Royal marketing
April 25, 2004
By Greg Groeller
(Orlando Sentinel) -- As Andy Mooney was enjoying a Disney On Ice performance in Las Vegas four years ago, what really caught his eye were the Disney characters seated in the audience.
There was a little Snow White. And a Cinderella. And an Ariel, star of Disney's animated feature film The Little Mermaid. Everywhere Mooney looked, he saw little girls who had come to the figure-skating show dressed as their favorite Disney heroine.
That experience in early 2000 gave Mooney, who had just taken the reins of Walt Disney Co.'s struggling consumer-products division, an idea. The division needed a new strategy, so why not package some of Disney's most popular female characters under a single brand and market them to a built-in audience of millions of little girls?
"I thought, 'Oh my God, this could be massive,' " Mooney recalled recently.
In financial terms, it has been just that -- for Disney as well as for retailers, toy makers and other manufacturers that have licensed the brand. Since the Disney Princess line was launched in 2000, global retail sales have grown from $200 million annually to an estimated $2 billion this year -- a 900 percent increase.
That puts the princesses in the same league as Mattel's Barbie, one of the world's largest toy brands for girls. Barbie had $3.6 billion in worldwide retail sales last year.
The Disney Princess line -- so named because of little girls' age-old fascination with princesses -- consists of six of the company's best-known female movie characters: Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Jasmine from Aladdin, and Aurora from Sleeping Beauty.
The line has grown to encompass most every type of product a little girl might want, from dolls and toys to software, toiletries and bedsheets.
The Disney Princesses are now the company's third-largest consumer-products line, trailing only Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse. Princess merchandise is displayed prominently in Toys "R" Us, Target, Wal-Mart and Party City stores, where it shares shelf space with rival doll-based brands such as Barbie; privately held MGA Entertainment's Bratz; and My Scene, also by Mattel.
Disney's Orlando theme parks feature the princesses at character breakfasts and meet-and-greet events every day. Princess merchandise available only on Disney property is sold throughout the giant Central Florida resort.
In June, Disney will launch a daily tea party with Ariel in its Grand Floridian Resort & Spa. And at least one top Disney official has publicly floated the idea of a Disney Princess promotional campaign for the company's theme parks worldwide.
Boost for slumping division
Visit any Disney theme park -- particularly the Magic Kingdom -- and it doesn't take long to spot a little girl tripping over her Cinderella gown or proudly sporting a silver tiara.
Dressed in a Snow White gown, 5-year-old Julia Marino waited patiently in Epcot's Norway pavilion with her mother, Christine, and dozens of other little girls recently, hoping for a chance to visit with her favorite heroine during the Princess Storybook Breakfast, held daily in the pavilion's Akershus restaurant.
"Snow White is my favorite, but I like them all," said Julia, who had recently attended a Disney Princess-themed birthday party back in her hometown of Greenbush, N.Y.
The princesses are a key part of Mooney's strategy to revitalize Disney's consumer-products division, which suffered a collapse in the late 1990s. A general decline in demand for cartoon-related merchandise and a series of box-office flops combined to hurt sales at the company's chain of Disney Stores, located primarily in shopping malls.
Disney responded to the slump by closing hundreds of stores nationwide; now it's hoping to find a buyer for the remaining outlets. Analysts say the Disney Princess brand is one of the few bright spots in the still-struggling division, which in fiscal 2003 posted a 4 percent decline in revenue and a 3 percent slide in operating profit.
According to Mooney, the Disney Princess line generated roughly 10 percent of the division's revenue -- or about $230 million -- mostly in the form of licensing fees. Rather than manufacture its toys, Disney generally licenses its characters to toy makers and other manufacturers, including Mattel, which makes Barbie.
"The Princess line has really been supporting a lot of the growth" in Disney's licensing revenue, said David Joyce, a media analyst for Guzman & Co. in Miami.
Resistance to new brand
Combining several of its most popular movie characters under a single umbrella was a radical departure for Disney, which was known for fiercely protecting the individuality of its various brands.
There was, in fact, some internal resistance to grouping the characters together -- particularly from within Disney's feature-animation department, Mooney said. But the Disney Princess idea got the go-ahead after it gained the backing of Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner, he said.
"The traditionalists within feature animation really believed that the role of consumer products was to solely represent the properties that they created," Mooney said. "Even coming up with the name 'princess' was a heresy to the raison d'être for what consumer products was."
