Disney's Metamorphosis Essay

Similar problems occurred in Disneyland Tokyo, where management didn’t even think about the height difference of Asians and Americans, resulting in too high public phones for Japanese guests. Concluding it is clear that the American company originally tried to implement a standardization strategy, when launching theme parks in other countries, without taking the local culture into consideration. Country specific procedures and regulations, and different local customer preferences forced Disney to adapt features of the US theme park business model to the local markets.

The case “Euro Disney: First 100 days” talks about the issues faced by the Walt Disney Company when expanding to international borders. The case begins with the history of Disneyland and then describes the reasons behind its success and expansion to various states across the country. It then describes the success of Tokyo Disneyland, first Disney theme park outside America and the factors affecting it.

     However, the opportunity should have not been ‘taken for granted’. Other cultural factors should have been analyzed to decide the positioning of Theme Park. Their prevalent mistake has been the failure to recognize the cultural differences between Americans and French people. Locating the Theme Park near Paris and acquiring agricultural land as well as imposing the U.S spirit undeniably negatively affects french citizens. The French peoples’ lifestyle deeply depends on the gratitude to their traditional agriculture. Thus, the land takeover by an American Company mainly does not provide pleasure to them.

Frank Kafka is considered one of the most influential writers of all time. Helmut Richter would agree with this statement. Richter agreed that Kafka was a very prominent figure in world literature and was amazed by his mechanics and word usage. I feel that his essay is supportive of Kafka’s writing, but also leaves out many important details in its brevity. Richter did not include Kafka’s flaws and tendencies in his essay.

Other than that, each park is designed and structured towards the country’s culture. As operations exist outside the United States, Disney had to consider and accept the cultural differences between their home market of the United States and different international markets. A key theory that assisted Disney in global expansion to Shanghai, China is the understanding of Hofstede’s cultural factors which focuses on six cultural dimensions; power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term/short-term orientation, and indulgence/restraint (Steers, 2016). “Hofstede compares culture to the “software of the mind” that differentiates one group or society from another.” (Steers, 2016). Figure 1 illustrates the cultural differences between China and the United States through Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions.

     Along with his serious Down to earth side Disney also lived part of his life in the realms of fantasy and imagination. His great love of fantasy and the great lack of family entertainment in America inspired Walt to build a theme park of his own. All of America thought that this time Disney had really gone crazy. As Disney once said about the reactions to his ideas for a park "Almost everyone warned us that Disneyland would be a Hollywood spectacular - a spectacular failure. But they were thinking about an amusement park, and we believe in our idea - a family park where parents and children could have

The Walt Disney Company has numerous theme parks located across the globe with the majority of those theme parks being concentrated between the North American and Asian continents with one also being thrown into the European continent. Despite the fact that these theme parks have been setup in locations that have seemingly different cultures, there are indeed culture characteristics that the Walt Disney Company is able to tap into for longevity and compatibility.

By imposing the Walt Disney appearance code, the Americans insulted French family traditions. “Many of the highly individualistic French refused to work at Euro Disneyland, including a 28-year-old Parisian trumpet player who insisted on keeping his pony tail hairstyle rather than join the closely cropped Disney

Hong Kong Disneyland use the consumerism strategic for attracting the customer in Hong Kong because, this is the first park of Disneyland in china and here the culture of people and environment are totally different from U.S.A environment.

Disney’s target market consists mainly of family-oriented Asian tourists, primarily those from mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. The mainland China accounted for large number of incoming visitors. At the time of Hong Kong Disneyland’s establishment, Hong Kong already enjoyed booming business and tourism sectors, but the government believed that the latter would be invigorated by the creation of a then absent “family tourist” niche. Below are the

Disney parks are known for their clean and well designed atmosphere. However, they felt short in providing the same experiences to Euro Disney customers. Euro Disney failed to deliver the high level of customer service standard to Disney theme parks are known for their, as well as failing to provide the service needs that were unique to the European market.

Even in the United States, Disneyworld (Florida) and Disneyland (California) vary in there social forces. Cast Members (Disney’s term for employees) in CA are trained to be friendly and greet every guest, while in FL they are trained to only greet guests who seek them out. The political, legal, and regulatory factors again, vary from theme park to theme park. The parks in the United States have more restrictions than say those of Hong Kong, China. In the U.S, minors (age 15-17) are only allowed to work 20 hours a week. In Hong Kong, young persons (ages 15-17) are allowed to work up to 48 hours a week. Regulatory factors such as this differ in each region. The Walt Disney Company Parks and Resorts has quite an extreme variety of natural environments. The weather in Florida for example can get in the 100’s regularly whereas in California it can get as cold as the low 50’s. These weather conditions actually are a big factor in guests determining which park they want to visit. Technology seems to stay consistent between most of the theme parks. In fact, many of the theme parks have some of the same rides at their parks. The global forces actually can create threats to the company. The addition of the newest theme park to the company, Shanghai Disney, took several years to become accepted. This has been common throughout the duration of The Walt Disney Company. Many people vote against a new theme park or resort because of the crowds that it

Mickey, a major promotion tool of Disney management did not create reason or attraction enough for the European community, unlike at the sister theme park Tokyo Disneyland. European families found EuroDisney to be an “over-rated” promotion of American culture and lifestyle, contrary to what

The main problem of the Euro Disney was that all calculations made by Walt Disney Company were based on parks in the USA and Japan considering Europe as a mass of people rather than many countries with different languages and cultures. Americans see theme parks as a destination where you can stay between 4 and 6 days. In Europe, Euro Disney was seen as a part of the experience when traveling to Paris. The cost was also a problem for the park. A night in a hotel inside the park costs as much as a high quality hotel in the French capital. So, given that the park was located 40 minutes by car from Paris, visitors preferred to spend a night in the romantic city of Paris.

Hong Kong was a prime tourist destination for a large number of people from the mainland. Disney focused on people from mainland, the local residents and