From Showtime to All the Time

This post was created in partnership with Cirque du Soleil

Cirque du Soleil’s breathtaking performances transcend language, culture, and borders. And now the legendary brand is expanding to weave inspiration across digital, physical, and emotional touchpoints.

At an ADWEEK House Cannes fireside chat, Cirque du Soleil Chief Customer Experience Officer Anne Belliveau, in conversation with ADWEEK Chief Content Officer Zoë Ruderman, revealed an exclusive look at Cirque’s bold new brand platform.

An opportunity to rebuild a brand

During the pandemic, Cirque went from 40 global shows a year to zero, presenting an opportunity for the brand to pause and clarify its future direction. A post-pandemic brand health survey of Cirque’s global, multigenerational audience showed an unaided awareness of 80%, surpassing that of Disney and Netflix. It also indicated that fans wanted to explore more in terms of digital formats, beyond just the shows.

Belliveau said the brand needed to change the “wash and repeat” of the customer journey, where customers buy a ticket, attend a show, and receive a thank-you email. Cirque decided to rebuild the brand and expand from only shows to a 360-degree offering.

“We took it from showtime to all the time. We’ve based ourselves on all this great data that we collected, and we started rebuilding—or even building—a solid brand architecture, which we didn’t have. We had our shows, but we had nothing else,” Belliveau said.

The Cirque du Soleil shows remain at the core of the customer experience framework, and the brand has added three pillars: experience, studio, and collection.

“This architecture, as simple as it is, is extremely coherent, and it enables us to create this environment within which the customer will recognize themselves,” she shared, “and really enables us as well to deploy specific touchpoints with new partners or by ourselves.”

Inviting audiences to feel the awe and inspiration

At the fireside chat, Belliveau unveiled Cirque’s new tagline: Feel the inspiration.

“We wanted it to start with a verb. It’s an action. It’s a call to action,” Belliveau explained. “We all know this as marketers; consumers don’t buy your product. They buy into a better version of themselves. They buy into hope. That’s what this is all about: inspiration.”

To engage its audiences and offer them more formats besides the premium-priced shows, Cirque stopped selling tickets through its own channels.

“We turned these channels into content channels that are extremely relevant and that nourish themselves into the demands or from the demand itself. That proved extremely successful. Our audience grew much more than we expected.”

Advertising video on demand (AVOD) and Free ad-supported TV (FAST) have become instrumental channels for improving Cirque’s visibility. The brand has also developed an ambassador network with its artists, where they create their own content for Cirque’s site and vice versa. For instance, Cirque has used Meta’s new AI glasses on its acrobats to produce an AI-driven content series.

“This is a trust loop that we built within our audience with our own artists that is really successful,” Belliveau added. “AVOD proved an amazing tactic for us, and it became our own amazing broadcasting instrument that we use.”

A new brand architecture to engage audiences

Belliveau shared that Cirque’s audience is wealthy, educated, and global.

“What we love about our audience is that it is universal. We go above the cultural barriers as we have no language, and we bring the awe feeling,” Belliveau pointed out.

She added that Cirque is attractive for marketers because its audience does not cross over with the live sports audience.

“It’s a very different approach. It’s an artistic, entertainment-driven audience,” Belliveau said. “And that’s what brands that are over-indexing, for example, in sports, are coming to us for. To help them diversify.”

Belliveau said Cirque’s new brand platform has created awareness, retention, loyalty, and, most of all, engagement. “That’s the beauty of this brand architecture—you can enter from many doors. You can enter as a consumer of our content.”

Belliveau concluded, “Once you experience one touch point, of course, the idea is to cross-reference all the others and to keep you in our environment from a 360 point of view.”