Hong Kong Disney Case Study

Hong Kong Disney Case Study

This case explores the efforts of the Disney Corporation to open a third amusement park outside of the United States, Hong Kong Disneyland (HKD). The case begins by providing a brief history on the Disney Corporation and its culture, followed by discussions about Disney’s experiences with conducting business internationally; first in Tokyo and Paris; and eventually in Hong Kong. The important issue that this case focuses on is the differences in the cultures that were involved in the HKD venture, on both national and corporate levels. Differences in cultures led to issues like poor capacity management and negative publicity. (word count: 99)

Battling the fact that the Hong Kong market did not have great knowledge of the Disney culture and stories, HKD did make efforts to change the culture of Disney to relate more to the Chinese culture embedded in Hong Kong. Disney made changes to the physical structure of the product of HKD to reflect the Chinese culture; they added squat toilets; restaurants served Chinese favorites; cast members were expected to speak English, Mandarin, and Cantonese; and signs throughout the park were written in both English and Chinese. Despite the changes made to HKD, Disney failed to take the Chinese culture into full consideration when developing the production and operations methods of HKD.

Failure to acknowledge the differences in culture, Disney faced issues in regards to the capacity management and public relations. In Chinese cultures, people don’t take vacations at any time of the year. Vacation time in Chinese culture normally revolves around national holidays and weekends. So when these national holidays would take place, HKD became very crowded. Large capacity crowds led to long lines, which led to confrontation amongst the masses. The crowded park ultimately resulted in fighting and injury, which eventually led to negative bad publicity of HKD. Before opening HKD, Disney did not consider