8 Timeless marketing lessons you can learn from Disney
How Disney created that magic that hooks you from beginning till end.
My wife has always loved Disney and always told me she wanted to visit Disneyworld in Orlando. I never understood why she would want to travel halfway across the globe just to visit a theme park. I mean, we visited Hong Kong Disneyland some time back but she said the experience was not magical enough.
It wasn’t till I watched more Disney movies and when we finally visited Disneyworld in 2019 that I finally understood what Disney was selling, that has hooked millions of kids and even adults worldwide — they are selling imagination and they immerse you deeply in it. An imagination of endless possibilities, surprises, magic, fairytales, and they bring it all to life. They blur the lines between imagination and reality, making adults love it as much as kids do.
Their marketing tactics play on their audience’s imagination and enhances it; showing you how you can step into your magical world.
Here’s what we can learn from them:
1. Create a memorable identity
Disney sells Disneyworld as “The Happiest Place on Earth”, and Magic Kingdom as “The Most Magical Place on Earth”.
Many people don’t dare to make such a claim, but you know what, Disney can. They have proven time and again how they can successfully create immersive experiences in a magical world.
If you’ve grown up with Disney, you would know what to expect when you visit their theme parks.
And you can be sure their experiences do create happiness, at least according to fans.
2. Immerse fans in the magic
Adding on to the above, Disney is really good at immersing you in the experiences, using good storytelling. They involve fans in the storytelling, creating relationships between you and the Disney characters.
How many little girls are enraptured by Frozen? They can’t wait to meet Elsa in real life, right in the theme park.
And what really gets them hooked is that they don’t just get someone to dress up as Elsa. No, this ‘Elsa’ behaves and speaks like Elsa, exactly what she would do or say if she had walked out of the screen and right up to you. That’s real immersion.
Disney immerses you in your favourite movies, makes you fall in love with their characters through relatable storytelling and truly brings them to life.
3. Create a loop from content to experience to product
You must be familiar with this narrative that probably every parent of a Disney-loving child goes through:
Content: You watch a Disney movie and your child falls in love with it and its characters. They bug you to bring them to Disneyland.
Experience: You bring the whole family to Disneyland. Your child meets their favourite movie characters in real life.
Product: You, after much pleading from the kids, buy a souvenir or toy based on the movie to bring home.
At all these touchpoints, Disney has successfully upsold you their various products, and it all starts from the content.
This then repeats.
4. Pay attention to the details
The details in Disney’s content, experiences and products are the ones that make your entire Disney journey magical.
Disney movies are full of Easter eggs. Did you notice them? You might even watch these scenes again to catch them.
Walt Disney himself was obsessed with details.
He would get his employees to ride the rides before they were open to the public. Then he would gather feedback from them and improve on the rides and experiences, so when you get to ride it, you’ll get a seamless and magical experience.
5. Make both kids and adults love it
Adults were once kids. And there’s still a part of us, somewhere inside us, that’s still a kid.
You just need the right experience to bring out that kid in an adult. And Disney has done a great job at this.
They’ve created unforgettable experiences for both parents and children, appealing to both the young and young-at-heart through magical experiences and nostalgia, and this creates a two-fold desire that’s difficult to break, as compared to products that only appeal to kids alone.
6. Surprise your customers and convert them into die-hard fans
You can walk through Disney’s theme parks and get tapped on the shoulder by a Disney employee, who told you you just won something.
Even when you haven’t signed up for any contest!
Giveaways have always been part of Disney’s birthday celebrations, and even newly opened parks like Disneyland Shanghai are doing so.
You could win something small such as getting to skip the lines, to dining experiences, park tickets, hotel stays and even all-expenses-paid trips to Disneyland.
7. Create an experience that sells itself
All the elements above enable the Disney experience to sell itself.
This means these experiences make their customers so happy that they would tell their friends about it. Customers would even keep coming back.
They had discovered the formula to viral marketing even before the age of digital media — when your customers willingly spread the word for you via word-of-mouth, which is still the most powerful form of marketing even today.
8. Upsell better experiences and memories
Once you’ve gotten your customers hooked, what do you do?
You upsell them better experiences.
Buy Disney’s passes to skip the lines. Dine at Cinderella’s castle.
You upsell them things they can remember the experience by.
Bring home a souvenir.
Every time they look at their souvenir, they will remember the good memories and crave to return for more experiences.
And this would add to your content-experience-product loop — in a winning sales and marketing strategy.
How can you replicate Disney’s success?
First, start by creating viral content that can successfully generate sales.
To be honest, when I first dabbled in content marketing 6 years ago as the co-founder of a digital travel media company (TripCanvas), I could barely write any content that could get anyone’s attention.
But throughout the years, through many experiments and mistakes, my team and I finally found the winning methodology that has helped us attract 78 million visitors to our site, and referred more than USD $5.7 million in booking revenue to more than 120 of our clients (including Airbnb, Marriott, Agoda and more), and I would love to share them with you.
We’re now revealing our content marketing strategies in our course ‘Supercharge Your Sales in Content Marketing’.
Find out more here (only $17 for the first 50 sign-ups!).
Co-written and edited by Candice Neo, who is also a fan of Disney.
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