Disney Scrambling to Build Recognition in China for Hong Kong Park

[Sarangel]

China's future Communist Party cadres are learning about Mickey Mouse along with Mao.

Walt Disney Co. said it had partnered "Youth Palaces" run by China's Communist Youth League to build awareness of its stories and characters in the mainland ahead of the opening of a Hong Kong Disneyland theme park in late 2005 or early 2006.

"It's one part of an overall brand-building process," Jay Rasulo, president of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, told a small group of reporters in Hong Kong on Thursday.

Mickey Mouse and other Disney representatives visited 500 children at two youth centers in Guangzhou, in southern China, in July, a spokeswoman said.

The California-based entertainment giant plans similar outreach programs, with story-telling and interactive games, elsewhere in China ahead of its Hong Kong Disneyland opening.

Other efforts to build the Disney brand include story-telling in public libraries, tours of shopping malls by the famous mouse and other characters such as Goofy and Donald Duck, and programs on Hong Kong television, which can be viewed in southern China.

The company said it is fine-tuning its program for youth centers. Some 70 million young Chinese are members of the Communist Youth League.

"In one session, we teach them to draw Mickey Mouse -- they're all amazed by that," said Irene Chan, vice president for public affairs at Hong Kong Disneyland. "We hope we can expand to more cities and provinces.

Disney expects that roughly one-third of visitors to its Hong Kong park will come from mainland China, where its brand recognition is high but not deep, said Rasulo, who was in Hong Kong for the "topping" of the park's Sleeping Beauty Castle.

China limits the number of overseas films that can be shown and restricts foreign TV programing, which means most mainland consumers do not have deep awareness of Disney stories.

Similar grass-roots brand-building was not needed when Disney opened its Paris and Tokyo theme parks, Rasulo said.

"We've had to be innovative. If you look at Europe and Tokyo, the brand was far better understood," he said.
The $1.8 billion Hong Kong park, being built on rural Lantau Island, will be Disney's second in Asia after Tokyo.

Some in Hong Kong worry the park will suffer from competition if Disney builds another park in Shanghai, which the company says it will not do before 2010.

"There's very little doubt in my mind that there will be a market further north in China for a second Disneyland," Rasulo said.