As we all can read in just about any news source, the current state of The Walt Disney Company is a mess. A few results of bad upper management and hubris: 1- The creation of the Star Wars hotel ie Galactic Star Cruiser and its closure. 2- The cancelling of the Lake Nona Disney headquarters move, along with the threat to quit investing in Walt Disney World supposedly because of the company's pissing match with the state governor. 3- The failure of Disney+. 4- Allowing Universal Orlando to march on and take more and more of a Florida theme park vacation. If you go way, you can discover how relatively new CEO Robert Iger cut ties with J.K. Rowling and gave away the right to Harry Potter theme park attractions. Yes, he really did.
Here's an article that appeared- and then was
removed- from the Huffington Post. It criticized Robert Iger and the Walt
Disney Company's plan for their entry into the Chinese market, and its potential
effect on Shanghai Disneyland.
This must have angered him so much that he
used his second wife's influence to have it yanked. So, wife Willow Bay pulled the strings to make the unflattering article disappear.
I hate that kind of corporate or
governmental power play! So, here it is below, courtesy Google.
(And thanks to the WDWMagic Boards where the article was
resurrected...)
Sorry Mickey, they're just not that into you. Minnie, you
either.
For that matter, you can take the whole stable -- the "Fab
Five" of Walt Disney's animated creations -- and, despite a media machine
that churns a very different story, China has largely been a land where the
fabled wishes, dreams
and magic of the Walt Disney Company and its brand have
virtually no connection with the consumer. As valued as that consumer is in the
economic theater of globalism, the iconic brand synonymous with America
has little appeal
and less traction among the newly seated audience in the
Chinese mainland.
To its 'vanilla on toothpaste' helmsman, Robert A.
"Bob" Iger, who has shown himself to be an able cobbler of assets but
a less than visionary leader of the media colossus that is the Walt Disney
Company, this troubling if known and
growing headwind threatens to undermine the content-heavy but
culturally aloof purveyor of demographically unshackled product. For in his
zeal to expand its library of content, Bob Iger has drop-kicked the Disney
moniker to enter new and expanding marketplaces only to
position a product that runs well afar of the expectation of the Disney bounce.
In so doing, the once unrivaled status of the Disney brand has
become a catch-all for
entertainment and its associated byproducts that are increasingly a strange and
sometimes conflicted ragbag of franchised acquisitions presented as some sort
of media mélange for all ages and all palates. Or, as John Dreyer, the longtime
and immediate past head of corporate communications for the Walt Disney
Company, said upon the publication of the column Disney CEO
Readies Magic Carpet for Exit, "Disney losing its Disney
way."
With the company making its grandest play for a market that
dwarfs all others, Disney has found itself adrift in a crisis of
identity that breaches the foundation of the castle upon which
an empire was built. For as turrets were raised, wings were added and a moat of
meticulously positioned whimsy was filled in to
expand the Disney footprint, something that looks decidedly more
pedestrian than the fantastical inspiration for one of the world's most coveted
brands has emerged.
Leverage has become the arch of entry into the Disney-verse,
while the brand has been marginalized into a holding vehicle for assets that
are worth more separately than that vested in the castle itself.
As Mr. Iger said at
the 2013 Fortune Global
Forum held in Chengdu:
I think the first thing you have to do is you have to obviously
be aware of what your most significant brand attributes are. What makes your
brand your brand? Why is it great? You have to focus on quality and on those
attributes that, again, created the value in the first place. You can't look to
cut corners. You can't look to make something with your brand on it that's any
cheaper simply because it's going into a market that may not be able to afford
it the way another market may have. You can't compromise in that regard. So it
starts with what I'll call quality and a respect for an allegiance to the very
brand attributes that created the value in the first place.
Now, considering Shanghai Disney is
preparing to make its 2016 debut as Disney's first foray into the renminbi rich
Chinese mainland after a less than stellar
arrival in the former British colony of Hong Kong in 2005,
there are lessons aplenty to learn from that delayed embrace and the long
stalled entry into the single largest consumer market on offer to the world --
the whole of China.
Under Mr. Iger's stewarding, Disney has partnered
with the Shanghai Shendi Group, an umbrella name placed on a
panoply of government-owned companies created to facilitate Western investment
as a massive
anti-graft campaign is just now rattling Beijing and beyond, to
introduce a Disney 'branded' park to those consumers. A flag in the ground for
Disney. A flag that has been in the works since
the prime of Michael Eisner's reign at Disney and one that nearly collapsed
entirely by the summer of 2006.
Indeed, Mr. Iger had to leave the annual Herb Allen
retreat for media moguls, tech tycoons and other scripters of
society in Sun Valley for an unscheduled trip to Shanghai that day in 2006,
scrambling to save face and
leading to a denouement worthy of great scrutiny by any company -- especially
those entities whose trade is in intellectual property -- wanting to enter
China.
