Disney: The Experience, the Product, and their Perfect Marriage
An Analysis of Market Segmentation and Strategy
Francetta Renee Clausell
Marketing 571
Professor Hawe
March 9, 2015
How do you reach prospective buyers when trying to attract them to a new product or service? Convince them that it is useful, rare, and exclusive, makes life easier or more convenience—that they need whatever product or service you are selling. Sounds easy enough, but it is not—so much so that people devote careers and lifetimes to studying consumer behavior, psychology, and reactions. Assembling potential consumers into smaller groups—segments—allows companies to perceive and address the needs of different categories of consumers and predict how
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This intentionally wide, but highly personal marketing approach lends itself to a larger customer base and brand loyalty. Disney strategically gears advertising and products toward households of median income and children ages 12 and under. For children, Disney provides an unparalleled magical experience and constant entertainment. For grandparents, they witness their grandchildren experience “the happiest place on earth”, just as they had growing up. Walt Disney himself once stated, “You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway”. Disney conducts extensive research to attract their target markets, and therefore is able to create products and entertainment that are frequently updated to appeal to new and ever-evolving consumer interests. However, it is the parents that are perhaps the most important segment. For Disney, it is necessary to maintain its good reputation and high standards to attract parents. Advertisements are deliberate and calculated including emotive words like “magic”, “love”, and “happiness”. Disney is known for high quality goods/services, has time-legitimacy (i.e., name recognition), fair prices, safe content, and cheerfulness. Employees are called “cast members” and visitors to the park are called “guests” and as stated before their creative team are known as “imagineers”. Disney, in a way, through understanding how to spark a predictable reaction in its target
It’s no doubt that creating a family oriented theme park based on popular, beloved cartoon characters and imagination was a good idea. From Cinderella’s castle to the famous Main Street, U.S.A, there’s something extraordinary lying around every corner. Walt Disney World, other wise known as “the happiest place on earth”, or the place “where dreams come true”, was founded by a man with a dream of creating a place where children and parents could spend time together while making amazing memories. However, this extravagant amusement park is only one of the major accomplishments of Walt Disney.
The Walt Disney believes diversity helps to bring creativities, innovation, cost-effective and quality work within the company and achieve its goals. When the company’s product, entertainment, and, attraction put out of the market that meets the need of the diverse global costumers, fans, and viewers. The Walt Disney has uniquely reflected the diversity of the consumers, audiences, and fans through their products. The company has focused on diversity of “workforce, inclusion, and opportunities within the workplace, and leveraging global diversity to grow the company and engage diverse communities” (PDF)
“I’m going to Disney World!” shouts the quarterback of the winning team. This scene is played out every year in front of millions of football fans watching at home with their children. Who is this advertisement focused on? Is Disney Corp. telling grown ups they should vacation there because that’s where rich football players go? Absolutely not! This promotion is bypassing the grownups altogether and attacking their true target audience. Disney’s marketing demographic is children. Everything about Disney is designed to entertain and capture the attention of kids. Disney is not only creating a market based solely on children it is
For most of society, the word Disney elicits warm feelings: memories of early Saturday mornings with family watching cartoons, family trips to Disney World, or a movie that was so encapsulating it was watched over and over again. Disney achieves a high level of regard from most of society unparalleled by other companies. Penn State education professor, Henry A. Giroux, accompanied by Grace Pollock, argues in his book The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence that society is blinded by Disney’s façade of “childhood innocence” and that Disney’s marketing tactics are far from innocent at all.
understanding if a certain segment of the market will truly appreciate a product or service to be
The Walt Disney Company is a diversified international entertainment company (Disney, 2010) with ownership of many media outlets including radio, cinema, television and literature as well as consumer products such as stationary and toys. The Disney brand has huge recognition globally especially in the category of children’s entertainment with over 80 years of productions in this sector. With an obvious predominance and market leadership in children’s entertainment and consumerism, The Disney Company has an unparalleled capability to reach
Specialized products, being marketed to a specific sector, also have a unique opportunity to market directly to a target audience. Being aware of the differences in marketing to mass audiences and the targeting of specific groups, is a valuable arrow in the quiver of a marketer. Comparing the differences in the older generations gives the marketer an insight into how to mass market, while targeting the groups as a whole. There is also an interesting opportunity for the marketer to target a very specific group for specialized products. While the job of the marketer remains the same, the methodology must be different to reach the intended audiences.
