a variety of specific experiences. For a retail store, for example, purchasing may include getting to the store, finding what you want when you get there, and checking out when you’re ready to pay. While these six stages provide a generic template that forces organizations to think through the complete buyer experience cycle, they can be and often are customized to better fit an industry’s particulars. To illustrate, imagine once again that you’re a customer of the wine industry. Your buyer experience cycle would be something along the lines of: Search (variety, food pairing, region, etc.) 
Purchase Chill Opening/Sharing Drinking Disposal of bottle.
Figure 8-1
The Buyer Utility Map
Interestingly, many industries focus on one or two stages of the experience cycle and overlook all the opportunities the remaining stages afford. This bounded rationality often creates pain points that escape industry players because they simply aren’t considering them. By identifying the full range of stages in the buyer experience cycle, the buyer utility map begins to generate insight into the unquestioned assumptions an industry is based on—assumptions that detract from buyer value and can be reversed.
The Six Buyer Utility Levers. The map also displays the major levers organizations can pull (or not) to provide greater utility for buyers. While the six stages of the buyer experience cycle run across the horizontal axis of the map, the six utility levers run down the vertical axis, producing 36 potential “utility spaces.” In the case of simplicity, fun and image, and environmental friendliness, the utility these levers offer is clear. The idea that a business, product, or service could reduce a customer’s financial, physical, or reputational risk is also fairly straightforward. And a product or service offers convenience simply by being easy to obtain or use. The most commonly used lever is customer productivity, which captures how efficiently an offering can fulfill buyers’ needs in each stage of the buyer experience cycle by saving them time, effort, and/or money. Interestingly, just as industries tend to focus on a small subset of stages, they also tend to focus on a small subset of the six potential utility levers, overlooking the expansive opportunities the full set affords.
Where does your industry or target industry concentrate its efforts among these 36 possible spaces? Executives in commoditized red ocean industries typically focus on only a few, leaving the rest virtually wide-open for blue ocean possibilities where today only inadvertent pain points reside. As you will see below, that’s precisely what Christian Grob’s team at Groupe SEB found when they filled in the buyer utility map for the European electric French fry appliance industry discussed in chapter 1. This is not an anomaly, either: Few industries or organizations realize the breadth of utility spaces they could explore or, on the flip side, the narrowness of their current focus. And simply asking people to imagine, without any help, that new utility can be created seldom helps them expand their field of vision.
When people can see how few spaces their industry focuses on, however, and see and name the range of utility spaces there are to explore, they literally see where trapped value may be hidden. That’s certainly what also happened to Kimberly-Clark Brazil when the company’s initiative team applied the map to toilet paper. “What could we do with simple toilet paper?” was the initial question everybody had in mind, since they all knew the industry was highly commoditized, swimming in a bloody red ocean. They couldn’t imagine what could be done beyond producing toilet paper more cost-effectively than the competition. But as you will discover in a subsequent chapter, the map helped them see ample untapped utility spaces they could exploit to create a blue ocean in the industry.
To drill down and get clear on exactly what these pain points are and where on the map they are hiding, the buyer utility map provides a straightforward, structured method for systematically thinking through all the possibilities. As shown in exhibit 8-1, team members are guided to consider the biggest blocks to each utility lever and the factors that give rise to them at each stage of the buyer experience cycle. As pain points become visible that no one had ever noticed before, or that the industry knowingly ignored—as players focused on beating one another in the current game—more ahas emerge.
Exhibit 8-1
Uncovering the Blocks to Buyer Utility
Purchase Delivery Use Supplements Maintenance Disposal
Customer Productivity: What is the biggest block to customer productivity in each stage? What are the key reasons for this block?
Simplicity: What is the biggest block to simplicity in each stage? What are the key reasons for this block?
Convenience: What is the biggest block to convenience in each stage? What are the key reasons for this block?
Risk Reduction: What is the biggest block to risk reduction in each stage? What are the key reasons for this block?
Fun and Image: What is the biggest block to fun and image in each stage? What are the key reasons for this block?
Environmental Friendliness: What is the biggest block to environmental friendliness in each stage? What are the key reasons for this block?
Plotting Your Buyer Utility Map
How do you plot a buyer utility map for your offering? Here are the steps.
