Can a Community Association have a Blue Ocean Strategy®?

Why not?

According to Wikipedia, a community association is a nongovernmental association of participating members of a community, such as a neighborhood, village, condominium, cooperative, or group of homeowners or property owners in a delineated geographic area. Participation may be voluntary, require a specific residency, or require participation in an intentional community. Community associations may serve as social clubs, community promotional groups, service organizations, or quasi-governmental groups.

There are many communities around the US and the world and more are being developed every day. Many are aging and now must face the future competing with the fresh new developments unconstrained by age, and old construction material and design.

Let’s look first at the Pioneer-Migrator-Settler map: The products of a community association are mostly services and might include private dining, assorted sports, social events, sense of community, joy of living in nice surroundings, location, and there could be others.

So if you look at those products and plot them out, the PMS map might look like this:

Where the size of the circles represents the size of the revenue. These are much the same products and services offered by every community association, so the products will be plotted in the settler cell at the varying profit /revenue sizes. Settlers typically shrink in profit over time due to little or no growth potential. So the Pioneer-Migrator-Settler map will look very red, or competitive. Especially if the development is older, it is going to have a shrinking opportunity for real growth as newer, fresher communities pop up. There doesn’t appear to be any profit growth, and in fact, the profit will continue to shrink over time, putting the future of the community at risk.

What would help here is a serious session utilizing the Blue Ocean strategy tools to create a new strategy for the future.

For further information on our Blue Ocean Strategic Planning visit http://www.corporatestrategy.com/

Dr. Sarah Layton specializes in helping clients increase revenue dollars and profit % by identifying new markets that are not dependent on fierce competition, expensive marketing or R&D budgets. She can be reached at info@corporatestrategy.com

Posted by Dr. Sarah Layton in Blue Ocean Strategy, Governance on July 31, 2008.