Case study: Cirque Du Soleil uses customer data to revamp its shows

Global entertainment brand Cirque Du Soleil used the end of the lockdown as an opportunity to diversify its product offering.

Nickole Tara, chief growth officer at Cirque Du Soleil told Digital Nation during the beginning of the pandemic their workforce plummeted from 5000 employees to 150 in two weeks.

Tara explained when the world started opening up, the entertainment company had a two-stage plan.

“Stage One was relaunching 32 shows contemporaneously, which is a feat that had never been done as far as we know, in the history of the world,” she said.

“Phase two was we have our core products out, but how are we going to use these core products to diversify into new business opportunities, grow new audiences, think about the future a bit more about who consumes us and how they find us?”

this in 2021, they did a full examination of what Cirque du Soleil needed, one of the items missing was digital infrastructure.

Tara said before she joined the brand in August 2022, the company there was an impetus and a strategic, inward look at the basic architectures that needed to be implemented.

“The ones that were there, how they needed to be modernised and what we needed as tools to be successful. SAP has been a longtime partner, and they were certainly a big advocate,” she said.

“I would go as far to say had an academic-type role with us and getting to understand how we could better utilise the tools we had, how we could grow into new tools, and then architecturally what we needed to do as a company to make a lot of those things happen.”

The platform allows for easy retrieval of first-party data, which helped Cirque Du Soleil understand the success behind their shows.

“We harvest a lot of first-party data with SAP products, the Qualtrics product, the first-party data has become increasingly important to us in a post-pandemic environment,” Tara explained.

“A lot of what Cirque Du Soleil did, particularly in its powerhouse 90s and 2000s eras where we were opening all of our massive Las Vegas-based resident programs and shows, there was almost nothing we couldn't do right in that era.”

Tara explained it's easy to move forward when all of their shows are successful, and they don't have to really think about why.

“In a post-pandemic environment, being more mindful about what we're creating and who we are creating it for has become something that's risen to the top of a critical priority for our business,” she said.  

“Having real-time data to be able to draft off of literally people's show-by-show experiences, everything down to what the bathrooms were like? What was parking? How was your concessions experience? How was the merchandise?

"Being able to aggregate that to better learn the evolution of consumer tendencies.”

Tara said consumers have evolved since the pandemic.

“When we had a lot of those things removed from our life, the way we returned, as an economy to live entertainment is different than how we consumed it in 2019,” she said.

“The demographics have shifted in certain markets. People like things earlier, instead of later we used to cater to a late-night audience and a lot of markets and people are overwhelmingly telling us they prefer that matinee show. And ‘oh, by the way, like 67 percent of us have kids under 18 now, and we're going to bring our kids so can we have a 3pm show instead of a 930pm show?’

“A lot of that real-time data allows us to adjust our core products, and then it allows us to build for the future.”