Purple Ocean Strategy: When Blue and Red Meet
Purple ocean strategy is a hybrid approach to market positioning that combines elements of blue ocean thinking (creating uncontested space) with the competitive discipline of red ocean markets. Rather than abandoning competition entirely or fighting for every inch of existing demand, it asks a more practical question: where can you compete differently enough to win, without starting from scratch?
It is not a formal academic framework in the way Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean theory is. It is a practitioner’s response to the gap between theory and the markets most businesses actually operate in.
Key Takeaways
- Purple ocean strategy is not a rejection of competition. It is a more precise way of choosing where and how to compete.
- Most businesses cannot escape their category entirely. Purple ocean thinking gives them a framework to differentiate within it.
- The real risk is not competing in a red ocean. It is competing in one without a point of difference that matters to buyers.
- Execution discipline separates purple ocean strategy from positioning exercises that never leave the whiteboard.
- Growth comes from reaching new audiences, not just capturing existing demand more efficiently than competitors.
In This Article
- What Is Purple Ocean Strategy?
- Why the Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean Binary Is Too Neat
- The Three Moves That Define Purple Ocean Positioning
- Purple Ocean Strategy and the Demand Creation Problem
- How Purple Ocean Thinking Applies Across Different Contexts
- The Execution Trap: Why Purple Ocean Strategies Stall
- What Purple Ocean Strategy Is Not
- Making the Framework Work in Practice
What Is Purple Ocean Strategy?
The blue ocean concept, as most marketers know it, argues that the best companies do not compete in existing markets. They create new ones. Cirque du Soleil did not try to be a better circus. It reinvented what a circus could be and found an audience that had no prior relationship with the category.
It is a compelling idea. The problem is that most businesses are not in a position to pull it off. They have existing customers, existing competitors, and existing cost structures. Telling them to find uncontested market space is a bit like telling a mid-table football club to invent a new sport.
Red ocean strategy, by contrast, is pure competition. You are fighting for share in a defined market with established rules. Margins get squeezed. Differentiation erodes. The best you can hope for is to be slightly more efficient or slightly better than the next brand.
Purple ocean strategy sits between the two. It acknowledges that you are operating in a competitive market, but it looks for the dimensions of that market where you can create meaningful separation. Not by reinventing the category wholesale, but by being genuinely different on the things that actually matter to buyers.
If you are thinking about how this connects to broader go-to-market decisions, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic frameworks that sit around and beneath this kind of positioning work.
Why the Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean Binary Is Too Neat
I have spent time judging the Effie Awards, which is about as close as you can get to a systematic review of what actually works in marketing at scale. What you notice, looking across hundreds of entries, is that the campaigns that win effectiveness awards are rarely the ones that invented a new category. They are the ones that found a sharper angle on an existing one.
The blue ocean framing is intellectually clean, but it can create a kind of strategic paralysis. Teams spend months trying to find uncontested space that does not exist, while the more tractable question, which is how to compete differently in the market you are already in, goes unanswered.
There is also a survivorship bias problem with the blue ocean examples. We remember Cirque du Soleil. We do not remember the dozens of companies that tried to create new categories and ran out of runway before the market caught up with them. Go-to-market execution has always been harder than the strategy behind it, and that gap is wider when you are trying to educate a market rather than compete in one.
Purple ocean thinking is more honest about the constraints most businesses face. It does not promise escape from competition. It offers a more deliberate way of choosing where to fight and where to differentiate.
The Three Moves That Define Purple Ocean Positioning
There is no single authoritative definition of purple ocean strategy, which means you have to build a working version from first principles. In practice, it tends to involve three connected moves.
1. Map the competitive dimensions that matter to buyers
Every market has a set of dimensions on which competitors implicitly agree to compete. Price, speed, quality, service, features. The first move is to map those dimensions honestly, not from your own perspective but from the buyer’s.
This is harder than it sounds. When I was running an agency and we were trying to differentiate from the competition, the instinct was always to lead with what we were proud of internally. The proprietary methodology. The awards. The case studies. None of which were the things clients were actually worried about when they were choosing between agencies. They wanted to know if we understood their commercial problem, if we would be honest with them when things were not working, and if the senior people they met in the pitch would actually be the people running their account.
Mapping competitive dimensions properly means getting out of your own head and into the buyer’s. What are they actually trading off when they choose between you and the alternatives?
2. Find the dimensions where you can create genuine separation
Once you have the map, you are looking for two things. First, dimensions where the whole category is underperforming relative to what buyers actually want. Second, dimensions where you have a credible right to be different.
The first without the second is just an opportunity. The second without the first is differentiation that does not move buyers. You need both.
BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy and pricing in B2B markets makes a related point about how companies often compete on dimensions that are not the primary drivers of purchase decisions. The implication is the same: understanding what buyers actually value, rather than what you assume they value, is the prerequisite for any differentiation that holds.
3. Commit to the difference, not just the claim
This is where most positioning exercises fall apart. The strategy gets signed off in a workshop, a new positioning statement goes on the website, and then nothing changes in how the product is built, how the sales team pitches, or how the marketing budget is allocated.
Purple ocean positioning only works if the difference is real. Not just claimed. Real differences require operational commitment, not just marketing language.
I have seen this play out enough times to know that the bottleneck is almost never the strategy. It is the willingness to actually change something, to stop doing what everyone else in the category does, and to accept that a sharper position will appeal less to some buyers in order to appeal more to others.
Purple Ocean Strategy and the Demand Creation Problem
There is a version of purple ocean thinking that is really just better competitive positioning. That is valuable, but it is not the full picture.
