Sublime

for as long as our film producer continues to lead his business on the basis of its being a ‘corporate film production company’, prospects will assess it on that basis and may try to drive down prices to a commoditized,

Ecologists know that two species of animal that try to exist in exactly the same way become deadly enemies. If two species compete head-on for food, only one of them can win. The other species must change either the food it seeks or the way it hunts for it. If it does neither, the weaker species will die out. It is the same with business, except

they tell the Yellow Tail story in terms of Blue Ocean versus Red Ocean.

Identifying value-creating opportunities requires probing for the underlying interests of each side, rather than playing the traditional game of positional bargaining.

Al Ries and Jack Trout: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (McGraw-Hill). Ries

Translation: One company wins big in each category. But most marketers, entrepreneurs, creators, and investors spend their entire careers competing for only 24 percent of the value opportunity of a given category. They’re not the Category King—and they don’t even know it. As a result, they waste time and effort competing over demand instead of

no more need to have them enforce our contracts.

How do you go about identifying the ocean of noncustomers to create new demand? How can you systematically redefine market boundaries to open up a new value-cost frontier that makes the competition irrelevant?

Prestige, quality, and design are harder to put numbers on.