Start with the buyer experience cycle
Walk the team through the generic buyer experience cycle shown in figure 8-1, making sure everyone is clear on what it captures. To help you effectively perform the tasks discussed in this chapter, relevant materials and templates are provided for your free download and use at www.blueoceanshift.com/ExerciseTemplates. Then, using this as a baseline, ask them to put themselves in the shoes of buyers, and imagine their total experience from purchase through disposal. While the buyer experience cycle for many industries generally follows the generic pattern shown in the figure, the team can also customize theirs for their business, product, or service offering, renaming some of the stages, for example, or adding or deleting stages to fit the specifics of their industry. In the case of personal computers, for example, a typical buyer’s experience would include setup as a stage after delivery and before use.
Next, challenge the team to identify the specific activities that fall within each stage of the cycle. This will help everyone begin to get a rich, full understanding of what buyers actually experience over the life of the offering. Going back to the PC industry, for example, setup would include getting the PC out of its big, tightly packed box; reading and making sense of the setup instructions; connecting the PC’s wires to all your other devices; climbing under furniture (which is when many of us hit our heads) to plug the PC in; and throwing away the box and all the protective casing inside it.
Explore the six buyer utility levers
Once the full buyer experience cycle is laid out, the team can turn to the six utility levers. To ensure that everyone understands what each buyer utility lever means, the team leader should post the summary definitions presented in exhibit 8-2. Then move methodically from stage to stage, posing the same two questions about each, as shown in exhibit 8-1, namely: “What is the biggest block to [insert utility lever here, e.g., customer productivity] in this stage?” and “What are the key reasons for this block?” While both questions aim to uncover the same problems, we’ve found that the richest answers come from exploring both perspectives.
Exhibit 8-2
To illustrate how dramatic the insights can be, consider the experience of a company in the Mexican retail furniture industry. The industry historically thought about delivery in terms of delivering new furniture to the buyer’s apartment complex, which in Mexico City meant depositing it in the building lobby. In fleshing out what delivery means from the buyer’s perspective, however, the team quickly realized how narrow this definition was and the pain points the industry unknowingly imposed. Delivery for buyers was not only about getting the furniture to the apartment building. It also encompassed getting the furniture from the lobby up to the customer’s apartment. Many on the team recounted horror stories about people struggling with family and friends to get their new furniture up to their apartments after a tiring day at work. Yet, somehow, even executives in the industry had simply assumed that hassle goes with getting a beautiful new room of furniture.
Such assumptions are not uncommon. Don’t most of us assume that dealing with an insurance company will entail getting the runaround, that getting gas for our car is a drag, that bottled water will be hard to carry and store, or that buying an iron also requires that we have a large, clumsy, hard-to-store ironing board? As you flesh out the blocks to utility that fall in each stage of the buyer experience cycle, even executives who consider themselves market savvy are typically surprised by all they’ve never thoroughly thought through.
Fill in the buyer utility map
As the blocks to utility surface, you should put an “X” in each space where a pain point was revealed. Figure 8-2 shows a completed buyer utility map, in this case for electric home French fry makers that Groupe SEB found when the team applied the map. As shown on the map, make sure to capture the reasons for each “X,” whether in speech bubbles, as we’ve done here, or on a separate sheet of paper. Cataloguing the reasons behind each pain point is important, because the team doesn’t want to lose any of the work or insight gained here.
Figure 8-2
The Buyer Utility Map of Electric Home French Fry Makers: Pre–Groupe SEB’s ActiFry
Finally, use an “O” to mark the utility spaces the industry currently focuses on. To do this effectively and avoid putting “Os” all over the map just because the industry minimally touches on a space, you should get the team to distill the industry’s core utility. Once again, the aim is the big picture. Go back to the as-is strategy canvas to provide the baseline: What is the industry fundamentally offering from the buyers’ perspective? Boil down the central utility buyers experience by using your product or service. Christian Grob’s team at Groupe SEB found, for example, that despite the intensity of competition, the industry essentially focused on only 1 of the 36 potential utility spaces—productivity in use, that is, creating a reasonably priced electric French fry maker that worked reliably. That is the “O” shown in figure 8-2.
As the team works to complete their map, you should remind them that today’s negatives could become positives in tomorrow’s strategy, and that the pain points they’ve identified reflect buyers’ perspective. When the negatives of their industry are unearthed, people in established organizations can feel uncomfortable or get defensive. Your role is to remind them about the potential opportunities that lie behind these pain points. Let them know that what your organization and the industry have focused on, as revealed by the map, may have been enough to succeed in the past. The point here is not to look back and it’s certainly not to cast blame. It’s to build a compelling future together and pain points provide strong clues on how to do just that.
