How Star Businesses Create a Focus Strategy

Everybody instinctively understands that it's important to focus. An eastern proverb says, "A man who goes after two rabbits catches neither." This is true in the context of projects or activities or meeting agendas. But when it comes to a business, it's quite easy to get misled and focus in the wrong way.

Here is the wrong way to focus while setting business strategy ...

You take a piece (or slice) out of an industry that has many built-in segments and focus on that segment without deepening differentiation and expanding your category importance. For example, let's say that you decide to launch a travel website in the hyper-competitive online travel category. In order to be different you decide to focus on only one kind of travel - say cruises. Or you decide to create a destination focused travel site and decide to offer bookings only for one destination such as Hawaai. In both cases you are likely to fail even though instinctively, you feel that you will have an edge since you're creating a best-of-breed product or service. People prefer to have lower overhead while allocating memory chunks in their brains. They like to categorize and bunch various items into categories and transact with the category leader wherever possible. So in both cases, you would stand no chance because of giants such as Expedia, Trip Advisor or Priceline.

The right way to focus would be to figure out a way to make your service or product clearly, unambiguously and specifically different while focusing on the tiny (but not insignificant) problem that you're trying to solve. So in the cruise website case, this may be a very large selection of large, medium and small ships including sailing ships, rowing ships, bare-boats and more. Or it can be the ability to book online for various on-board activities. Or perhaps you can have a reverse auction service for cruise liners where you aggregate potential travelers and shop on their behalf for a great deal with the cruise liners.

Or in the case of the Hawaai travel website, you may decide to put up videos of little known locations, beaches and islands. Or put up cameras in various locations of Hawaai and stream the images live to your website.

In both cases, we're doing more than just take a sub-segment from the market. We're expanding the market sub-category and attempting to gain a foothold in the prospect's mind by raising the importance of what we're offering.

This is how Star Businesses create a focus strategy.