BLAC and White moves
Playing 2x2 chess…
How do you become a must have, Blatant and Critical product?
How you move through the quadrants of the BLAC and White framework can be quite strategic. Just like chess, it pays to think several steps ahead if you’re going to win the whitespace, efficiently.
Labeling the quadrants:
1 Latent Aspirational - New products for yet to be recognized needs (eg the iPad when first introduced) 2 Blatant Aspirational - Luxury goods (Luxury Fashion, Cars, Boats) 3 Blatant Critical - Healthcare, Accounting products 4 Latent Critical - Risk management and insurance products
B2C
Many consumer products start in the bottom left, (quadrant 1) but can make their way up toward the top left (quadrant 3) as they become fashionable and may even get to being “status” symbols. There are all sorts of ways this can be achieved, from great design and branding, to capturing “trendy” waves. Recruit influencers, brand ambassadors, or even famous people who endorse your product. Have them tell their stories using your products and services.
B2B
In B2B, it’s ideal if you can make your way to becoming Blatant and Critical. But if you start off in the Latent Critical bottom right, develop a narrative and case studies of why people can’f afford _not_ to use your product. Believe it or not cyber security was not even a category a few decades ago because people weren’t aware of the risks of data loss. When I was at Symantec we had to take out full page advertorials educating people on how susceptible they were without anti virus and backup software and highlighting the costs of data loss and downtime.
These products moved from latent to critical as the rise of networking and the internet made it obvious how quickly things like viruses, data breaches and identity theft could wreak havoc.
If you read between the lines here, you’ll see that timing is critical in your progress through the BLAC framework. If you move too fast, getting ahead of the market, you’ll burn cash. If you move too slowly someone else may capture the white space before you do. See 
Funding Market Fit
The Startup Secret here is simple,
Don’t just try to time a market, pace it!
Needless to say the pacing should be determined by your customers. If you’re having to push them to buy you’re early. If you’re feeling pull from them then you’re in the sweetspot. More about this in the 
Go to Market section of Startup Secrets, because picking and focusing on the right 
MVS - Minimum Viable Segment can help you create a tipping point within an initial segment to go from push to pull as you show success and garner a critical mass of reference-able customers.
Exercises
1. Think about what kinds of things you buy and use or discard and fit them into each quadrant.
I often get questions about examples of the two less obvious quadrants, 2 and 4.
2 - Blatant Aspirational : Think of LVMH, one of the most successful consumer businesses of our age. Luxury fashion items are things people aspire to look and feel good and some people find it blatantly obvious that they must wear the latest fashion or sport the latest status symbol to be perceived appropriately!
4- Latent Critical: Insurance. We all insurance is critical for many things like health or even mandatory in some cases, but beyond that it’s often latent until disaster strikes, then it becomes blatantly obvious we should have had it!
2. What might be your favorite quadrant to invest in?
Think of your answer if you were investing your own money into a product or service.
- Then click here or click on the chevron to reveal my thinking
- As usual I don’t want to give you an answer.
- If you choose what might seem obvious, Quadrant 4, Blatant and Critical. Then you won’t have to invest money in developing a market need. That work can be expensive, time consuming and also very risky, as the market may never emerge. Instead you can just focus on spotlighting the need and highlighting it with customer stories that help others realize they too have the need. Be careful to do this one segment at a time, starting with a MVS - Minimum Viable Segment where all the potential customers have the same need. But what is the downside to chosing Quadrant 4, Blatant and Critical?
- Consider this
Market timing
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
The most valuable move on the BLAC & White diagram is getting a need from the bottom-left (latent, aspirational, nice-to-have) to the top-right (blatant, critical, must-have). If you can identify the difference between a nice-to-have and a must-have, you obviously want to be in the top-right. So the practical question is: how do you move a need up?
Victor asked the sharp version of this about the iPad: when Apple built it, they didn’t yet have the thousands of applications that later made it critical, so didn’t they build it before solving a critical problem? Chicken or egg? The answer is one of the most instructive things about Steve Jobs. People say he never talked to users, and that’s famously his line, but what he was brilliant at was having great vision for what the device could be, and then building the real business asset: a platform. He said, in effect, anybody can take my device, use my platform, and build the application they need. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions of applications got built. The need moved from latent to critical one application at a time. Today, a pilot uses an iPad for navigation and won’t fly without it; in medicine it’s become critical where a keyboard is impractical and a surgeon just needs to touch something to activate a function; and for many consumers it became their primary device for notes, entertainment, or education (some people’s whole entertainment interface is now YouTube on a tablet).
Startup Secret: to move a latent need to a must-have, make a platform easy enough for others to adopt it and solve their own problems. Open source works the same way: anybody can take the code (I’ve used WordPress/Acquia and Drupal as examples) and extend a website however they want, from integrating Instagram at one extreme to Salesforce at the other, so that publishers can give fans a great experience uploading photos at the Grammys and then keep a close relationship to sell them records and merchandise. A whole experience-management industry grew on an open-source platform, just as an app industry grew on the iPad’s open platform.
The counter-example is Pebble. It fit the framework on paper (it answered several of the U’s and the BLAC questions), but was it truly urgent, and was it open? I’ll admit a personal parallel: when I bought my first Apple Watch I wrote an article (you can find it on LinkedIn) offering it to anybody who could tell me why to keep it, because I thought it was a useless gadget. It didn’t even stay on; I had to flick my wrist to see the time, and there were essentially no applications. What eventually worked was the development platform and a large developer/user base building applications. Now I’d never give up my Apple Watch: it monitors my sleep and other health metrics, and (importantly for my job) it keeps me on time. Some of the difference between Pebble and Apple Watch is the platform and ecosystem, and some of it, honestly, is marketing. The frameworks don’t hand you a guaranteed answer, but they give you the questions that reveal why one moved up to critical and the other didn’t.