Disney

Walt Disney

Since the beginning of Disney establishment, the company has moved through different stages. With each stage having a different competitive advantage that differentiated the company from its rivals. In the early days the main sustainable competitive advantage was the uniqueness of the Disney characters. Creativity on these days won the company brand recognition winning many academy awards through the development of new successful characters. These characters were rare to consumers and they were only experienced through Disney that provided a special experience that were recognized by the consumers that appreciated and admired the work, that added value to their experience. Furthermore it was hard to imitate and will hold value as long as consumers were attached to the characters. Using their main stable competitive advantage the company leverage their characters to develop more revenue streams, in addition reissuing cartoon classics to new generations of children and it grew to be the most important source of profits.

After that Disney recognized that they could create more value by diversifying their operation while leveraging their competency they had within the characters. The first step was creating theme parks & resorts associated with the characters. That involved the full involvement of management in creating the ultimate experience for adults and kids to gain control of quality and operation. That created a sustainable competitive advantage because it was difficult and costly to create theme parks with the same fashion. Adding to that, resorts and parks required a huge sum of capital investments with high costs for land and construction development that rivals could not easily imitate and that was a perfect example of vertical integration. Then the firm diversified even more by creating the Walt Disney Music Company that would claim the right to all music produced by Disney. It enabled the company to attract top artists, this...