Blue Ocean Strategy, Yo: Fun With ChatGPT And Bad Marketing Theories

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Oceanographer At Heart; Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash…

When I first heard the “blue ocean” metaphor in business, I didn’t get it. Coined by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their 2004 book, Blue Ocean Strategy, the term describes new markets created by innovators, as opposed to “red oceans,” which are existing markets teeming with predators. The authors advise execs to avoid those blood-saturated waters and seek out new opportunities.

My immediate thought: You know why those waters are red? That’s where the fish are. Those blue parts? Yeah, totally barren. Any grizzled old fisherman would tell you to head for the red.

OK, I know, the authors were talking about creating new markets, but I couldn’t get past the flawed metaphor. Perhaps that was myopic on my part, so I sought out different perspectives and found many divergent opinions. Who has time to synthesize them all?

I found someone.

So, 20 years after the book was published, I asked ChatGPT to critically analyze it from a business professor’s perspective. Here’s what it gave me:

Not bad, other than the erroneous publication date, and it took less than a minute. The problem? The academic jargon results in a tedious read. So why not have someone with a flair for language take a stab at it — perhaps a grizzled old fisherman?

I told ChatGPT to “Now rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man And The Sea.’” Within seconds, it conjured up the following:

Better — but I think I hear Papa Hemingway spinning in his grave, and the literary approach might sound too rigid for today’s students.

So I told ChatGPT to “Now rewrite it in the lyrical style of Eminem.”

Can’t say I’m comfortable with “relevance ain’t stagger,” but I will definitely use “need more quantitative to make it more informative” as I throw down and drop mad science in future lectures. Academic hip-hop — is that blue ocean enough for ya?