One last observation about this stage of the plotting process: In some cases, after completing the map, one or more members of the team may question the results. And, indeed, as the team goes through the rest of the blue ocean shift process and meets with and interviews both customers and noncustomers, these insights may well be refined and altered. Hassles the team did not perceive in this initial step may make themselves known and be found to be significant. Others the team identified may be found to be less important than they had originally thought. At this point, though, you should immediately follow up by asking the team member or members who’ve expressed concern what percentage of conceivable inaccuracy they’re worried about: 100 percent? Or 20–25 percent?
In our experience, the far lower range is almost always the answer. That’s your opportunity to stress the strength of the results: Even assuming 20–25 percent of the utility blocks the team identified are inaccurate or incomplete, it doesn’t invalidate the other 75 percent uncovered through this one step. In short, blocks to utility still exist, and the flip side represents opportunities to redefine the strategic playing field. Then go on to assure the team that as the initiative continues, they will have ample opportunity to systematically meet customers and noncustomers, validate or disprove their insights, and learn how to look at the market in new ways. This type of honest, direct discussion eases people’s anxieties and strengthens collective confidence. In the case of Groupe SEB, for example, not only did the team confirm the pain points noted in figure 8-2, but the next steps of the process led the team to discover other important pain points that had long slipped under the radar, such as how the high calories in French fries discouraged noncustomers from patronizing the industry.
As an aside: We have seen the above concern come up often in organizations that have a culture of analysis paralysis, where data tends to be used not to help people take action, but rather to postpone and even invalidate actions that move away from the status quo. Should this happen, it’s an important signal to take note of as you move forward with the process, because it means that additional handholding will likely be required as the team learns to step back and see the big picture, atomized step by atomized step.
Is What You See What Buyers See and Experience?
With the completed buyer utility map in hand, the team can bring the insight it contains to life. To initiate the discussion, ask the team members to juxtapose the insights gleaned from the as-is strategy canvas with those revealed through the buyer utility map. Have them first recap what they learned and the conclusions they reached from the as-is strategy canvas. Provide prompts as necessary: That competition is intense? That the strategic profiles of the industry’s players have largely converged? That the room for future profitable growth is viewed as limited? That it is hard to find opportunities to break away from the competition? Jotting down the key takeaways to these questions creates an additional opportunity for team members to internalize the lessons from drawing the as-is strategy canvas.
With that done, shift to the completed buyer utility map, asking: “What, by contrast, does the map we collectively created reveal?” “Is the industry, knowingly or unknowingly, imposing pain points on buyers across their total experience?” “Could these pain points be limiting current customers’ use of our industry’s product or service?” “Would existing customers jump ship and champion an organization that eliminated these blocks to utility, and even use more of its offering?” “Could these blocks to utility also be discouraging or intimidating other people—noncustomers—from patronizing our industry?” “How many of the 36 utility spaces does our industry genuinely focus on?” As one executive put it, while answering this last question, “We are here [pointing to two utility spaces on the map], when there’s all that out there [dragging his finger across all the “Xs” on the rest of the map].” That’s when the team first begins to appreciate and see the real possibility of creating blue oceans.
As the discussion above suggests, creating the buyer utility map for their offering enables the team to see that red oceans need not be inevitable, and that insights into new opportunity spaces begin to be revealed just by applying this one analytic tool. Completing the map can be tough, however, in industries where, over the years, management has seemingly become disconnected from market reality and buyers’ experience. We have been called into industries fraught with hassles and inconveniences where, at the same time, management stares almost blankly at the buyer utility map. Understanding the obstacles that buyers experience in using their industry’s products or services, or even their own product or service, is hard for them to get their heads around.
In some cases, organizations are so close to their industry that they fail to see what hassles still exist. In others, the players have historically held unique positions, which gave them little or no incentive to focus on buyers’ experience and the blocks to utility they themselves created. In still other situations, the organization itself has unwittingly put rose-tinted glasses on management’s eyes, creating a gulf between the way they see and experience their industry and the way ordinary people do. One of the top three US automakers, for example, was known to have employees systematically take care of management’s cars while the executives were at work—making all the necessary tune-ups and repairs, filling their tanks, and washing their cars. And when dealerships heard that management would be dropping by, they rolled out the red carpet. When you don’t have to experience any of the hassles of buying, owning, and maintaining a car, or suffering breakdowns and waiting and paying for repairs, and when dealerships couldn’t be more accommodating and sparkling, it’s no wonder you’d lose touch with the pain points imposed by your company and industry.