By breaking with this long-held strategy and combining characters from a half-dozen of its animated feature films, Disney risked diluting the value of its individual properties, analysts said. But the company instead has pulled off this "brand-management juggling act," promoting the Disney Princess line without compromising the personalities and story lines of the individual characters, said Frank Catalano, a principal in Catalano Consulting, a Seattle-based marketing consultant.
"Nobody up until this had the idea that they don't have to keep each of the Disney heroines within their own property," Catalano said. "That's the genius of the Princess line."
Disney has assigned each princess one or more personality traits, allowing girls to choose favorites and switch loyalties as they grow older. For example, Cinderella's strongest traits are beauty and grace, Snow White's is kindness, while Jasmine's is adventurousness, Disney officials said.
On a recent family visit to Epcot, 8-year-old Courtney Brickner of Bowling Green, Ohio, was checking out the Disney Princess tiaras and pins on sale at an outdoor cart. Courtney said she likes all six princesses, though her favorite is Jasmine -- for now.
"She likes stuff her own way, and I do, too," Courtney said.
While the characters' distinct identities allow girls to choose favorites, the combined marketing under the Disney Princess brand also gives girls the freedom to break out of the characters' well-known story lines, experts said.
"There's not a lot of ways to play Snow White," said Chris Byrne, a New York-based toy consultant and editor of the newsletter Toy Report. "The story is so prescribed that it doesn't leave a huge leeway to play. But when you put it into the Princess line, the sky's the limit."
New ways to play
The approach also takes advantage of kids' natural desire to mix and match their toys, Byrne said. When children play, GI Joe might ride about on a Tonka dump truck. And Barbie might hang out with Cinderella.
Mixing the individual Disney characters "is really what little girls were doing anyway," Byrne said. "I think it's one of the most brilliant product patterns that Disney has done in the last few years. It's a license to print money."
Catalano predicts the Princess line will continue to be a winner for Disney as long as the company resists the urge to stray too far from the characters' original identities.
"You don't want to have Ariel become part of a biker gang for the sake of some sort of Princess story line," he said.
While the Princess line has been a bright spot for Disney's consumer-products division, it also draws attention to a failing of the company as a whole to create and promote equally popular male characters for young boys, said Joyce, the media analyst.
The success of the Princess line "is emblematic of how the new Disney shows and movies have been skewed to young girls instead of being more balanced between girls and boys," Joyce said.
Instead of human characters, many of Disney's most popular male characters are animals, Joyce noted, such as Mickey Mouse, Pluto or Simba from The Lion King. Joyce acknowledges that Disney has taken steps recently to remedy that. Its remaining Disney Stores, for example, now carry a line of action figures, toys and consumer products known as Heroes, based on animated male characters such as Peter Pan, Tarzan and Hercules. But the company needs to do more, he said.
"If they can brand a line like Princess for the boys, it will be successful," Joyce said. "It's a way to make one half of the Disney Stores pink and the other half blue."
Boys are a harder sell
Disney's Mooney said the company intends to expand the Heroes line. But he argues that boys play differently than girls do, so it may be more difficult to immerse them in a world similar to that of the Disney Princesses. Toy experts note, for instance, that boys tend to be less loyal to a single character or line of characters than girls are, particularly over an extended period.
"I'm not so sure that, because of the play pattern of boys, that Heroes would ever be as big as Princesses," Mooney said. "But I'm very optimistic about that world."
In the meantime, the Disney Princess line will dominate. Experts say that one of Disney's smartest moves may have been to name the brand "Princess." The word provokes strong emotions in many little girls, who grow up hearing stories -- many of them created or popularized by Disney -- about the magical lives led by princesses.
"It's very satisfying to play the role of a princess," said Steveanne Auerbach, director of the Institute for Childhood Resources in San Francisco, who goes by the nickname "Dr. Toy." "It has this appeal of allowing you to step outside of your humdrum life and play princess for a day."
Auerbach noted that the sales growth of the Disney Princess line has come at a time of war and terrorism, events that have left many Americans feeling unsettled and unsafe. Children pick up such feelings among adults and may look to retreat into fantasy worlds that offer them a sense of safety they can't get from reality, she said.
"There's been a need to capture a simpler and easier and more romantic time, when things were not so stressful," Auerbach said.
But while the female characters in Disney's animated movie often fall in love with a handsome prince, the attraction of the princess fantasy is not all about getting the guy, argues Debby Holgren, senior manager of sales and marketing for the Disney Princess brand.
"Quite frankly," Holgren said, "the princes are accessories."