The more interesting application is what happens when you use differentiated positioning not just to win more of the existing demand in your category, but to reach audiences who are not currently in the market at all.
Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance. I was focused on capturing intent that already existed, and I told myself that was where the measurable return was. Over time I came to see that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The people converting on search were already close to buying. The channel did not create the demand, it just intercepted it.
Real growth comes from expanding the pool. From reaching people who were not considering your category, or who had written it off, and giving them a reason to reconsider. That is a different kind of work, and it requires a different kind of positioning. A purple ocean position, one that is differentiated enough to be interesting to someone who does not already know they need you, is part of what makes that possible.
Think about it like a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who just walks past the window. But they have to come in first. Positioning is what gets them through the door. Performance marketing is what handles the transaction once they are already there.
How Purple Ocean Thinking Applies Across Different Contexts
The framework is not category-specific. It applies wherever you have competitive pressure and the option to differentiate.
In saturated consumer categories
Consumer markets with strong incumbents are the classic red ocean environment. Competing on price is a race to the bottom. Competing on features in a mature category is diminishing returns. Purple ocean thinking here means finding the underserved segment, the unaddressed need, or the delivery mechanism that no one else has committed to.
This is not the same as launching a challenger brand with a provocative tone of voice and calling it differentiation. Tone of voice is easy to copy. Genuine differences in what you offer, how you deliver it, or who you serve are harder to replicate.
In B2B and professional services
B2B markets often have less visible competition but more entrenched buying behaviour. Buyers stick with known suppliers. Switching costs are high. The purple ocean opportunity is usually in the dimensions that established players have stopped paying attention to because they have been winning on relationships for years.
Transparency is one. Many B2B categories are opaque by design. Pricing, methodology, results. A competitor who commits to genuine transparency on those dimensions can create real separation, not because it is a clever positioning move, but because it changes the buyer’s experience in a way they notice.
In go-to-market execution
Purple ocean positioning is not just a brand exercise. It has direct implications for how you go to market. Which channels you prioritise, which audiences you target, how you price, how you sell. Growth strategy examples across categories consistently show that the brands that grow fastest are not always the ones with the best product. They are the ones with the clearest sense of who they are for and the discipline to build everything around that.
Creator partnerships, for instance, are increasingly a go-to-market mechanism for reaching audiences that are not reachable through conventional paid channels. Using creators in go-to-market campaigns works best when the positioning is clear enough to brief against. Differentiation and distribution are connected.
The Execution Trap: Why Purple Ocean Strategies Stall
I have been in the room for enough strategy sessions to know what happens after the framework gets presented. There is energy in the room. The positioning makes sense. The team is aligned. And then six months later the brand is back to doing what it always did, because the organisation did not actually change anything.
There are a few reasons this happens.
The first is that differentiation requires subtraction. To be genuinely different on some dimensions, you have to be willing to be average or absent on others. Most organisations resist this. They want to be better at everything. The result is a position that is slightly better across the board and meaningfully better at nothing.
The second is that the people responsible for executing the strategy are often not the people who designed it. The positioning gets handed down, but the commercial logic behind it, the specific dimensions where differentiation was supposed to happen, does not travel with it. Sales teams revert to pitching what they always pitched. Product teams build what they always built.
The third is measurement. It is much easier to measure whether your performance marketing is working than whether your positioning is working. So organisations optimise for what they can measure, and the longer-term positioning work gets deprioritised. Growth tools and tactics are easy to evaluate in a dashboard. Brand differentiation is not. That asymmetry shapes where attention goes.
None of these are insurmountable. But they require the same discipline that the strategy itself requires: a willingness to be deliberate about where you focus, and honest about what is actually working.
What Purple Ocean Strategy Is Not
It is worth being direct about a few things this framework is not, because the positioning space attracts a lot of noise.
It is not a branding exercise. Changing your visual identity or your tone of voice is not a purple ocean strategy. Those things might support a differentiated position, but they are not the position itself.
It is not a niche strategy by default. Finding a smaller, underserved segment can be a purple ocean move, but the framework does not require you to shrink your addressable market. It requires you to be different in ways that matter to the market you want.
It is not a one-time decision. Markets change. Competitors copy. What was a point of difference three years ago may be table stakes today. Purple ocean positioning requires ongoing attention, not a strategy document that gets filed and forgotten.
And it is not a guarantee of growth. Differentiation is a necessary condition for sustainable competitive advantage. It is not a sufficient one. You still need to execute, distribute, price correctly, and build the commercial infrastructure to convert positioning into revenue.
Making the Framework Work in Practice
The most useful version of purple ocean strategy is not a theoretical model. It is a set of practical questions you ask about your business and your market on a regular basis.
Where are you currently competing on the same dimensions as everyone else? What would you have to change, not just claim, to be genuinely different there? Which buyers are underserved by the current market, and do you have a credible right to serve them better? What are you willing to stop doing in order to be meaningfully better at something specific?
Those questions are uncomfortable. They require honest answers about capability gaps and organisational constraints. But they are the right questions, and the businesses that ask them consistently tend to end up in better competitive positions than the ones that treat strategy as an annual presentation.
Early in my career I was handed a whiteboard pen in a brainstorm I was not supposed to be leading, for a client I had barely met, in a room full of people waiting to see what I would do. The instinct was to freeze. The better instinct was to start asking questions. What does the brand actually stand for? What are we not saying that we should be? Where is the gap between what the category offers and what the audience actually wants?
That is still the shape of the work. The framework changes. The questions stay the same.
If you want to go deeper on the strategic layer around positioning and market entry, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the connected decisions that turn a positioning idea into a commercial plan.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
