Behind the Scenes: Blue Ocean: A Look At Buyer Experience & Utility Levers

Original Title: Blue Ocean: A Look At Buyer Experience & Utility Levers 

Publication Date: 2/11/2012

Author: Samantha Ferreira

Ah, the Blue Ocean articles! I loved doing these!

Before we begin, I have to level with all of you: I love business. I adore the idea of building something from (seemingly) nothing, and I've always found some romance in bringing something that people adore to the market. My bookshelves are lined with books like The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen), Purple Cow (Seth Godin), and The Thank You Economy (Gary Vaynerchuk).

Seriously - I still read this one from time to time!

And, probably not coincidentally, I'm enraptured with the whole business side of the anime industry. The whole process, from negotiations, to licensing, to marketing just fascinates me. Granted, it's also given me a low tolerance for childish pandering, but I digress.

In 2011, I was still kind of floating between identities for Anime Herald. And, well, I had just finished reading another business book that grabbed my attention outright: "Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant" by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The book actually came onto my radar a few years earlier, as late Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata and Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé brought the book up in the early years of Wii Mania (TM). However, I hadn't had a chance to read it until a few years later. 

What can I say? When you're cramming for exams, working full-time a retail job, and managing a fledgling anime website, things just get put on the back burner.

But anyway, reading this book blew my mind. The entire thesis, in which smaller players could carve out a niche in a market by chasing new audiences, new customers, seemed so elegant and simple. It was beautifully stated, and the examples in the book were superb. This book had hooked me.

And, at the time, I figured "screw it - Anime Herald's going to become the Nikkei of western anime fandom." (That... didn't work out, obviously.)

And, well, just dove right in. I tried to apply the ideas discussed in Kim and Mauborgne's book into a greater industry study... thus giving rise to the "Blue Ocean Industry" article series. Between November 2011 and March 2012, I wrote a series of seventeen articles, which hoped to illustrate the concepts found in the Blue Ocean Strategy as a whole. 

These were intended to be fairly meaty articles, which appealed to an older set of readers. These articles took deep dives into the markets as they were at the time, breaking down what separated the anime industry from the mainstream world (and eventually took on more specific market fragments). And by meaty, I mean *meaty* - things even went as far as an in-depth market analysis at one point.

This specific article, though - "A Look at Buyer Experience & Utility Levers", was arguably the most popular of the bunch. This is one that still gets a lot of traffic today, for some reason.

And, well, I kind of had fun doing it. This was the last article that I had written before going into the full market analysis, and, well, I kind of went overboard in parts. The core crux of the article was basically to interpret the lessons taught in The Blue Ocean Strategy. This particular chapter always struck me as particularly relevant in the anime world.

The basic crux of things was that the overall consumer market works in a repeating cycle of War, Peace, and Revolution, I mean six steps:

• Purchase
• Delivery
• Use
• Supplement
• Maintenance
• Disposal

Likewise, there were six "Utility levers" - controls that helped to jump-start a product by creating new appeal and use for an audience.

• Productivity
• Simplicity
• Customer Risk
• Fun & Image
• Environmental Friendliness
• Convenience

At the time, this was firmly in my wheelhouse. I decided to flip the script a bit, and take a look at these six items from the customer's perspective, bringing in examples from my many years of covering the anime industry. (Abunai Sisters' announcement will never not be funny to me. You, ah… had to be there.)

And, well, I hoped to really make a lot of these concepts accessible to people on the whole. In particular, I spent a lot of time discussing the idea of overshooting the market, an idea where companies over-complicate their products in hopes of attracting customers only to intimidate and turn away the very folks they tried to attract.

But anyway! Taken together, I had ultimately hoped to give this general crash-course on our industry, as told through the lens of the Blue Ocean strategy. And, well... looking back, I'm pretty sure I've done that. These pieces took ages to write - I believe each took close to ten hours, given the research and fact-checking, and the industry census took closer to fifty hours. All in all, this is about 200 hours of work - just over eight full days of research, writing, and fact-checking - across seventeen articles.

As I mentioned earlier, the Buyer Utility piece continues to get a healthy amount of traffic today, consistently ranking in the top-15 pages despite its overall age. I'm proud of these works, and I don't regret the work that went into them. 

That said, I do wonder what would have happened if I kept going in this direction, instead of shifting gears...