Products and services can be remarkable in many different ways. One way is through a strategic logic called value innovation. In Blue Ocean Strategy, authors Kim and Mauborgne say:
"... instead of focusing on the beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space."
Uncontested market space. Wouldn't that be nice? If it sounds impossible, think about this – 30 years ago these multi-billion dollar companies/industries/products didn't exist: FedEx, minivans, iPod & iTunes, snowboards, cell phones, Starbucks, home video & DVD.
Sure, some of these involved new technologies and maybe you're not a technology company. But others involved innovation –the recombining of existing resources to create a new capacity and new value. Cirque du Soleil recombined circus, theater and musical components to create a new entertainment phenomenon.
Cirque created a leap in value for buyers by presenting a new take on an old concept, the circus. (Starbucks did much the same thing for the coffee shop). And Cirque create a leap in value for their own company by eliminating a huge cost component, live animals.
One possible road to remarkable is to ask yourself what features/costs you could eliminate in your business that would have little or no negative impact on your customers – while at the same time adding features that provide a leap in value (enjoyment, convenience, utility, status?) for your customers. It's not impossible, but it's probably hard. Hey, nobody said building a Kick-Butt Company was going to be easy.
