Great Videos of the Rise and Fall of Disney Parks

[Bruggok]

If WDW execs focus on numbers, It will be too late by the time a noticeable # of loyal customers bail on them. It will take decades to get irate customers to return. Customers who return won’t have any goodwill left to burn and will have the mindset of fool me twice shame on me.

It will be like when Ford, GM, and Chrysler lost sedan buyers to Japanese automakers. Like when people stopped seeing McDonalds as good place to take a family to dinner. Those companies never recovered their prior dominance, despite later putting out products with competitive prices and quality.

If WDW wants to stay dominant for the next half century, it needs to be emulate Chic fil A and avoid copying Walmart. People are happy to pay higher prices to get consistently great product/service delivered by cheerful workers. Abuse that reputation/loyalty and they will write you off.

 

[BrianL]

If WDW execs focus on numbers, It will be too late by the time a noticeable # of loyal customers bail on them. It will take decades to get irate customers to return. Customers who return won’t have any goodwill left to burn and will have the mindset of fool me twice shame on me.

It will be like when Ford, GM, and Chrysler lost sedan buyers to Japanese automakers. Like when people stopped seeing McDonalds as good place to take a family to dinner. Those companies never recovered their prior dominance, despite later putting out products with competitive prices and quality.

If WDW wants to stay dominant for the next half century, it needs to be emulate Chic fil A and avoid copying Walmart. People are happy to pay higher prices to get consistently great product/service delivered by cheerful workers. Abuse that reputation/loyalty and they will write you off.

This is true. The retail death-spiral has always fascinated me. A store, let's call it Sears, loses customers due to a lack of merchandise that those customers want to buy and an unpleasant or dated shopping experience. Their solution is to cut costs and put even LESS merchandise on teh shelves and make the shopping esperience MORE unpleasand with understaffed stores. They lose more customers and react in the same way, again making the experience worse. They need to make the experience BETTER - improve the stores, the merchandise, etc. Of course when you're not reinvesting profit into the stores and instead are lining executive pockets, that is hard to do.

I'm not saying Disney is Sears - far from it at this point - but it's not wrong to say that they are showing some of those inclinations at the moment. THey have been through this before though and it is recoverable. unlike retail stores, Disney is a brand that people are emotional about, so that gives them some advantage when it comes to "winning them back," but that only goes so far too, and I don't thaink that testing the limits of that is a good strategy.

 

[MonkeyKnifeFight]

If WDW execs focus on numbers, It will be too late by the time a noticeable # of loyal customers bail on them. It will take decades to get irate customers to return. Customers who return won’t have any goodwill left to burn and will have the mindset of fool me twice shame on me.

It will be like when Ford, GM, and Chrysler lost sedan buyers to Japanese automakers. Like when people stopped seeing McDonalds as good place to take a family to dinner. Those companies never recovered their prior dominance, despite later putting out products with competitive prices and quality.

If WDW wants to stay dominant for the next half century, it needs to be emulate Chic fil A and avoid copying Walmart. People are happy to pay higher prices to get consistently great product/service delivered by cheerful workers. Abuse that reputation/loyalty and they will write you off.

I wish this was true but Disney has a large consumer base locked in through their timeshare. So while I do think a lot of people are disenchanted and will leave, those with dvc will keep coming even though it’s a watered down and mediocre experience.

 

[EastYorkDisneyFan]

This is true. The retail death-spiral has always fascinated me. A store, let's call it Sears, loses customers due to a lack of merchandise that those customers want to buy and an unpleasant or dated shopping experience. Their solution is to cut costs and put even LESS merchandise on teh shelves and make the shopping esperience MORE unpleasand with understaffed stores. They lose more customers and react in the same way, again making the experience worse.

I think the biggest problem with Sears was that it didn't adapt to the world shift to online shopping. For years they had their catalogue wehe you could phone in an order and have it sent to you, pick up in-store or to a distribution center. However, they didn't translate that to online very well and got beaten out by other companies like Amazon. Kodak is also the same they didn't do well once everyone started going digital and couldn't rest on their laurels of being one of the biggest film producers anymore.

 

[Illinois76]

As long as Disney has exclusive attention of little girls with Princess dress and makeup, they will rule the theme park universe. As a father of 3 girls and 5 female grand children, it is never even a question on where we are going. I have 2 male grand children, but guess where their mother wants to go (she is in her mid 30's)--clue it is not Universal. Disney hooks them when they are young and the nostalgia keeps bringing them back.

This 1000%.

Disney World fans easily forget the way in which all things Disney is indoctrinated WAY beyond the parks.

Universal is never touching this part of the interaction.

 

[Tigger's ally]

This 1000%.

Disney World fans easily forget the way in which all things Disney is indoctrinated WAY beyond the parks.

Universal is never touching this part of the interaction.

Yep. And if my grandtinker wants to go see the princesses, I will be there to watch her face light up.

 

[TiggerBouncy]

Rumors of Disney's demise are grossly exaggerated. The chance that Universal will eclipse them in any near future is very small.

That said, I think Disney could stand for a little healthy competition. I don't think they will lose -Disney has shown in the past that they can be nimble and adept at rising to a challenge when faced with one. Universal challenging Disney would be a great thing for all of us. But dethroning the mouse? Not gonna happen.

 

[TiggerBouncy]

I wish this was true but Disney has a large consumer base locked in through their timeshare. So while I do think a lot of people are disenchanted and will leave, those with dvc will keep coming even though it’s a watered down and mediocre experience.

While I think Disney is not going anywhere and the chance of them falling is small, DVC is not a "large consumer base" for them. Lets put a little perspective around that. There are about 220,000 DVC owners. On average, they own about 150 points (enough for a week at a studio). WDW has an estimated 58,000,000 visitors a year. Heck, there are 250,000 people at WDW A DAY.

So the "large consumer base locked in through the timeshare" is enough to feed the beast for probably a week. Speaking as one of those people.