Is Mickey Mouse working a bit too hard?
He and his tireless show business colleagues-Roger Rabbit, Donald Duck, Snow White & Company-are toiling overtime these days, popping up in endless magazine supplements and television commercials announcing the new Disney-MGM Studios theme park at Disney World near Orlando.
And the cartoon figures are advertising not just Disney but other companies and products: Mickey Mouse promotes Chevrolets in a network television commercial; Roger Rabbit pitches Diet Coke, also on television;
Donald, Goofy and Pluto help to sell Pampers diapers in store displays, and so on.
In recent days, this wave of Disney promotions has many in the business world wondering if the Walt Disney Co. is pushing things too far.
”If the question is, `When does Disney get overexposed?` the answer is,
`I don`t know,` ” said David J. Londoner, an entertainment industry analyst for Wertheim Schroder & Co. in New York.
”It`s a question I`ve been asked for 20 years. There`s no question that Disney`s exposure is greater today than it`s ever been, but it`s been getting greater for 60 years.”
Some Disney purists say that Mickey Mouse, alone among the Toontown crowd, has long since succumbed to corporate pressures and lost his mischievous charm.
”He`s become a corporate logo,” said Bernard Shine, the owner of a Los Angeles gallery that specializes in Disney memorabilia. ”He used to be an adventuresome, comic character. He`s now become a pitchman, a generic logo that fits every product.”
But Disney executives firmly insist that neither Mickey`s personality nor the integrity of the Disney name have suffered from the heavy promotions.
If Disney`s balance sheet is any indication, they are right.
Since 1984, when a new management team came on, Disney has had a remarkable turnaround, escaping a takeover attempt by the New York financier Saul P. Steinberg and reversing several years of disappointing earnings.
Between 1984 and 1988, revenues climbed from $1.45 billion to $3.44 billion; earnings per share have risen from 49 cents in 1984 to $3.80 last year.
Masterminding the revitalization has been Michael D. Eisner, the former president of the Paramount Pictures Corp.
Under his direction, Disney has churned out one hit commerical film after another, most recently ”Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” ”Three Men and a Baby”
and ”Good Morning Vietnam.” Disneyland and Disney World have been spruced up, and expanded home video, cable television and merchandise operations have also bolstered the company`s financial health.
The good times made Eisner the highest-paid executive in America last year, earning $40 million, more than $32 million of it through the sale of stock. Graef S. Crystal, a leading consultant on executive compensation, said in Fortune magazine that Eisner`s contract with Disney froze his salary at $750,000 a year through 1990 but gave him 2 percent of all profits that exceeded a 9 percent return on equity.
As a licenser of its name and cartoon characters, marketing executives say Disney is perfectly poised to thrive in the present business environment, in which limits on product sales have been reached in many consumer markets.
In such an environment, the only way to grow is to grab market share from competitors, and the struggle for the business of a finite number of consumers becomes fierce.
Attention-getting advertising devices that automatically communicate values like ”quality” and ”fun” are invaluable and rare. Enter the Walt Disney Co., which owns a large stable of such devices, most of them available for rent or hire.
Yet there are risks to that strategy, and some marketing experts suggest that a warning signal should be sounding. The concern is that Disney might be exploiting its assets for short-term gain, overlooking the chance of eventual public disenchantment.
”My concern is that it could get to the point where people say, `Who wants to see Mickey Mouse?` ” said Gene Grossman, a partner in Anspach Grossman Portugal, a New York firm that consults on corporate identities.
”Disney is a tradition, a part of our culture. But if it gets to be too familiar, too much a part of the landscape, Mickey`s going to burn out and take Disney along with him.”
Disney executives say they address the risk of oversaturation every day, in every area of the business.
Paul Pressler, the company`s vice president for licensing, said the number of Disney licensees has actually been reduced in recent years, to about 150 from 185, although more lucrative approaches to the remaining contracts are being pursued.
”We walk away from dollars every day to make sure we don`t damage the image,” he said.
Yet Disney executives say that since 1984 they have energetically pursued ways to exploit ”underutilized assets” like the Disney name and characters. They now say they are taking a new tack in that pursuit.
”We got a little more aggressive in our promotions,” said Peter Clark, a senior vice president of Disney. ”But I think you`re going to see that that aggressiveness has now run its course. I don`t think we ever overused the characters, but we will now be even more selective on how they are used and seen and shown.”
Clark and other Disney executives say the company always controls carefully any use of a Disney character by a licensee.
Never, they say, is a character allowed to ”touch, eat, smell, hold or point” to a product.
Instead, a natural and creative connection is sought between the character and the product. In a television commercial for Chevrolet`s new Lumina sedan, for instance, a hippo in a tutu demonstrates the roominess of the car`s trunk.
Still, during the initial period when new licensing applications were being aggressively explored, Disney learned some lessons about its corporate name and characters that it is still actively and richly exploiting.
The Disney name alone, and the Disney characters, were found to have many qualities that different types of companies valued for different reasons, not all of them obvious.
It is not surprising, for instance, that Mattel Inc. would seek Disney licenses to help sell its toys to children or that Procter & Gamble would use Disney characters to promote Pampers diapers to parents.
The car connection was less evident. But market research convinced General Motors that Mickey and other Disney characters could help persuade adults to buy the Lumina it introduced this spring.
”Our target customer is the buyer of family vehicles,” said Charles McAvoy, car marketing manager of Chevrolet. ”Consumers said it was particularly appropriate since we`re talking about a family vehicle, and Disney is the premier family entertainment company.”
Even in those cases in which Disney seemed obviously compatible with another brand, new areas were discovered in which Disney`s brand power could help a licensee.
In the case of Mattel, Disney`s search for new licensing applications coincided with Mattel`s desire to break into the preschool and infant toy market that has been practically monopolized by Fisher-Price, a unit of the Quaker Oats Co., and Playskool Inc., a subsidiary of the Milton Bradley Co.
After signing a wide-ranging licensing contract with Disney, Mattel, whose largest moneymaker is the Barbie doll, last year brought out a line of 38 infant and preschool toys, ranging from Mickeytown Railroad Sets to Minnie Mouse dolls and Donald Duck bath toys. In the first year, Mattel sold about $55 million of the toys, making itself, almost overnight, an important player in the market.
”It`s going gangbusters, and Mattel is well on their way to being No. 3,” behind Fisher-Price and Playskool, said Sean McGowan, a Wall Street toy and retail industry analyst. ”If Mattel didn`t have Disney they wouldn`t be doing nearly as well.”
The fact that these are cartoons and not real people adds to their desirability, many advertisers say.
The tendency of human film stars to appear in the scandal sheets threatens to embarrass a corporate sponsor at any moment, but the antics of Disney`s cartoon stars are totally controlled on the drafting table.
Most marketing experts today say that despite the risk of diluting its characters` brand-name appeal, Disney is pursuing a sound strategy that is creating a new type of company, an entertainment conglomerate that ties together the worlds of movies, television, consumer products and theater as no one has before.
”The Disney franchise may be the most expandable in the world,” said Londoner of Wertheim Shroeder. ”Clearly, Coca-Cola is a fabulous franchise, but you can`t make Coca-Cola plush dolls. Disney is expandable to anything in the consumer realm.
”What keeps me from getting concerned is that Disney is not just Mickey Mouse. It`s movies. It`s theme parks. It`s channel television. It`s video. It`s Minnie Mouse. It`s Roger Rabbit. And they haven`t even started on Huey, Dewey and Louie.”
