The funny thing about the MagicBand is that there might be someone who thinks that could be a huge selling point. It is a nice operational feature. Save the hassle of fumbling for that room card/ticket. It seems most handy at a waterpark. Now they just have to convert the lockers to RFID and Typhoon Lagoon/Blizzard Beach could be hands free. They have done a poor job of explaining what the back end of the system is doing and what the bands are doing. But, that is what happens when you try to sell a system that is merely a massive operational infrastructure improvement project/data mining analytics system as a positive to the guest.
Plenty of "guests" will like MagicBands but, somewhat equally, it seems a lot of folks will dislike them as well. I suspect Disney had focus groups for them. The problem is that people in such groups tend to be biased to start. The reason why they agreed to volunteer is often because they want to be part of the "experiment" and also want to please. ("What did you think after wearing them all day?" How many truthfully will answer "They absolutely sucked!")
Beyond that, MagicBands drew a lot of attention to the "privacy" and "child safety" issues since they were featured in nearly all of the initial articles. If Disney simply started with RFID cards, would people have noticed? Then, later on, when they added MagicBands, Disney could have countered with "You've already been carrying RFID devices for years. This is just a better way to do what you've already been doing." However, since MM+ is all about customized service
(also customized tracking) I suppose Disney didn't have much of a choice. They needed to start with MagicBands right from the get-go and to sell them as one of the three key parts of MM+.
Right now, MagicBands and those Mickey Mouse light-up balls are the physical embodiment of MM+. Nothing else about MM+ makes for a good ad photo. I guess that alone should have been enough of a reason to question MM+. If you can't have a lot of pretty pictures to sell it, how are you going to be able to sell it? TV ads for MM+ should be better, showing people quickly entering the parks, paying for services, customized experiences on attractions, etc. Seeing these things in motion (and all the smiling faces like
every Disney ad) should "sell" MM+ better than still photos.
I recall @
WDW1974 mentioning (I hope I remember correctly) they had to rush the MM+ announcement. Perhaps this was part of the problem; they simply weren't prepared? Maybe I'm just overthinking it. Maybe MagicBands would have had a mixed reception no matter what Disney did.
I'd like to think my position is clear on what I view as Disney's attempts to track us using RFID technology. It's dehumanizing and invasive to be treated like factory inventory or store merchandise and hope the entire initiative goes down in flames. However, I still think there is time for Disney to recover. I hope they botch that too but there are a lot of really smart people running this show. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Disney, stop treating me like Work-In-Process (WIP) to be optimized and start treating me like a human being.
