The Efficient Practice: Transform and Optimize Your Financial Advisory Practice for Greater Profits

CHAPTER 10

Efficient Branding

Hardly a day goes by that someone does not offer some new idea on how to market a business. Most such ideas go the way of other fads by fading quietly away. Others seem to stick, and still others grow in popularity over time. Given profit constraints on the financial services profession and competition battling for the same block of clients, it is not surprising that financial advisors seek new ideas and alternatives when it comes to marketing their financial practice. The fact is that there exists a certain level of sameness in this profession that makes the task of differentiation that much more difficult. However, there is a popular movement that promises to change all that. Dubbed the Blue Ocean Strategy™, this concept embraces a systematic approach for making the competition irrelevant. A book written by W. Chan Kim and Renee Maubourne, appropriately titled Blue Ocean Strategy (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), suggests theoretical approaches to creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth. The book, written in 2005, sold over a million copies in its first year and is now being published in 39 languages, which suggests that this is one of those ideas that is growing in popularity.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY

The concept of the Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) is that the entire marketplace of potential clients (customers) is divided into red and blue oceans. The red oceans are characterized by accepted industry boundaries (basically ...