What Are the Key Characteristics That Enabled Disney to Remain Successful for So Long?

What are the key characteristics that enabled Disney to remain successful for so long?

• Throughout the years, Disney has come up with remarkable characters like the Mickey Mouse, Alice and the wonderland, lion king, Cinderella. All these characters have been remembered by kids for decades. The creative team at Disney has generated characters and presented them such that they are well applauded by customers. The great quality content has been a trademark in Disney’s every offering.
• Disney has the ability to market their content to each generation of children and their parents and it sets them apart from the competition.
• Since its first feature animation, Disney has had a strategy of making a wide range of products related to the characters of the movies. Various toys, memorabilia, apparels, books, video games and many other things were stocked in stores around the release time that generated great secondary revenues.
• Open & Collaborative Environment: All employees were encouraged to share story ideas in a Gong show hosted by executives of the companies. Since anyone from the company was allowed to bring in ideas, Disney had a broad variety of stories to select from which generated great storylines for Disney and was a key towards their success.
• Family friendly brand offering: All of Disney’s offerings have been family oriented, which means their products attracts a bigger audience, in form of kids and their parents. They later targeted adults as well through touchstone films.
• Relationship with Pixar: Disney’s collaboration with Pixar in 1986 was an important step towards improving their animation technology. First they developed the CAPS system to make 2D cel-based animated movies. Later they jointly produced full length: 3D computer generated animated movies. Disney always maintained a upper hand in their deal and retained all the distribution rights, rights to produce sequels and had the major control over marketing decisions as well.
• Sequels to successful movies: Disney cashed on to the popularity of various movies by making their sequels. Sequels generated 30% to 90% more box office revenues than the originals.
• TV Shows: Starting from 1950’s, Disney produced various TV shows each year( animated and non-animated) of different genres and targeted different types of audiences. It was another important sector of Disney that has been running successfully till now.
• Disney parks and resorts: Apart from animation movies and TV series, Disney’s rise to fame was also because of the experience from their theme parks that had various attractions related to their famous characters and have been a success for the company.

The key to success is Disney’s mastery in engaging new set of audience and attract engaging their audience in variety of offerings related to same character again and again.

What did Michael Eisner do to rejuvenate Disney? Specifically, how did he increase net income in his first four years?

• Michael Eisner became a part of Disney in 1984 when it was going through a financial crises as the animation business was struggling since Walt Disney’s demise. He stopped certain projects that were in pipeline and thought would not do much to lift company’s revenues.
• He got Jeffrey Katzenberg along with him from Paramount pictures, who personally supervised each aspect of the studio’s films. He outsourced talents wherever it was necessary (like Elton John for Lion king)
• He added a completely new market segment to its movie offerings catering to Adults for the first time. He started Touchstone studios through which movies were marketed to teens and adults. This created a whole new market segment and expanded Disney’s revenue streams.
• Took a major step to invest into retail stores and launched the first exclusive Disney store in 1987. He took the decision to expand their successful chain of Disney theme parks internationally in order to have a global impact. It generated revenues from theme parks along with increased popularity for Disney characters that allowed them to cross sell their products.
• Major collaboration with various companies. Collaborated with ABC for producing TV shows, bought rights for Star wars for a major attraction at theme parks.
• He encouraged his creative team to generate long term characters and storylines to keep the customers engaged and interested for years.
• The first deal with Pixar came during Eisner’s role as chairman.  Under this collaboration Disney’s produced some great box office hits that boosted their revenues.
• The Gong Show encouraged open and collaborative environment that brought in great storylines for Disney, but Eisner’s observed a micro-management system. Although micro-management has a negative connotation but it helped Disney stay on track and revive itself.