Which strategy aims at creating new customer demand?

The blue ocean strategy is designed to create new customer demand by exploring and tapping into uncharted market spaces rather than competing in saturated markets. This approach encourages companies to find innovative ways to meet customer needs, effectively making the competition irrelevant. By pursuing differentiation and low-cost strategies simultaneously, organizations can open up new markets and create new consumer bases that were previously untapped, thus generating demand that did not exist before.

In contrast, the cost-leadership strategy focuses primarily on becoming the lowest-cost producer in an industry to attract price-sensitive customers, rather than creating entirely new markets. Benchmarking strategy involves comparing business processes and performance metrics with industry bests to improve efficiency and effectiveness but does not inherently involve creating new demand. The market penetration strategy aims to increase market share within existing markets through various tactics, yet it does not seek to create new demand but rather to capture more of the existing demand.

Thus, blue ocean strategy stands out as the only option explicitly aimed at generating new customer demand through innovation and market creation.