When any of the above is the case, our response is “Stop. Go no further.” Likewise, if the answers coming back are thin, or lack conviction, or are loosey-goosey in any way, or if there isn’t a deep level of agreement among the team members, you need to take a different tack. Have all of them get up, go out, and see with their own eyes what it means to experience your industry’s offering across the entire buyer experience cycle in the same way that ordinary people do. You’d be surprised how many organizations lack a wide-angle understanding of their buyers’ total experience and all the pain points they encounter along the way. This is why we stress, time and time again, that seeing is believing and that you should never, ever outsource your eyes or ears. In fact, even organizations that don’t struggle with the map are often keen to do this for added learning.
To see how this process works, and how, in executing it, the scales fall from people’s eyes with a speed no market research report we have ever seen was able to achieve, let’s look at the experience of a team that went into the field to learn.
Learning to Look Through Buyers’ Eyes
On a cold, snowy, late-winter morning, the senior executive team of one of America’s largest pharmacy chains gathered in a hotel conference room to work on their buyer utility map. The company was growing like gangbusters; yet this growth was largely through acquisitions. Their main rival in the US$250 billion US pharmacy market was following suit.
8:00 a.m.
“OK. I need a volunteer.” The nine C-level executives look at the team leader with mild anxiety. “I need a volunteer.” Heads turn, faces contort, and at last the vice president for IT says, “OK, I’ll do it.”
“You’re all sick,” the team leader says. “Not a life-threatening illness, but a serious one: an earache, a sore throat, a bad cold, the flu. What would you do?”
“Go to work!” the executives unanimously respond.
“OK. Let’s say you have a sore throat that won’t go away. Maybe it’s a strep infection. How’s your productivity?”
“Rotten,” they once again unanimously respond.
“How do your coworkers feel about you?”
“Not happy. You’re sick and infecting them,” they say.
“Great. So our productivity is low, we may be infecting our colleagues, and none of us uses the pharmacies in our own stores for the most common illnesses. Thank goodness others do.”
“Let’s start the day over,” the team leader then says. “I’d like you [pointing to the VP of IT] to go home. Get back in bed. Don’t push through the pain of your sore throat. We’ll go home with you. Let’s go!”
Back at the executive’s home, about 20 miles outside a midwestern city, the team gathers around his bed. They have a video camera with them to capture the buyer experience.
9:30 a.m.
“Now instead of going to work, call a doctor. You may have strep throat. You don’t want to get anyone else infected, do you?”
The VP calls his doctor. It’s 9:30 a.m. The earliest he can be seen is 11:30 a.m. The team waits. Video is rolling. The executive is told to stay in bed. He can only communicate on the phone or by email (preferable, as his fake strep barely allows him to speak).
10:30 a.m.
With his doctor’s office more than 30 minutes away when the roads are clear, the team sets out. Between the snow and the stop-and-go traffic, it takes 45 minutes to get there. All ten members sit or stand in the crowded waiting room, which looks more like an emergency room: children with hacking cough, adults sniffling in their sleeves, a few infants spitting up. After 30 minutes of waiting—appointments are running behind schedule—the team is let in to see the doctor.
11:45 a.m.
A nurse takes the “patient’s” weight and height. He sits down and is told to strip down to his underwear. Hysterics aside, everyone on the executive team feels bad for the VP as he goes to the bathroom and emerges in his tighty-whities, or shorts.
12:15 p.m.
After, what seems like forever (particularly for the VP sitting up on the examination table in his skivvies), the doctor arrives. He takes the patient’s blood pressure, tests his reflexes, asks about his dietary habits, probes why he’s overweight, asks how much he drinks, and if he’s thinking about having children. Very intrusive.
After a throat swab, a few more minutes of waiting, and getting the results from the nurse, the team is done. At this point, the team is several hours into the buyer experience cycle. While the VP actually had a clean bill of health (it was a fake strep throat, after all), the team improvises that he has received a prescription for antibiotics and analgesic medications. So they get back in their cars and drive to the pharmacy. As most people do, the IT executive chooses the location nearest to his house.
