Super Tuesday and Blue Ocean Strategy

OK, so you are Mitt Romney or John McCain, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. If you want to make your competition irrelevant, how would you go about doing that?

Let’s look at the one of the principles of Blue Ocean Strategy and see if we can apply it to politics.
Principle #1 – reconstruct market boundaries. How would a candidate do that? There are about 223 Million adults over 18 in the US. Approximately 78% are registered voters but only about 35% are fairly regular voters. So if you were going to reconstruct market boundaries, BOS style, you would go to where the registered active voters aren’t, to the registered non-voters and the 22% non registered US citizens.

So the bright red ocean would consist of those registered voters who vote regularly.

Your blue ocean represents 65% of the population from several tiers. The first tier of non-customers are those who are registered but don’t vote regularly. The second tier of non-customers are registered but rarely vote and the third tier of non-customers are those that are not even registered.

The idea is to research the three tiers and determine what the competitive factors of value are in each tier. What is important to them? Just think about what you would ask a non-voting registered or non registered citizen to get them to register and vote? First question might be why they don’t vote? There might be many reasons. Some I can think of might include:

Don’t care – nothing compelling to get them out
Don’t think their vote matters
No transportation – can’t get to the polls
Not available during voting hours
Illiterate – can’t read the ballot
Too sick to vote

It would be interesting to see if any of the candidates could actually come up with a blue ocean strategy that would lead this country back into its strong world leadership role. It would take specific strategic moves that create value innovation for its citizens to get this country back to the glory it deserves.