What is a Strategy Canvas

What is a Strategy Canvas?

3-4 minutes

Strategy canvas (also known as Value Canvas, or Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas) is a strategic tool that allows us to know the proposals offered by a certain market analyzing all the companies present, compared to the proposed value that our company will offer with its new product, all represented in a single chart which allows us to understand at a glance to know and appreciate the differences between the strategic profile of the market and the strategic profile of our new proposal.

Tool for Formulating Blue Strategy

One of the techniques used in the book is the strategy canvas. It is a simple but very powerful visualization methodology which efforts are focused on how to snatch and defeat competitors present in the market

Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean

A company will have more success, fewer risks, and increased profits in a blue ocean market. The goal of a Blue Ocean Strategy is for organizations:

• To find and develop “blue oceans” (uncontested, growing markets)
• To avoid “red oceans” (overdeveloped, saturated markets).

Blue Ocean represents new and unknown markets for companies, in which the absence of competitors ensures a new growing demand and exclusive leadership over these new markets. Whereas, Red Ocean represents all the companies that compete within the same sector in which the efforts and strategies are based on how to beat the competition to win customers within a fixed and exploited demand.

The Structure of Strategy Canvas

A strategy canvas is a line graph that plots factors against importance for a company and then overlays the competitors or product alternatives, helping us to formulate a competitive strategy. It is also used to show how a company can change its focus to separate itself from the competition and attract no customers currently to the industry to become customers.

The strategy canvas is a basic line chart with the competing factors along the x-axis and the offering level along the y-axis.

Horizontal Axis – We indicate the attributes or typical characteristics of the market as well as new attributes of our new value proposition.

Vertical axis – We indicate the level at which each of the attributes located on the horizontal axis is offered, a high level means that the attribute is important within our proposal for clients and therefore we will invest more effort in developing it.

See the ABC Airline example below to see how the value curve of the company operating in the blue ocean compares to the value curves of red ocean solution