Blue Ocean for Solopreneurs. Reconstruct Boundaries with Path 5 of Six

Blue ocean for solopreneurs is a series written to provide a translation of the business best-seller Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant into language more useful for the solopreneur or small business owner. Today in Blue Ocean for Solopreneurs we Reconstruct Boundaries with Path 5 of Six.
Path 5: Look Across Functional or Emotional Appeal to Buyers.
Companies of all sizes generally default to doing what the competition does. There is generally little thought given to strategic planning that leads to true differentiation of one company’s product over another.
In most cases, companies will compete on functional price-oriented factors or emotional feeling-oriented factors. These two competitive defaults end up training the entire customer base of entire industries. The cycles of function or emotion become reinforced over time.
One example shared in the text is that of Swatch. The budget-oriented watchmaker managed to transform a functionally friendly watch segment into an emotional buy and as a result, the brand went global and sales exploded.
Another example includes QB (Quick Beauty) House. QB House understood the traditional barbershop experience in Japan was ripe for disruption and began delivery of highly functional haircuts that took a fraction of the time at a fraction of the costs of the Japanese barbershop experience.

Via Semantic House
As you see in the QB strategy canvas, laying out the key competitive fac