Once upon a time, I was part of a management team that were all given a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy and effectively told: go do that.
Cirque du Soleil was the case study we went through. And the lesson, loosely translated, was that if you just think hard enough, strip away industry assumptions, and “do something different”, you too can step neatly into uncontested market space.
Simple?
In the years since, I’ve become less and less convinced by the folklore surrounding the story.
Cirque du Soleil didn’t wake up one morning, spot a pristine blue ocean on a matrix, and set sail. The narrative hides the fact they were a scrappy troupe with real constraints, strong creative conviction, public funding that bought them time, and a long stretch of trial and error. The success came later. And the story was retrofitted to make that success feel inevitable.
We tend to reverse-engineer outcomes and pretend they were intentional from day one, but it’s not how most meaningful differentiation actually happens.
In this case, what got airbrushed out was:
– constraint-led decisions
– timing, and sheer dumb luck
– things that didn’t work, tours that lost money, formats that got binned
– the fact that many similar attempts quietly failed and never became case studies
While blue ocean thinking and other models can be a helpful lens for explaining why something worked, as a methodology for building something new, it’s often heavily oversold.
That’s why the best model is town is still ‘try stuff, iterate, scale’
By Dave Heywood
A marketer who’s spent his career figuring out how real growth happens – for brands and people alike. He runs Marketing Careers Uncovered, a podcast where marketers talk honestly about the work, the missteps, and what actually moves the needle.
