If you’re a business owner wanting to grow your company, the strategy canvas could be the tool for you. It helps you analyze competitors and find new market opportunities. By using it, you can position your business for growth and stand out.

In this article, we’ll look at how the strategy canvas can benefit your business and help you reach long-term goals.

Understanding Strategy Canvas

What is a Strategy Canvas?

The purpose of a Strategy Canvas is to provide a visual representation of an organization’s current strategic landscape and its future prospects. By graphically capturing this information in one simple picture, the Strategy Canvas serves as a diagnostic tool and an action framework for building a compelling blue ocean strategy.

It allows businesses to configure their offering to buyers in relation to their competitors, providing a clear understanding of where they and their competitors are currently investing. In essence, a Strategy Canvas helps in comparing business strategies by crisply communicating the factors of competition, the offering level buyers receive across these factors, and the strategic profiles and cost structures of both the organization and its competitors. Furthermore, it allows businesses to see the product, service, and delivery factors the industry is competing on, and what customers receive from existing competitive offerings.

Choosing Between Blue Ocean and Red Ocean

Blue Ocean and Red Ocean strategies have key differences in how they approach competition and market creativity.

In a Red Ocean strategy, companies compete in existing market spaces, trying to outperform rivals to grab a greater share of the demand.

On the other hand, a Blue Ocean strategy seeks to create new market spaces and generate demand, making competition irrelevant by offering unique value and pursuing differentiation.

To determine which strategy is the best fit, a company must assess its industry environment, competitive landscape, and overall strategic goals.

Companies can use the Strategy Canvas to make such decisions by visually mapping out their current strategic landscape and comparing it with potential future prospects.

This allows them to see where they and their competitors are investing, the customer value currently being delivered, and the factors of competition in the industry.

By utilizing the Strategy Canvas, companies can gain valuable insights to help determine whether a Blue Ocean or Red Ocean strategy is the most favorable approach for their business growth.

The Roles Strategy Canvas Plays

The strategy canvas is important for a business’s strategic planning. It visually captures the current strategic landscape and future prospects. It identifies competition factors and communicates the offering level compared to competitors.

It helps in recognizing and analyzing market competition. It showcases an organization’s investments, product/service/delivery factors the industry competes on, and what customers receive from existing competitive offerings.

A company can use the strategy canvas to make strategic decisions and grow its business. Understanding their and competitors’ investments, strategic profiles, cost structures, and product/service/delivery factors helps in configuring offerings better.

It aids in developing a compelling blue ocean strategy and analyzing the big picture for future strategic sessions.

How to Build a Strategy Canvas for Your Business

Find Your Main Competitors

Identifying main competitors is important. It helps understand the key points of competition for your business.

These key points include factors of competition, levels received by buyers, and strategic profiles and cost structures of your organization and its competitors.

By understanding these key points, a business can gain insights into the product, service, and delivery factors its industry competes on, and the value customers receive from competitive offerings.

Knowing how much main competitors focus on these key points can provide valuable information for developing an effective business strategy.

Recognizing how these key points connect and interact with each other for main competitors is essential for building a compelling blue ocean strategy and ensuring future growth.

By carefully analyzing the strategic landscape and future prospects, businesses can make strategic decisions that lead to sustainable success.

Listing Competition Key Points

When listing competitors in a strategy canvas, it’s important to consider the factors of competition. Then, you should look at the offering level buyers receive across these factors. Also, consider your own and your competitors’ strategic profiles and cost structures.

These key points help in understanding the strategic landscape and the future prospects for an organization in relation to its competitors. You can measure how much competitors focus on these key points by analyzing the investment in product, service, and delivery factors. Additionally, it’s important to understand what customers receive from existing competitive offerings.

When drawn on a strategy canvas, these key points connect by allowing companies to visually compare and analyze where they and their competitors are currently investing. This also shows the areas the industry is competing on, and what customers are receiving from existing competitive offerings.

By carefully evaluating these key points on a strategy canvas, businesses can gain valuable insights. These insights inform their strategic decision-making and potential for business growth.

Measure How Much Your Competitors Focus on These Points

Businesses should first evaluate the level of focus their competitors have on product, service, and delivery factors. By comparing their organization’s strategic profiles and cost structures with their competitors, they can gain insight into current investments and customer offerings.

To measure this focus accurately, businesses can use tools like the strategy canvas, which visually depicts how an organization configures its offerings in relation to competitors. Additionally, methods such as market research, customer feedback, and competitor analysis can be utilized to assess and compare competitor focus.

These methods provide valuable insights into competition factors and buyer offerings, which help businesses adjust and realign their strategies. By practically using these tools and methods, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their competitive landscape and make informed decisions to drive business growth.

Draw Lines to Show How These Points Connect

To measure how much competitors focus on key points, businesses can analyze competition factors, buyer offering levels, and strategic profiles and cost structures. By examining these elements, companies can visualize investments and industry competition, identifying areas for differentiation and improvement.

The strategy canvas helps build a visual representation of a company’s value graph and makes changes with the Four Actions Framework. It provides a clear overview of the strategic landscape and future prospects. It captures how an organization configures its offering to buyers in relation to competitors, enabling a deeper understanding of industry competition. This allows businesses to identify untapped market spaces and develop new value curves to set themselves apart.

Use Strategy Canvas to Grow Your Business

Creating Your Company’s Value Graph

A Strategy Canvas is a visual tool used in business to analyze an organization’s strategic plans and future outlook. It helps companies assess their offerings in comparison to competitors and communicate four key elements of strategy: competition factors, buyer offerings, and the strategic profiles and cost structures of the company and its rivals.

By using the Strategy Canvas, businesses can get a comprehensive view of where they and their competitors are allocating resources, the industry’s competitive factors, and what customers are getting from current offerings.

To identify main competitors and evaluate their focus, a business can compare its strategic profile with that of its rivals using the Strategy Canvas. This helps companies identify strengths and areas for improvement, enabling them to make strategic adjustments for better market positioning.

With the Four Actions Framework, a company can create a value graph by making changes in four key areas: eliminating low-value factors, reducing less vital factors, increasing highly valued factors, and creating new factors to differentiate from competitors. This framework allows the development of a unique value proposition that sets the company apart in the market.

Making Changes with The Four Actions Framework

The Four Actions Framework provides a structured way to change business strategy.

First, companies must identify competition factors and the level of offering buyers receive for these factors. They also need to define their own and their competitors’ strategic profiles and cost structures. This helps companies understand where investments are being made, the product, service, and delivery factors the industry competes on, and what customers get from competitive offerings. By identifying these elements, businesses can determine which factors to reduce, eliminate, raise, or create to unlock new value for buyers and the company. This approach can reveal strategic opportunities by challenging industry assumptions and uncovering areas for innovation. However, implementing changes with the Four Actions Framework may face challenges like resistance to change, difficulty in assessing competitor strategies, and uncertainty about buyer responses.

These limitations should be carefully considered and addressed for successful use of the Four Actions Framework in business strategy.