Willis voices her opinion of Disney World and her experience when she went to visit. She made comments on the fact that family is the basic social unit, everything is too safe and not enough of the real world, and they charge too much and try to entice consumers to an extreme extent. She responds very negatively to these facts but as a Disney Spokesperson, I am here to view these as a positive part of Disney World. Despite Willis’s opinion of Disney World, I believe that Disney is family focused, the happiest place on earth, and is invested in their consumers.
Markets consist of buyers that differ in their needs, wants, resources, locations, buying attitudes and buying practices. To reach customer insight, it is important to understand the needs of different segments and to communicate pertinently to them (Brown L, Brown C, Gallagher SM, 2008).
Sometimes it’s not so important that your product fits the exact needs of the segment you target; rather, it’s vital that customers perceive that you do, even if it’s not true. In order to achieve this, the proper amount of advertising and sending the appropriate message are both vital.
Overview of the concept of corporate level strategy Corporate level strategy is to the basis for strategic business decisions made by the top management to influence the corporation as a whole. Concentration strategy is used when the company focuses on one business field. Vertical integration occurs when the company controls the supply chain that produces products by itself or distributes the products directly to the markets. Diversification, also known as, horizontal integration is related to acquiring or merging different or similar businesses to increase market share.
Marketing to people in the world is done in different ways depending on the demographics. “Demographics underlies almost every marketing program, and is often a source of potent insights and opportunities for marketers (Hiam, 1992).” In society today, the different age groups and social classes of our population are part of the demographics that are considered. The groups are these: the youth market, teens, underclass, baby boomers, elderly and marital status (Hiam,
Disney is one of the most successful and largest companies in the world. They have their hand in nearly every form of entertainment as well as media, and broadcasting. Disney is best known for their animated films, unique cartoon characters, catchy musicals, and fairy tales that most of us were first introduced to as children. They are one of the few entertainment companies in the World whose primary demographic is children and teens. Nearly everybody is familiar with the Disney name and its brand, and its realistic to suggest that nearly everybody has experienced a Disney film and animated character at some point in their lives; which may have helped to influence them or their behaviors or even their
Disney has become a marketing goliath and the #1 entertainment company in the US. They have been able to develop a creativity-driven philosophy that over time was tempered by financial responsibility and that benefitted from powerful synergies between its divisions. From the very beginning, Disney has been synonymous with innovation within the children’s entertainment industry, from their introduction of animations with synchronized audio, full-length animated feature films and then later into theme parks and on-ice and Broadway shows. One important element of Disney’s success was the extent to which they integrated and expanded into different
The Happiest Brand on Earth"Tina Ross AB219: Marketing, Unit 1 AssignmentKaplan University05 April 2016Date: April 05, 2016 To: All Marketing personnel From: Tina Ross, Marketing Associate Subject: Success of Disney Company & Marketing Strategies for Disney FranchiseThis is a memo that seeks to illustrate and bring out the success efforts and routes used by Bob Iger between the years 2006 and 2012 while at Disney to help deliver and improve quality in our company especially in the film and the movie industry. Disney has had many successful franchises by offering a variety of different franchises that target different age groups and genders; they are able to expand their reach. Not only have they expanding the target market, they changed the ways they reach this market. Pirates of the Caribbean have been a successful franchise for Disney CEO Bob Iger. This based on the classic park ride theme. The Pirates of the Caribbean was able to breakthrough into the teen viewing area. This franchise was the first one of Disney 's to be rated PG-13 (Lamb. C.W., Hair. JF., McDaniel. C, 2014). Iger had a great vision for the firm that was pegged on the three main pillars (White, 2014). These were the expansion into the new global markets, the generation of the greatest and most creative content possible in the market, and the development of innovative technology that could fit into the modern industry. Looking at how Disney 's CEO Bob Iger targeted this franchise towards the older viewers