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Key Takeaway: Engage your customers and develop meaningful relationships

All of Disney’s interactions with its customers aim at creating or enhancing the relationship between the brand and its customers.

Arguably, media and entertainment companies have more opportunities to engage and foster relationships with their customers. However, purposefully engaging with customers is imperative for every organization that wishes to have loyal and high-quality customers. Producing value and being relevant are today’s most important marketing traits.

Disney has entered, disrupted, and innovated in a number of industries. What is driving all of Disney’s innovative initiatives is its intense focus on the customer. It’s impossible to overstate this fact. Excelling at customer experience is what sets Disney apart.

Reinventing the cruise experience

When Disney decided to enter the cruise industry, few believed in its success. The truth is, to this day, Disney hasn’t achieved a penetration larger than 3% of that market. That’s a poor indicator of its influence. Since Disney entered the world of cruising, it has never been the same.

Disney took the traditional cruise experience and flipped it on its head. In what was a primarily adult-designed experience, Disney shifted its focus on the children. They made their ships particularly family-friendly.

Disney reinvented cruising by designing its ships from scratch. They don’t buy ships and remodel them to fit their standards; they build them from the beginning with their customers in mind.

The ingenuity that went into crafting the cruises was evident in two elements. Customer service and the ship design.

Disney achieved the impossible. It translated the theme park experience to the cruise experience. The company-built rides inside the ship, shows, and performances and every single place had a theme attached to it. From pirate nights to Star Wars bars.

And the design is accommodative for the whole family. There are places exclusive to children and others exclusive to adults. Everything and everyone inside the ship aims at making life easier for the parents and joyful (and safe) for the kids.

Living inside the ship is beyond relaxing and comfortable, it’s a Disney adventure. Sometimes people choose not to go to the private islands that Disney has included in the cruise route, just to spend more time inside the ship. They made their ships the destination.

The influence that Disney has in the cruise industry is monumental.

Imagineers: Disney’s most important team

From the early days of the company, the founder established a team, called “Imagineers”. They were responsible for building and bringing the vision, dreams, and plans of Walt Disney and the company into the real world.

Behind the design of every theme park, ship, and attraction is this team. Today this team has evolved into the R&D department of The Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney’s obsession with quality and exceptional customer service had spoiled the team, which never stayed within budget when it came to their projects.

This later led to complications and disputes within the company, contributing to its financial difficulties when Disney wasn’t performing well. Like every organization, Disney struggled to balance pursuing innovation and having efficient processes.

In all accounts, Disney’s R&D arm is responsible for stacks of technological and design advancements throughout its history, helping the company to pioneer and stay ahead of its competition.

World-class analytics

Since well before 2000, Disney had established a world-class analytics department and in the following years kept investing in it, trying to take advantage of its capabilities as much as possible. The primal focus is the customer. Every analysis and insight aims at optimizing the customer experience and improving every single interaction with the brand.

The $1 billion solution

The problem today with companies is not gathering the data, but the analysis and use of it. Disney faced several problems early in the last decade, where guest satisfaction in its parks suffered due to high attendance. In the pursuit of a solution to numerous logistical problems, Imagineers came up with an innovative and widely applicable solution: the MagicBands.

Initially, a bracelet and recently redesigned to fit several other accessory roles, MagicBands include multiple functions that make the guests’ experience frictionless and playful. However, the easily noticeable improvements to customer service were only the tip of the iceberg of the invention’s efficacy. Its most meaningful impact occurred behind the scenes.

With the data collected from the bands, Disney solved or improved countless operations and logistical nightmares, which impacted not only the cost of operations but guests’ experience as well. There was one advantage that Disney’s obsession with quality and creating an immersive experience made that investment payout so well. The sense of safety and lack of harmful, ill-intentioned situations within the parks.

People felt comfortable sharing their data within the park’s compounds and resorts, knowing they’re safe from all the negative exploitations and content that platforms like social media can’t mitigate.

Though the capabilities of smartphones quickly outmatched the technology of the MagicBands, Disney had developed elaborate systems and processes to track and analyze all kinds of data from them.

That way, it was relatively an easy matter to incorporate technological advancements into the company’s processes. The $1 billion investment in the development of the MagicBands enhances Disney’s data capabilities in the long term.

Hardcore customer-centric data analysis in the heart of modern innovation.

Disney conquered and influenced a number of industries with its obsession with customer experience. It didn’t achieve that by passively brainstorming new ideas. Instead, it created outstanding analytics programs that connected all of its processes from customer knowledge to financial information.

Raw data is worthless if it can’t be analyzed or connected to the right information. A strong analytics department can lead to insights that create competitive advantages.