Wherever they got their info on EE from, it took them down the wrong path.
Yep!! That is one of the very, very, very nice recent additions that I have noticed that added gobs and gobs of pixie dust on our recent trips!!
I didn't say they weren't related. I was just commenting on your post about guest surveys, since you were implying that they were the only way Disney was getting feedback.
No, it shouldn't require letter writing campaigns, thousands of posts on message boards, and visits to Guests Services and City Hall. And, the PR folks should have known that the readers of their spin weren't idiots.
Well, yeah. It should. If a company tries something (whether it's bringing back Cabbage Patch Kids or developing New Coke), they try it so they see what kind of reaction they get. Will people spend money on their experiment, or not? Will people be incensed that they changed something, or will they accept the new product? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but stuff gets tried because you want to see what will happen. You NEED that feedback -- good, bad or ugly. Even if the feedback proves that you're wrong.
Originally posted by WDSearcher
Well, yeah. It should. If a company tries something (whether it's bringing back Cabbage Patch Kids or developing New Coke), they try it so they see what kind of reaction they get. Will people spend money on their experiment, or not? Will people be incensed that they changed something, or will they accept the new product? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but stuff gets tried because you want to see what will happen. You NEED that feedback -- good, bad or ugly. Even if the feedback proves that you're wrong.
I would pretty much bet that, at the time the substitution of CC for EE was implemented, it was done so as a short term solution. A knee-jerk reaction to needing to quickly cut budgets, but to also develop something that could help take care of the "not enough characters" problem. My guess would be that the plan all along was to cut EE for a while to save some cash and put a short-term character solution out there. That gives the Character people a little breathing room and a chance to figure out a real plan to increase the character presence in the parks. And then, when the time was right budgetarily, they bring EE back with fanfare PLUS they add all this new character presence in the park. Thereby creating a new marketing hook.
But whether that's the case or not, the letter writing campaigns and the message board posts and the visits to Guest Services and City Hall are exactly the reaction you want to see, because it gives you the feedback you need to preserve the program in the long term.
Yes, in a perfect world. But the decision that looks stupid today might have been the best solution at the time. If you've got a director or a VP telling you to cut expenses and you know from your own view of the finances that this has to be done, you have to come up with some cuts somewhere. You don't want to, maybe, and you know that people are going to be mad at the decision, but you do what you can because that's your job. And you hope that the guests will be out there to complain because you want and need a reason to bring that program back. I'm not saying that always happens, but it's not like cuts like that are made on a whim.
I can't answer that without knowing WHY you stopped the frequent buyer club discount. Presumably you had a reason, and didn't just do it on a whim. You didn't just wake up one day and decide to cut a successful program. You did it because, at the time, it seemed like a sound decision and the solution to a problem you had. And even if the only reason you did it was "to find out what would happen," you've done that.
So you either track them down and find out, while reminding them that you have this "new and improved" buying club discount to offer them, or you count on new customers coming in. Maybe you get those 25 back, maybe you don't. Either way, it was your decision to cut the program in the first place. You knew there were risks, but again ... you took them because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
How much did it cost you to try to get those 25 back? And no, you never get them all back. Walt said it, and its a tried and true business adage...It costs a heck of a lot more to bring a customer back than it does to keep him in the first place.
Now we're stepping beyond "like everybody else" and into plain suicide. A service company doesn't cut services just to "find out what would happen." At the very least they need to accurately do their research and be confident of what the overall impact will be before they make the cut, for the costs of being wrong will outweigh any benefit from the cut.
No, it shouldn't. For if this does happen, you've messed up royally. Again, real world here, you've lost customers and you've lost money. That's a much more serious problem than you seem to realize. Disney made this cut even though it flies in the face of everything they were built on, and they made it worse by not understanding what they true impact would be.
No, that's not true. The results are not all that matters. What also matters is why the other 50 came back, and why the OTHER 25 stayed even after the program was cut. You want an accurate idea of what your customers want, you need to care about what's behind all of those motivations.
Geez Matt ... it was just an example. I wasn't implying that Disney would ever do that. I was listing a possible motivation for why HB2K might have cut his frequent buying program, per his example.
Unless you've got an in at corporate planning, we don't know what kind of model or research they used or why.
But they did come out with a new product. The early morning character greetings in the resorts. Maybe it wasn't cutting edge, but it was something that had never been done before. In the process, they took something else away. Like taking away Mr. Toad and replacing it with Pooh. Some people liked it. Some people hated it. In the case of CC vs. EE, more people hated it than liked it, so EE came back.
Oh man ... this is too much like school! What do I know? My training is in the non-profit sector!
Great example Searcher. Replace an attraction with the shortest queues in Fantasyland [that is based on an obscure Disney animated feature which (at the time) had not even been released on video and few people had any idea about] with an attraction based on a hugely popular story and set of characters that can easily be revived and made current (the book of Pooh). {geez, what a run on} The payback in terms of attracting new guests, generating return guests and generating the sale of Pooh stuff would seem to make it a no brainer. Take a relatively unpopular attraction and replace it with a winner.
Yes, you obviously should learn from your mistake, but in Disney's case, the mistake wasn't so much the mis-judgement itself. No, the mistake was the deviation from the successful business model they employed to build the Disney we know today. That's the root cause, and they didn't learn a thing.
Of course it happens. The key is the methodolgy behind your decision. Did you really try to do the "right" thing? Did you make your decision with the goal of helping the company meet its goals? In Disney's case, the answer is yes, but only because the goal has essentially become "let's see what we can get away with". They, think the mistake was that they didn't get away with it, when the real mistake was the goals were messed up to begin with. Those goals have not changed.
It really doesn't matter. The reasoning behind it was faulty to begin with, and on top of that, whatever research they did led them to incorrect results. Ill-conceived and poorly executed. A bad combination.
Great! Wonderful! Beautiful!
