DrStarlander
Active Member
With the opening of Epic, it's an interesting time to analyze Universal's attraction mix and target demographic...
Universal focuses on thrills, film-realism, and irreverence/sarcasm (e.g., Minions, Simpsons, DreamWorks). That made sense, for a long time. Going directly against Disney's wholesome, traditional family-market strength would have been an uphill battle and too expensive. But the market they captured is narrow...at least narrower than Disney's. And it's not nearly as lucrative.
When a family visits Disney, it can be four or five guests! And they may come many times during the kids' childhoods. Teenagers, meanwhile, have a much shorter window of family travel. By the time they are in their mid-teens, they'd often rather be home with their friends during school breaks than traveling with their parents, and it's harder for them to miss school, plus extracurriculars such as sports create further travel-scheduling complexity. A family with young kids can travel virtually any time of year. So Universal has a much shorter opportunity in years and in terms of school-breaks, to exploit the family with teenagers and they have to wait to start engaging them until the kids are older. Meanwhile, Disney got their hooks in them years earlier.
If Universal wants to do, say, 10-12 million visitors a year, focusing on their past/core demo/psychographic will continue to work. But if they want to get up to, say, 14-15 million a year per park (Magic Kingdom and Disneyland do 17 million), they need the families. They need to start earlier in getting the family to come (not wait until the kids are teenagers) and they need to establish multi-generational brand attachment.
The great thing is that offering more family-friendly attractions is relatively cheap. Dark rides (Fantasyland level) are much cheaper than the mega dark rides teenagers are expecting. And flat rides fill a niche too, plus walk-throughs, play areas, small shows, and other tuck-in offerings all help.
I do think the "classic dark ride" (aesthetic, passive, delightful, low-stress) is an area of theme park offerings Universal has hardly attempted, but the hour+ wait for SLoP in Hollywood I encountered recently was a reminder how appealing -- and rare -- these are.
I think that Universal has largely been an "insurgent" brand (especially in So. Cal but also in Orlando). It focused on a demographic/psychographic it could most easily "peel away" from Disney based on Disney's long-standing "wholesome" brand attributes/parameters that have both been Disney's greatest strength...and its Achilles Heel with adolescent boys...(hence the Marvel and Star Wars acquisitions).
Universal focuses on thrills, film-realism, and irreverence/sarcasm (e.g., Minions, Simpsons, DreamWorks). That made sense, for a long time. Going directly against Disney's wholesome, traditional family-market strength would have been an uphill battle and too expensive. But the market they captured is narrow...at least narrower than Disney's. And it's not nearly as lucrative.
When a family visits Disney, it can be four or five guests! And they may come many times during the kids' childhoods. Teenagers, meanwhile, have a much shorter window of family travel. By the time they are in their mid-teens, they'd often rather be home with their friends during school breaks than traveling with their parents, and it's harder for them to miss school, plus extracurriculars such as sports create further travel-scheduling complexity. A family with young kids can travel virtually any time of year. So Universal has a much shorter opportunity in years and in terms of school-breaks, to exploit the family with teenagers and they have to wait to start engaging them until the kids are older. Meanwhile, Disney got their hooks in them years earlier.
If Universal wants to do, say, 10-12 million visitors a year, focusing on their past/core demo/psychographic will continue to work. But if they want to get up to, say, 14-15 million a year per park (Magic Kingdom and Disneyland do 17 million), they need the families. They need to start earlier in getting the family to come (not wait until the kids are teenagers) and they need to establish multi-generational brand attachment.
The great thing is that offering more family-friendly attractions is relatively cheap. Dark rides (Fantasyland level) are much cheaper than the mega dark rides teenagers are expecting. And flat rides fill a niche too, plus walk-throughs, play areas, small shows, and other tuck-in offerings all help.
I do think the "classic dark ride" (aesthetic, passive, delightful, low-stress) is an area of theme park offerings Universal has hardly attempted, but the hour+ wait for SLoP in Hollywood I encountered recently was a reminder how appealing -- and rare -- these are.
