Blue Ocean Grand Slam

Blue Ocean Grand Slam

“There’s no such thing as a permanently great company or a permanently great industry. All industries rise and fall as do companies. However, there are permanently smart strategic moves” – Blue Ocean Strategy co-authors W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne, from Chief Executive Magazine article “Flouting Conventional Wisdom” (May 2003).

Accepting the defined market boundaries in which a particular business operates—the status quo way of doing business—is a surefire path to cut-throat, bloody Red Oceans. In highly competitive industries, such as sporting and event ticket sales for example, businesses are continually faced with an uphill struggle to profitability as they all compete for share of the same pie.

With this in mind, today we turn our attention to RazorGator, one such company which is calling on some Blue Ocean-like thinking to find untapped value in hidden, complementary offerings. In the process, as RazorGator’s CEO Jeff Lapin describes, "We're morphing from a traditional ticket broker to a provider of services to corporations in the ticketing world."

From a recent Fast Company report:

Bank of America's ticket inventory numbers in the hundreds of thousands, including seats in more than 80 suites for teams like the Boston Red Sox, the Dallas Cowboys, and the San Francisco Giants. Managing that inventory? That wasn't really the bank's forte.

So last summer, the bank signed on with online reseller RazorGator. Using proprietary software, RazorGator manages approvals for bank staffers to use those tickets, both to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and to increase return on its investment. "In past years, people managed tickets in desk drawers," says Bill Read, Bank of America's sports-and-events ticket management executive. "With the online system, it's all centrally managed, so we know what tickets we have and how they are utilized. We look at the clients, the order, whether all the tickets were used, and whether there was a benefit to the organization."

At US$ 3 to US$ 8 a ticket, RazorGator's work with Bank of America and a handful of other Fortune 500 clients is lucrative. It also gives RazorGator a way of differentiating itself from the pack. "If a corporation wanted to keep track of gifts for approvals and for Sarbanes-Oxley, our software could be programmed for that type of request."

Source: http://blueoceanstrategy.typepad.com/creatingblueoceans/2007/11/index.html