April 25, 2004
By Greg Groeller
(Orlando Sentinel) -- As Andy Mooney was enjoying a Disney On Ice performance in Las Vegas four years ago, what really caught his eye were the Disney characters seated in the audience.
There was a little Snow White. And a Cinderella. And an Ariel, star of Disney's animated feature film The Little Mermaid. Everywhere Mooney looked, he saw little girls who had come to the figure-skating show dressed as their favorite Disney heroine.
That experience in early 2000 gave Mooney, who had just taken the reins of Walt Disney Co.'s struggling consumer-products division, an idea. The division needed a new strategy, so why not package some of Disney's most popular female characters under a single brand and market them to a built-in audience of millions of little girls?
"I thought, 'Oh my God, this could be massive,' " Mooney recalled recently.
In financial terms, it has been just that -- for Disney as well as for retailers, toy makers and other manufacturers that have licensed the brand. Since the Disney Princess line was launched in 2000, global retail sales have grown from $200 million annually to an estimated $2 billion this year -- a 900 percent increase.
That puts the princesses in the same league as Mattel's Barbie, one of the world's largest toy brands for girls. Barbie had $3.6 billion in worldwide retail sales last year.
The Disney Princess line -- so named because of little girls' age-old fascination with princesses -- consists of six of the company's best-known female movie characters: Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Jasmine from Aladdin, and Aurora from Sleeping Beauty.
The line has grown to encompass most every type of product a little girl might want, from dolls and toys to software, toiletries and bedsheets.
The Disney Princesses are now the company's third-largest consumer-products line, trailing only Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse. Princess merchandise is displayed prominently in Toys "R" Us, Target, Wal-Mart and Party City stores, where it shares shelf space with rival doll-based brands such as Barbie; privately held MGA Entertainment's Bratz; and My Scene, also by Mattel.
Disney's Orlando theme parks feature the princesses at character breakfasts and meet-and-greet events every day. Princess merchandise available only on Disney property is sold throughout the giant Central Florida resort.
In June, Disney will launch a daily tea party with Ariel in its Grand Floridian Resort & Spa. And at least one top Disney official has publicly floated the idea of a Disney Princess promotional campaign for the company's theme parks worldwide.
Boost for slumping division
Visit any Disney theme park -- particularly the Magic Kingdom -- and it doesn't take long to spot a little girl tripping over her Cinderella gown or proudly sporting a silver tiara.
Dressed in a Snow White gown, 5-year-old Julia Marino waited patiently in Epcot's Norway pavilion with her mother, Christine, and dozens of other little girls recently, hoping for a chance to visit with her favorite heroine during the Princess Storybook Breakfast, held daily in the pavilion's Akershus restaurant.
"Snow White is my favorite, but I like them all," said Julia, who had recently attended a Disney Princess-themed birthday party back in her hometown of Greenbush, N.Y.
The princesses are a key part of Mooney's strategy to revitalize Disney's consumer-products division, which suffered a collapse in the late 1990s. A general decline in demand for cartoon-related merchandise and a series of box-office flops combined to hurt sales at the company's chain of Disney Stores, located primarily in shopping malls.
Disney responded to the slump by closing hundreds of stores nationwide; now it's hoping to find a buyer for the remaining outlets. Analysts say the Disney Princess brand is one of the few bright spots in the still-struggling division, which in fiscal 2003 posted a 4 percent decline in revenue and a 3 percent slide in operating profit.
According to Mooney, the Disney Princess line generated roughly 10 percent of the division's revenue -- or about $230 million -- mostly in the form of licensing fees. Rather than manufacture its toys, Disney generally licenses its characters to toy makers and other manufacturers, including Mattel, which makes Barbie.
"The Princess line has really been supporting a lot of the growth" in Disney's licensing revenue, said David Joyce, a media analyst for Guzman & Co. in Miami.
Resistance to new brand
Combining several of its most popular movie characters under a single umbrella was a radical departure for Disney, which was known for fiercely protecting the individuality of its various brands.
There was, in fact, some internal resistance to grouping the characters together -- particularly from within Disney's feature-animation department, Mooney said. But the Disney Princess idea got the go-ahead after it gained the backing of Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner, he said.
"The traditionalists within feature animation really believed that the role of consumer products was to solely represent the properties that they created," Mooney said. "Even coming up with the name 'princess' was a heresy to the raison d'être for what consumer products was."
