Well I'm tail-end Gen Y, bordering on Gen Z, and that is why the state of the parks really concerns me. I will be their core customer in the coming decades, and I hope they can re-establish a sense of quality that will keep me coming back. Keep in mind, very little has changed at WDW in my memory. I visited AK opening day in a stroller. When you consider that this age group is now entering their 20's, you now have a group of young adults who do not know Disney's old reputation. Instead of building new attractions to give us something different to come and see, they seem to take advantage of the fact that we did not grow up expecting additions every year. This notion is dangerous when it comes to building a future loyal customer base. Even for those, like myself, who grew up taking annual trips in the 00's or 10's, will there be a reason to continue on our own if the product has stagnated and the quality has been downgraded? Disney needs to realize that the world is much more accessible to us than any previous generation. You need to have the best products and you need to fight for these customers.
I think that the overreliance on quantitative data is already becoming a problem. I recently got my degree in Marketing and was taught to quantify everything; that numbers are the way of the future. "Intuition" is taught to be "faulty" and "of the past". Now given I am just a rookie and I do not mean to dismiss all the advancements we have made in this decade with hard data. However, I do not think Marketers are being provided with as accurate of a picture as they think they are. I see in my own generation, whom they stalk the social media accounts and track the hashtags of, in an attempt to figure out "what the kids are into". This method in my opinion still ignores an enormous human element. We need to focus on what will be the effects of growing up in this plugged-in world. It also seems to lead to more derivative ideas rather than new ones, with a focus on what has already been done. This is, again, dangerous with this age group. While referencing interesting areas of the past has always had quite a bit of success, we must also remember that thanks to the internet, the past itself is more accessible. This can be both a good and bad thing. Interest is having decreasingly less to do with age. Old itself is not bad. It is stale that is bad, and with our constant media bombardment, things can grow stale at a faster rate than ever.
So perhaps what I'm saying is that a survey, or hashtags, or any number of likes, indicating that say, a certain IP is popular, does not necessarily mean it is the end-all be-all. The issue is multi-faceted and slapping the latest hot IP on to something is operating completely at face value. (I would also throw in that people who were kids in the 00's, a dark era of Disney animation as many call it, are a bit caught inbetween here. The 90's wore off and we grew up with Stitch and Pixar, but didn't experience much Marvel or Star Wars until at least adolescence.) Fan culture has become what it is because the of the high quality of the products to begin with. I'll say again, today we are pickier than ever, we can track down the good stuff. That is what is getting them interested in the first place. Treating people like they should settle for lower quality products because a name is thrown on them is an insult. Put out the best, they will be interested. Just give them the chance to be. Like Walt did. And even though it is important to recognize the generations, this isn't really even about age, it's about ideology.
