Pininfarina: The winner’s circle expands beyond design

To break out of red oceans, companies must dismantle accepted boundaries that define how they compete. Instead of looking within these boundaries, managers need to look systematically across them to create Blue Oceans. To help this process of discovery, Blue Ocean Strategy offers 6 perspectives, such as looking across alternative industries, across strategic groups, across buyer groups, across complimentary product and service offerings, across the functional-emotional appeal of an industry, and even across time (Blue Ocean Strategy, p. 48).

In the past we have discussed how design and fashion ultimately affect lifestyles, and, thus, drive profits. As we have seen, by placing an emphasis on design companies such as Apple, Volkswagen and LG have managed to achieve Blue Ocean Strategy-like success.

Building on the design discussion, today we introduce a recent Fast Company article which highlights Italian car design firm Pininfarina’s “brand-building coup.” It seems that Pininfarina, looking across the six perspectives, may be driving itself towards a Blue Ocean Strategy success by expanding its design expertise to product and process-engineering:

Pininfarina may be fabled for its 77-year history of iconic silhouettes for the likes of Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lancia, and other first-in-class marques, but it has come to see that sort of high-end work as a powerful marketing tool for its real business--engineering and assembling far more modest vehicles for giants such as Ford and Mitsubishi.

Pininfarina now offers a complete suite of services that can take an automaker's project from a blank sheet of paper to final delivery…. This year the company expects nearly 90% of its $1 billion--plus in revenues to come not from design, but from product-and-process engineering and the production of nearly 70,000 vehicles for Alfa Romeo, Ford, Mitsubishi, and Volvo.