Another 45 minutes of driving and they’re at the store. As at many American suburban pharmacies, the team finds ample parking. But as the doors open, it is like walking into a grocery store. Aisles of merchandise: chewing gum, toys, magazines, soft drinks, diapers, and finally, some 50 yards later, the pharmacist. The team goes over to the prescription counter and realizes that after handing in their prescriptions, customers are told to wait. Fifteen minutes is the average wait time recorded—a small eternity for people who don’t feel well, many with children climbing on their laps.
That is the buyer experience cycle of the person who does the right thing and doesn’t expose colleagues to contagion.
3:30 p.m.
The team reconvenes at the hotel meeting room. They now map the buyer experience cycle with relative ease. As they start to assess the utility blocks they experienced that day, the executives are flabbergasted. One executive blurts out, “Who wants to spend their day doing that? It’s so much easier being sick. There are just too many pain points.” Another executive chimes in, “Think of all the people suffering needlessly just to avoid all the hassles we experienced. Didn’t we even joke this morning about going to work sick, even if our productivity is down, and others don’t like it? We don’t even patronize our own industry when it comes to a common, serious, but non–life-threatening illness!” Silence. Then energy builds as possibilities to eliminate this pain point, break away from the competition, and unlock new demand start to come into view.
“What if we put a doctor in the pharmacy?” suggests one team member. “Too expensive,” replies another. “What about a nurse-practitioner? They’re one-third the cost, and they can write prescriptions for most of the common ailments we’re looking to treat.” “You walk in, you see a ‘doctor,’ and you’re out within minutes! Hours and hours of boredom and pain are gone.” “Sales grow.” “And people feel better.” Quiet grins. Team members sit noticeably taller. Electricity runs through the room as the red ocean parts and blue ocean possibilities begin to open before them.
The First Rule of Fieldwork: Experience What Buyers Experience
As the example above reveals, when insights are lacking at this step, there is no substitute for going into the field to discover them firsthand. Asking the marketing department to come in and walk a team through the buyer experience cycle, or provide research reports to fill in the blanks, will not work. There are no shortcuts. We cannot emphasize enough the danger of allowing a team to outsource their eyes and ears, even to their subordinates. It will ensure that the members learn almost nothing, and that what they do learn will be nonvisceral—data points that seldom register and are rarely engraved on people’s hearts and minds.
In going out in the field, we strongly recommend that, wherever possible, the team assume the role of ordinary buyers, or observe existing buyers in their professional environments or homes, being careful to document the difficulties these individuals encounter across the full buyer experience cycle. Do not confuse this with holding a focus group. Focus groups are artificial forums. While they are fine for gathering input on how to incrementally improve a product or service, they will provide neither the rich insights nor the conviction you and your team need and will only get by going into the field.
Teams who observed buyers at the point of sale alone have gained insights into pain points that had eluded their industry for years. Similar wake-up calls have occurred for teams who watched how their offerings were explained, stored, set up, used, and disposed of. To document the difficulties buyers experience, you may want to ask the team to take pictures or to video what they see and experience to support their findings.
Note that we have rarely met a team that wasn’t initially somewhat reluctant to go out in the field, with some members even questioning what they could possibly learn. However, we have also never observed a team that didn’t come back glad they had done it and with a visceral, grounded understanding of what buyers experience and the blocks to utility they face. Such knowledge is immensely worthwhile.
In the end, one of the biggest obstacles to implementing a blue ocean shift can be the executive team, even if they sanctioned the project. Many executives become blind to the hassles and grievances that buyers and users of their industry’s offerings face day-to-day. They may realize they are stuck in a red ocean, and they may aspire to sail into the blue ocean, but to build both their understanding of what this will mean in practical strategic terms and their confidence in the team’s work, you need to follow the principle of “No surprises—EVER.” This means thoroughly debriefing senior executives about what the team has found after this and every step, and having them hear it directly from the team members themselves. Even if they say this isn’t necessary, it is necessary. In fact, it’s more than necessary. It’s indispensable, because it means that any doubts executives may have can be caught early and addressed up front.
If the executive team seems to be discounting what the blue ocean team has found, make sure to invite the doubters to see the pain points ordinary buyers experience for themselves. When this has happened, we have never witnessed executives be other than profoundly influenced. The experience not only shifted their thinking, but renewed their confidence in the initiative. Their status and involvement also did wonders to garner support for the project across the organization, providing yet another illustration of how mobilization is built into every step of the blue ocean shift process.
With the buyer utility map assessed, collective confidence created, and the executive team apprised of the results, the team is now ready to move on to the next task—understanding the three tiers of noncustomers they can unlock to create all new demand and expand the size of the economic pie.