Getting an Edge with Strategy Canvas
Do you want to stand out from your competition? The Strategy Canvas is a powerful tool that can help you succeed in your industry.
By visually mapping out the key factors that drive your business and comparing them to your competitors, you can identify untapped opportunities.
This helps you make strategic decisions that set you apart and gain a competitive advantage.
In this article, we’ll explore how the Strategy Canvas can help you achieve success in your market.
What’s the Big Idea with Strategy Pictures?
Discovering Strategy Pictures: How They Help Your Business
Using a strategy picture for a business is important for visualizing its competitive advantage and goals. The main goals of using a strategy picture include understanding the current strategic landscape of the business, identifying opportunities to expand into new markets, and differentiating the business from competitors.
To effectively build its own strategy picture, a business can start by understanding the market landscape through the lens of Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean strategy. It needs to analyze the competitive landscape to differentiate the business and evaluate high-level business strategies. By identifying competitors, defining key factors of competition, ranking competitors’ investment in each factor, mapping a value curve, and charting a business value curve, the business can effectively visualize its competitive advantage and goals.
Strategy pictures are great for businesses because they enable companies to identify areas for improvement, develop unique selling propositions, and potentially create a niche market. Therefore, the benefits of making a business picture include uncovering blue ocean opportunities, challenging assumptions about the industry and customers, and standing out from competitors.
The Main Goals of Using a Strategy Picture
A strategy picture provides several benefits for a business. It helps visualize the current strategic situation and find opportunities to expand into new markets. It also aids in understanding the competition and developing high-level strategies.
By mapping a value curve, businesses can create a clear plan that all stakeholders can see. This ensures everyone understands the company’s position against competitors.
Using a strategy picture challenges assumptions about the industry and customers. It also uncovers opportunities to stand out from competitors.
Additionally, it helps identify areas for improvement, develop unique selling propositions, and potentially create a niche market. Southwest Airlines’ use of the Strategy Canvas is a good example of this.
Why Strategy Pictures Are Great for Your Business
The Perks of Making a Business Picture
Creating a business picture has several benefits for companies. It helps in providing a clear plan and aligning everyone’s efforts. It also improves communication and decision-making.
The strategy canvas offers a holistic view of competitive landscape, helping to identify untapped market opportunities. It acts as a diagnostic tool, aiding in making better-informed decisions and developing compelling strategies.
Using a strategy picture enables businesses to understand competition factors and buyer offerings, providing a clear direction for differentiation and unique business value.
Making a Clear Plan Everyone Can See
Using strategy pictures can help create a clear plan for a business. This visualizes the current strategy and future prospects in an easy-to-understand format. The goal is to understand the market, stand out, and find opportunities to grow. The benefits of using strategy pictures include understanding the competition, assessing business strategies, and questioning industry and customer assumptions.
Visual analytics also help identify areas for improvement, create unique selling points, and explore niche markets.
Centering on What Makes Your Business Special
A Strategy Canvas shows what makes a business unique. It visually presents where the business invests and competes, plus the value it delivers to customers. It highlights factors of competition and offering levels compared to competitors. This helps the business stand out and identify areas for improvement. It also maps out the cost structure in relation to competitors, making it easy to compare.
This visual representation allows the business to find potential niche markets and differentiate itself.
Building Your Own Strategy Picture
Know Who You’re Up Against
Businesses compete in important areas like product, service, and delivery. These are key factors in standing out from competitors.
To compare efforts, they create a value curve. This shows how much rivals invest in these factors.
By comparing their own profile and costs with rivals, companies see where they do well and where they can improve. Knowing their competition is crucial in creating a strategy.
This knowledge helps find new opportunities and challenge industry assumptions. It also helps develop unique selling points. It leads to a more successful business strategy.
List the Important Parts Where Businesses Fight to Win
Businesses compete in different ways – like standing out, keeping costs low, and offering great value to customers. Differentiation means offering unique products or services. Cost is about giving similar value for less money. Customer value focuses on improving the overall experience. To judge how well a business is doing in these areas, compare the investment and performance with rivals. Look at things like what they offer, prices, and customer satisfaction.
Using a strategy canvas can help show a business’s and its rivals’ strategies visually. Mapping a value curve and a business value curve can help make smart decisions.
Score Your Rivals Based on How Much They Try in Each Part
When evaluating rivals’ success through the Strategy Canvas Advantage, businesses look at how they allocate their efforts across different parts of their strategy. They consider the investment in product, service, and delivery when competing. This helps to identify and compare the key areas where competitors focus their efforts, giving valuable insights into the competitive environment.
Understanding these areas allows businesses to develop strategies for standing out and creating their own unique market space. For instance, a company might notice that one rival invests a lot in product innovation, another in customer experience, and another in low-cost operations. Recognizing these trends helps companies strategically position themselves in relation to their competitors.
Draw Lines to Show the Scores for Each Part
Drawing lines to show the scores for each part on a strategy canvas can benefit a business’s strategy picture. It provides a clear visual representation of the organization’s standing in relation to its competitors.
By scoring rivals based on their efforts in each part and drawing lines to represent these scores, businesses can identify areas of competitive advantage or disadvantage.
This visualization allows companies to understand the competitive landscape and make informed strategic decisions to stand out from their rivals.
Using graphs to visually represent their scores, businesses can make their strategy picture more effective. It clearly communicates the factors of competition, the offering level buyers receive, and their own and their competitors’ strategic profiles and cost structures.
This enables businesses to gain insights into where they and their competitors are investing, the products, services, and delivery factors the industry is competing on, and what customers are receiving from existing competitive offerings.
Make a Graph to Show Your Business’ Scores
Businesses compete in different areas such as product quality, pricing, customer service, and innovation. Ranking rivals based on their investment in these areas provides insights into their strategic profiles and areas for differentiation. A graph can visually represent a business’ scores, showing its position relative to competitors. This helps in understanding competitive factors and identifying opportunities for differentiation.
The Strategy Canvas enables businesses to analyze their position, uncover new market opportunities, and develop strategies to stand out.
Use the ‘Four Moves’ Plan to Make Your Graph Better
The ‘Four Moves’ plan helps businesses improve their strategy picture. They can systematically change the strategy canvas to show the future of their industry. By reducing, creating, raising, and eliminating different competition factors, the graph gives a clear visual of a company’s strategy and potential innovation opportunities. This method makes the strategy picture more clear and effective.
Choosing Blue Over Red: Making Your Own Quiet Sea with a Picture
Using a strategy picture in “Choosing Blue Over Red: Making Your Own Quiet Sea with a Picture” has two main goals:
- Visualize the current strategic landscape.
- Identify opportunities to expand into new markets.
To create your own strategy picture, focus on:
- Making a clear plan.
- Highlighting what makes your business special.
Understanding the market landscape through the lens of Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean strategy is important.
Steps for using the ‘Four Moves’ plan in “Choosing Blue Over Red: Making Your Own Quiet Sea with a Picture” include:
- Identifying competitors.
- Defining key factors of competition.
- Ranking competitors’ investment in each factor.
- Mapping a value curve.
- Charting a business value curve.

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