Disneyland Resort Paris

Disneyland Resort Paris: a development after understanding local cultures The case Disneyland Resort Paris: Mickey Goes to Europe introduced readers to the development of Disneyland Paris during fifteen years. Even though Disneyland Paris had a terrible start in 1994, it had a great improvement and bright future in 2007. The reason for its failure and success is the same: culture. Forgetting to respect local culture caused Disneyland to lose market and revenue in Paris, while adjusting its operations with culture issues put Disneyland Paris in a successful position. The success of Disneyland in AmericaAs a cartoon company which was founded in 1923, Walt Disney Company started its business in America. During the period to develop its business to Americans, Disney created its core values such as innovation, fun and magic. Disney movies which evoked these values are welcomed by audiences and make the company the world leader in animation (Martha, 2011). For the same reason, Disneyland t heme park, a resort to make â€Å"magic† real and tangible, also had big success in America. The universal strategy of Disney Company is to use Disneyland resorts to connect the real world and the magic world.First, the company shows audiences a wonderful and magic world in its animated movie. Second, with the popularity of the movie, the animated world reappears in Disneyland resorts by those famous characters and sidewalks (Martha, 2011). All these factors can provide guests with comfortable experiences of magic and fun that helping them to forget worries in the real life. To adopt above strategy in operation, Disney cares about both the internal and external management. For internal management, Disney offers its employees excellent treatments which create a high employee loyalty to the company.For the external management, Disneyland cares about details in its management and confirms that it transfers core values to its customers through quality services. In this way, Disne y received high customer satisfaction and won great success in America. Both the core values and operation strategy are universal about Disney. Factors such as fun, magic and innovation can capture positive emotions of human beings and make them be touched. Then Disney uses its high quality services to transfer these emotions to guests in the theme park and drive them to become loyal customers.This is the reason Disneyland did great job in California and Tokyo. However, Disney faced failures in Paris at the beginning of the resort opening. The Reason of Failure in Paris The reason of failure in Paris is forgetting to consider the effects of culture different. Disney is not an aggressive company that explores new market blindly. It aware the risk of operating a theme park out of America and thinks carefully about how to spend money and transfer core values to guests in Tokyo. Tokyo Disneyland is the most profitable Disneyland in the world.The park in Tokyo completely copied the busin ess model of the American one. However, due to the success case in Tokyo, the company forgot to consider about cultural differences and lost its market in Europe. What the company states is the strategy works in Tokyo will also works in Europe. However, Disney forgot to consider two kinds of culture differences, the difference between culture in Europe and Japan and the difference between culture in America and Europe. The former difference means even though America model worked in Japan, the same model may not success in Europe.For example, customers in Japan like their park have â€Å"the real thing† (Martha, 2011) not means customer in Europe will also welcome it. For the similar reason, a mode works well in America may not also works well in Europe. For example, the wine issue put Disneyland in Paris in a negative position and brought it infamous effects. An Effective Improvement to Make the Resort to Survive in Europe Disneyland in Paris had five approaches to improve it s business: * Change the name of the park from â€Å"Euro Disney† to â€Å"Disneyland Paris†.This approach weakened the image of park in Europe and strengthened the image of a theme park in Paris . As a result, the effects of culture differences will have lower power to stop guests feel Disney’s core value. * Reduce cost to increase net income under a condition of lower revenue of Disneyland Paris. The culture in Europe restricts the ability of Disney to absorb money form customers. Since it’s hard to change the culture in Europe, a better choice is to adjust financial approach to reduce the lose caused by culture. Redesign services to attract more customers. Disney studio park and Val d’ Europe are two examples of services which capture more customers. The former one tries its best to include European elements in it. The approach provides guests something they were familiar with and attract more tourist to visit the Disneyland park. The latter one created a center to draw customers’ attention and affected their travelling preferences. Both of these two buildings were near Disneyland Paris and work as a transportation to connect the European culture and â€Å"Disney culture†.Buildings with familiar elements will make guests feel comfortable and reduce their unfriendly feelings to Disneyland Park. Therefore the park will get a chance to cross the cultural boundary and bring its customers excellent experiences. * Improve services to bring visitors back. In addition to existing services, Disneyland is doing kinds of improvements to satisfy customers and making them find new attractions in the park. This approach will increase the customer loyalty and get them back to the park. In my opinion, Disneyland Paris did right process to resolve its crisis.At one side, Disney didn’t give up its core values. At the other side, the park improved its operation and management to create an environment which can comfort Eu ropean visitors and expend businesses. Disneyland Paris indentified its main problem, cultural blunder, clearly and reacted to it quickly. Take the Walt Disney studios park as an example, this approach adopted the MBI model perfectly. * Mapping: Notice the culture differences between America and Europe. * Bridge: In â€Å"prepare stage†, Disneyland Paris already understood its customers and plan to use the studio to make it understood by customers.In â€Å"decenter stage†, Disney Company evolved European elements in its products since the empathy made it to offer customers services they like. In â€Å"recenter stage†, an example of inviting European designer to design stunt show expresses its high emotion of establish a common reality (Martha, 2011). * Integrate: the opinion of Peter McGrath (Martha, 2011) illustrates the studio park has high awareness of handle cultural differences and face new cultural challenges. Disneyland Paris also adopted MBI model to its other services and the park generated customer loyalty successfully.The company reprogrammed and reopened existing star attractions to bring visitors back and also draw attention of new customers. The high benefits Disney Paris offering to its employees creates a positive internal company culture and helps employees to provide visitors with high quality services. The high quality services with innovation transferred core values of Disneyland to its customers. For example, the â€Å"summer camps† service, which launched in 2003, brought low cost and high return to the company and at the same time welcomed by customers. A balance of local culture and America StyleI will advise Disneyland Paris to adapt the park in a balance of local culture and American style. Completely copying American model is proved to be a failure case therefore moving Disneyland Paris to this mode is just putting the company in the wrong track of development. A total local cultural mode will cause the pa rk lose its characteristics. If Disneyland doesn’t have any Disney features, why customers prefer Disneyland rather than its competitors? At one side, features like Disney characters and buildings differentiate Disneyland from other theme parks.At the other side, the company needs to design and organize services in a more local way to guarantee that its core values can be transferred and accepted by visitors. To connect Disneyland with local events will be a good choice. For example, Paris will hold music festival every July. Sending band which consisted with Disney characters to play music on the festival can remind people the existence of the park and attract them to visit it. In 2009, German visitors are just 3% of whole visitors (Maznevski, 2009). Therefore to increase German visitors can extend visitors and boost revenue.When Oktoberfest festival is held in German, Disneyland Paris can also hold beer festival in the park to make Germany feel happy and glad to visit the p ark as well as spend money. Bibliography Harry w. Lane, Martha l. Maznevski, Joseph J. DiStefana, Joerg Dietz. (2011). International Management Behavior. Chippenham, Great Britain: CPI Abtone Rowe. Karsten Jonsen, Martha Maznevski. (2009, 06 25). Disneyland Paris – ANNO 2009. Lausanne, Switzerland. Karsten Jonsen, Martha Maznevski. (2011). Disneyland Resort Paris: Mickey Goes to Europe. In M. l. Harry w. Lane, International Management Behavior (p. 137). Chippenham: CPI Antony Rowe.