Find New Channels of Potential Business – Blue Ocean Spaces
Small retailers are going to have to look for Blue Ocean Spaces, and find new channels of potential business. While these businesses are too small to own a marketspace, they can certainly carve out profitable niches. There are three areas which small retailers can focus on to develop new business: geographic, demographic, and usage (both occasion and type). They can carry merchandise and services centered around a locale – and have offerings which are highly relevant to a given community. This is a Blue Ocean which large national chains will find very difficult to follow because many are very centralized in structure. As a smaller craft in the Blue Ocean Seas, local businesses can more adeptly cater merchandising, marketing, and operations to uniquely fit communities, towns, cities, and regions.

Look Beyond Current Buyers Demographics
Small businesses can also look outside of the demographic profile of current buyers to target additional customer groups. This can be done effectively by evaluating alternative or complementary industry buyer groups. Small retailers can look for synergic “hooks” to fulfill the needs for either of these groups. A business mentioned in the WSJ article, Charles Mayer & Company, is an up-scale boutique seller of china, crystal, and decorative accessories in Indianapolis. An example of them targeting a complementary buyer group would be to develop an interior design service which shows home- and condo-owning customers the appropriate matches of various pieces to rooms and homes being re-modeled or built. This look across industries would also yield very synergistic opportunities to bundle with partner companies. To further extend our previous example, Charles Mayer & Company could join with an interior design firm outright to provide pieces for a price discount or items which are exclusive to the given designer.

Blue Ocean Spaces Through Alternative Usage For Product Or Services
The third way a small retailer can discover or create a Blue Ocean Space is through alternative usage for their goods or service offerings. This can take the form of different types of usage for their offerings, or different or varied occasion usages for their goods and services. Possible variations on usage fit well with the previously mentioned opportunities to bundle with other goods and services. Alternative uses for a small retailer’s goods or services can be uncovered by looking at a buyer’s experience with related products or services. These retailers should observe and evaluate these buyer’s experiences before, during, and after a given product or service is used. This will yield rich insight into how to extend, alter, or retract their offerings in terms of recommended uses for their given products and the services they offer around them. For example, small auto repair shops have observed the success of “oil change only” shops such as Jiffy Lube, and now include even more discounted oil change services of their own as a front-end bundled offering when repairing other parts of a customer’s car. In this case, the usage occasion was changed from a scheduled maintenance item to an upfront service and opportunistic sale for a small retailer.