By breaking with this long-held strategy and combining characters from a half-dozen of its animated feature films, Disney risked diluting the value of its individual properties, analysts said. But the company instead has pulled off this "brand-management juggling act," promoting the Disney Princess line without compromising the personalities and story lines of the individual characters, said Frank Catalano, a principal in Catalano Consulting, a Seattle-based marketing consultant.
"Nobody up until this had the idea that they don't have to keep each of the Disney heroines within their own property," Catalano said. "That's the genius of the Princess line."
Disney has assigned each princess one or more personality traits, allowing girls to choose favorites and switch loyalties as they grow older. For example, Cinderella's strongest traits are beauty and grace, Snow White's is kindness, while Jasmine's is adventurousness, Disney officials said.
On a recent family visit to Epcot, 8-year-old Courtney Brickner of Bowling Green, Ohio, was checking out the Disney Princess tiaras and pins on sale at an outdoor cart. Courtney said she likes all six princesses, though her favorite is Jasmine -- for now.
"She likes stuff her own way, and I do, too," Courtney said.
While the characters' distinct identities allow girls to choose favorites, the combined marketing under the Disney Princess brand also gives girls the freedom to break out of the characters' well-known story lines, experts said.
"There's not a lot of ways to play Snow White," said Chris Byrne, a New York-based toy consultant and editor of the newsletter Toy Report. "The story is so prescribed that it doesn't leave a huge leeway to play. But when you put it into the Princess line, the sky's the limit."
New ways to play
The approach also takes advantage of kids' natural desire to mix and match their toys, Byrne said. When children play, GI Joe might ride about on a Tonka dump truck. And Barbie might hang out with Cinderella.
Mixing the individual Disney characters "is really what little girls were doing anyway," Byrne said. "I think it's one of the most brilliant product patterns that Disney has done in the last few years. It's a license to print money."
Catalano predicts the Princess line will continue to be a winner for Disney as long as the company resists the urge to stray too far from the characters' original identities.
"You don't want to have Ariel become part of a biker gang for the sake of some sort of Princess story line," he said.
While the Princess line has been a bright spot for Disney's consumer-products division, it also draws attention to a failing of the company as a whole to create and promote equally popular male characters for young boys, said Joyce, the media analyst.
The success of the Princess line "is emblematic of how the new Disney shows and movies have been skewed to young girls instead of being more balanced between girls and boys," Joyce said.
Instead of human characters, many of Disney's most popular male characters are animals, Joyce noted, such as Mickey Mouse, Pluto or Simba from The Lion King. Joyce acknowledges that Disney has taken steps recently to remedy that. Its remaining Disney Stores, for example, now carry a line of action figures, toys and consumer products known as Heroes, based on animated male characters such as Peter Pan, Tarzan and Hercules. But the company needs to do more, he said.
"If they can brand a line like Princess for the boys, it will be successful," Joyce said. "It's a way to make one half of the Disney Stores pink and the other half blue."
Boys are a harder sell
Disney's Mooney said the company intends to expand the Heroes line. But he argues that boys play differently than girls do, so it may be more difficult to immerse them in a world similar to that of the Disney Princesses. Toy experts note, for instance, that boys tend to be less loyal to a single character or line of characters than girls are, particularly over an extended period.
"I'm not so sure that, because of the play pattern of boys, that Heroes would ever be as big as Princesses," Mooney said. "But I'm very optimistic about that world."
In the meantime, the Disney Princess line will dominate. Experts say that one of Disney's smartest moves may have been to name the brand "Princess." The word provokes strong emotions in many little girls, who grow up hearing stories -- many of them created or popularized by Disney -- about the magical lives led by princesses.
"It's very satisfying to play the role of a princess," said Steveanne Auerbach, director of the Institute for Childhood Resources in San Francisco, who goes by the nickname "Dr. Toy." "It has this appeal of allowing you to step outside of your humdrum life and play princess for a day."
Auerbach noted that the sales growth of the Disney Princess line has come at a time of war and terrorism, events that have left many Americans feeling unsettled and unsafe. Children pick up such feelings among adults and may look to retreat into fantasy worlds that offer them a sense of safety they can't get from reality, she said.
"There's been a need to capture a simpler and easier and more romantic time, when things were not so stressful," Auerbach said.
But while the female characters in Disney's animated movie often fall in love with a handsome prince, the attraction of the princess fantasy is not all about getting the guy, argues Debby Holgren, senior manager of sales and marketing for the Disney Princess brand.
"Quite frankly," Holgren said, "the princes are accessories."
