Blue Ocean Strategy and Cirque

The article, “Blue Ocean Strategy,” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, was a very interesting read which discussed shifting focus away from the competition and toward creating an altogether new market, where your competition was rendered irrelevant. Their example using Cirque du Soleil really illustrated this idea of a blue ocean for me. After doing a bit more research, I came across blueocenastrategy.com, which went into more depth about Cirque du Soleil and its enormous success creating its own blue ocean. They state that what is most interesting about this example is that Cirque made leaps and bounds in a declining industry that was projected to stay in downward sloping market. They made enormous progress in little time, and were able to come out at the top as the leader in this new circus industry.

Additionally, another reason why Cirque was so successful was that they did not take customers from their competition (Ringling Brothers or Barnum and Bailey). They appealed to an entirely new population of people and they created a market entirely different from the traditional circus. The “new” audience included several corporate clients that were willing to pay the extra cost associated with a company that “reinvent the circus.”

Lastly, I think Cirque du Soleil was successful in creating this new market because they took a chance on the unknown, and launched itself into an untapped market that benefited them greatly. They used a systematic approach and took their competitors out of the equation entirely. 

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Blue Ocean Strategy, http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/, accessed July 26, 2015.