Disneyland China Localization

Disney Act Local

Walt Disney Company iconic for their characters, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck gain enormous brand recognition as the world’s most famous family friendly entertainment. The company operates theme parks in several locations including the most recent park, Hong Kong. Disney’s theme park built their brand recognition for the live animation and features. However, despite the level of awareness of the Disney brand, only 25% of the company’s revenue came from outside of the US. To gain more revenue globally, the Disney team has created products in the past and exported them however now that Disney targets outside of the US (China, Indian, South Korea), it is gearing away from their “one size fits all” model. A call for a change in strategy began when their prediction of the amount of customers who would come to Hong Kong decreased by 5.6 million people. As a result, the executives decided in order to increase their customer base an effort to educate the Chinese about Disney characters had to be in place.

In Hong Kong, Disney officials also failed to recognize that most of mainland China often book package tours for vacation. Typically, tour companies choose where these vacationers go to generate the highest fees and commissions thus Hong Disneyland failed to offer a tour package with dinner. In response to this, Disney decided to create a new “dining with Disney” program to address this issue. In order to promote this new program, individual tour companies were offered an incentive of a 50% individual discount to visit Disneyland in order to experience the theme park first hand.

According to the Chinese calendar, 2008 was the year of the rat. Therefore at the Hong Kong theme park, Mickey and Minnie Mouse wore special red costumes in order to represent and acknowledge the Chinese Customers, calling 2008 to be the “Year of the Mouse”. Recognizing the Chinese governments tight regulations, Disney continually endorsed the affordable products such as...