Or, as Dalian Wanda
Group Chairman Wang Jianlin, whose real estate and
entertainment empire is building its North American headquarters adjacent to
the Beverly Hilton at 9900 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, said on the same
panel at the Fortune Global Forum:
[W]e have so many Western companies in China, but you cannot
simply replicate the Western ideas and philosophies in China. They need to
adapt to the Chinese realities... So for Fortune 500 companies in China it's
very important, it's imperative for them to learn traditional culture in China
and how is it interrelated with the modern business culture.
Curiously though, the world beyond the
berm is told the 330 million or so Chinese within a three-hour
trip to the site on the other side of Shanghai's Pudong International Airport cannot
wait to queue up for a boat ride on "It's a small world"or
whatever Disney is offering up for its reported $5.5 billion marker. As, no,
there will apparently be no attraction of that name at Shanghai Disneyland.
Not in China. Not in a country where Mickey, Minne and the rest
of the gang are barely known. In a country where Disney might as well be Smith
or Jones or Johnson. Well, maybe not that last one as Johnson & Johnson is
actually a reasonably
well-known brand throughout China.
The Walt Disney Company has a history of
stumbling if not outright tumbling in its efforts to export
Disney's brand of Americana. For reference, look no further than Euro Disney --
now known as Disneyland Paris --
and Hong Kong Disneyland. Of the latter, it is worth note that Disney has
been known to
Hongkongers from the early days of the Disney Brothers Cartoon
Studio. Yet, to this day, with a direct link by MTR line to points throughout
Hong Kong, Disney is barely able to keep up with the brand devoid,
geographically hemmed in and animal exhibit heavy Ocean Park in Aberdeen.
Over lunch earlier this month at Neptune's in the Grand
Aquarium, Ocean Park
Hong Kong CEO Tom Mehrmann, who began his career as a street
sweeper at Knott's Berry Farm just up the road from
Walt's original Disneyland, said, "Disney still has to explain to some of
its guests exactly what a 'Disney Park' is. We don't have that problem."
To further illustrate this point, visit Disney's outpost on
Lantau, a parcel of reclaimed land near Hong Kong International Airport, and
you will notice a different Disney. Some call it 'Disney-lite'. Others refer to
it as 'McKingdom'. Regardless, there is a definite feel of a diminished product
-- of a diminished brand -- on stage for the public's consumption.
For, on a spit of land with an audience topping seven
million attached by
subway line having a familiarity and a kinship with the West, sits
the real experiment of Disney's entry into the Chinese market. And there, on a
recent day, at a performance of The Lion King in a theater
designed for Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando dropped into the Walt Disney
Company's first Disney
branded park in China, the actors sought to lead the audience
in a rendition of the hit tune from
this classic of Disney's second golden age of animation: Hakuna Matata.
Hakuna Matata.
What a wonderful
phrase.
Hakuna matata.
Ain't no passing craze.
It means no worries.
For
the rest of your days.
It's a problem free philosophy.
Hakuna matata.
Arms raised high in the air, cast members -- on stage and off --
encouraged the capacity crowd to sing the infectious chorus. With lyrics
blasting through the speakers and flashing on screens in the theater, they
sought a simple singalong to the catchy and commercial hit written by Elton
John and Tim Rice. Unmoved, the audience sat stone-faced. Child and adult
alike.
Considering most individuals reading this are likely humming the
tune or hearing it play as part of the soundtrack of their lives, that speaks
poorly of Disney's penetration into the far less foreign landscape of Hong
Kong. As for Shanghai, Mr. Iger continued on at
the conference in Chengdu:
We're a brand that is viewed as good for me and good for my
family. There are values to the Disney brand and what it stands for that have
interested people all over the world. But, it's very, very important that while
we bring Disney to a market we make sure that in that market it feels like, for
instance, China's Disney.
In leaving the park on
that recent evening, the dressed by and for Disney MTR cars filled with tired
visitors exposed to, saturated in, that which is the Disney Parks experience
offered up in Hong Kong. Looking to the left, to the right, all around, not one
visitor had that uniquely
American rite of passage positioned upon their head. Mickey
ears. Not one.
And, in the second largest market for its product and the largest
consumer market on the planet, Disney's Frozen, the highest grossing
animated film ever having delivered over $1.27 billion in ticket sales and
the fifth-highest grossing film of all time, earned little more than $48
million. Less than four percent of its global box office.
Gary Snyder is a member of the Redstone family, whose company,
National Amusements, owns Viacom and CBS, among other media assets. He is an
advisor on Western media and culture to China.
