If Your Heart's Not in the Dream

There’s no doubt that The Walt Disney Company is a remarkable force in marketing. In the entertainment industry, Disney is respected (though perhaps less admired these days) for its marketing expertise. Disney’s management likes to call it “branding.” In the simplest form, it’s why we get names like “Disney’s Contemporary Resort” or “Disney’s Animal Kingdom,” when in decades past the shorter form would suffice.

Disney has virtually made a science out of the art form of marketing. Through highly paid consultants and outside agencies, through focus groups and incessant testing, Disney has learned its business well.

And yet, Disney’s relentless, inexhaustible marketing machine also has removed any trace of real personality from its products. As Disney Consumer Products head Andy Mooney told the Los Angeles Times a few months ago, the new “Tinker Bell” movie wasn’t made for entertainment value. It was made to make money. Mooney said, “We were fundamentally missing an opportunity in terms of getting Tinker Bell out there as a character. There’s clearly latent demand.”

That’s how Disney thinks: Consumer demand drives creative decisions, not the other way around. And from a long-term value standpoint, the problem is, “the other way around” is exactly how The Walt Disney Company became so successful in the first place.
And all of that, in a roundabout way, brings us to EPCOT.

EPCOT Center wasn’t created because consumers demanded a more adult-oriented theme park dedicated to exploring future technologies and world cultures. If you had asked 100 adults in 1976 if they thought such a place was needed, or even interesting, you likely would have been met with 100 blank stares.

Focus groups weren’t asked if EPCOT Center would make them feel better about Disney or drive their interest in visiting a Disney Park.

EPCOT Center didn’t fill a gaping void in Disney’s theme-park catalog, wasn’t designed to appeal to the company’s “core consumer.”

EPCOT Center was created because it was a great idea that hadn’t been tried.

EPCOT Center was built on a vision. (Yes, you could argue it was a flawed one) It was conceived by creative artists who might have had a limited reach, as opposed to Walt Disney’s, but who were at least aspiring to something new and different.

The consumer proposition came later, as the project was handed off to marketers and merchandisers and publicists, who had the task (enviable, in my book, unenviable to some) of introducing and explaining this entirely new idea to the public.

The idea came first. The selling of the idea came afterward.

The dream was the most important thing.

Twenty-six years later, EPCOT does not fit any sort of “core message” that Jay Rasulo and his marketing team at Disney Parks have devised for the theme parks. That’s a problem. Because while Disney has the collective brain and skillset of thousands of very smart marketing executives, there’s one thing it doesn’t have: a collective heart.

Unfortunately, that’s the very thing that EPCOT and, increasingly “Disney Parks” in general, needs.

Until they can make it into “Disney’s Epcot,” this marketing group, for all of its expertise in other areas, simply can’t sell the thing.

So, instead of trying to understand what they don’t understand (as Pocahontas might say, of learning “things they never knew they never knew”), they’ll keep adding Pixar characters and Disney characters and princesses and kid-oriented activities and cartoons and “magic” to the place until only the architecture sets it apart. And although there will be no good way to explain that giant golf ball, those sleek buildings, the massive pavilions, the unusual layout, and all those weird “country places,” it won’t matter.

It will be “Disney,” as that word has come to be defined. Then they can sell it.

The Disney of today manufactures and markets filmed-entertainment products like Beverly Hills Chihuahua and ever more Pirates of the Caribbean soon-to-be-DVDs, but would not be able to take the bold creative steps that led to, say, Fantasia, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Mary Poppins or The Wonderful World of Disney ... much less Disneyland or EPCOT Center.

In all of those instances, the idea came first. The idea drove the business. And though he is, unfortunately, not recognized for the towering achievements he made to American Industry, Walt Disney’s concept of putting the idea first created a company unlike any other.

Despite his accomplishments, Walt Disney knew he was corny, reveled in it. So it made sense that he would approve of a lyric like, “If your heart is in your dream / No request is too extreme.”

Those who have inherited what Walt Disney built aren’t corny. They want to be hip, cool players in today’s Hollywood. They don’t, as a rule, seem to really understand or appreciate the sentiment behind those lyrics. The idea is secondary; the ability to market the idea comes first.

So they can’t quite understand what happens when your heart’s not in your dreams.

They need look no further than EPCOT.

A few weeks back, a Walt Disney World executive and I were talking about the woes that have befallen my favorite theme park. I reminded him of its origins, its concept, its message, and wondered to him why Disney didn’t try to rebuild that concept.

He smiled at me and said, “Wow, you really believe that stuff, don’t you?”

It made me doubt whether he even knows the lyrics to When You Wish Upon a Star. Or maybe, after 22 years of “Disney marketing,” he’s simply forgotten.