The book The Disney Touch by Ron Grover published by Richard D Irwin, Homewood, Illnois, 1991 provides the material for this column. The characters of Disney of Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Pluto and the early movies of Snow White, Cinderella and Pinocchio are known are the world and loved by many people. The stories are universal to people and Walt Disney did an excellent job in creating them. As a business person, Walt needed help except for similar to many founders of companies he made most of the decisions by himself. There were many reasons why this developed including during the early years the company almost did not survive. It is not surprising when founders risk all of their assets and credit lines before the company experiences regional or international growth, the founders have a certain management style. As the company grew, Walt Disney envisioned theme parks although the one in Florida was larger because Disney did not like all the land uses around the California site. He was trying to have a particular image of the park and surrounding land uses. Eventually, Walt Disney passed away and his successors ran the company like Walt would have wanted. That type of management works for a couple of years, but will quickly go down, because very few new projects will come forth. In the case of Disney, shares traded on the stock exchange and it was not long before various people recognized Disney had great assets but were not using them.

Many homes have a dvd and video cassette player. Disney has a wonderful library of movies that were worth millions of dollars. Although they technically were not in a vault, since very few people had access, the originals could have been in a vault. The new management examined the video market and took a long time to break the ties of the old management. If they released a movie in video would people still want to see it on the movie screens. Remember people in the movie industry thought a movie is to be made to be played only on the big screen. Eventually management released Pinocchio and learned lessons about price points. When Sleeping Beauty was released it broke new records. The video cassette/ dvd release would now be part of corporate strategy and earnings for the company.

Kids of all ages like Disney stuff, most of it was to be found in Disney theme parks. The new management wanted to test whether people would buy in a store in any mall. The day the test store was to open, line ups were to be found. Disney expanded on the experience and there are now many Disney stores, including those in the theme park.

People like Disney TV shows and Disney similar to everyone else tried a cable TV network, without a great deal of thinking behind it. The name Disney worked in the early years, however the expectations were not realized and soon there was more people leaving the service as there was coming in. A revamp needed to be done to bring value and quality to cable program. It showed the company just because the name is Disney does not make it a winner. People choose to come back for very good reasons which need to exist.

The same thing happened with TV programs, for a while Disney on Sunday evenings was one of the lowest rated shows. the entire TV strategy was overhauled to make it connect to viewers.

Disney started in animation with Walt Disney drawing the Mickey character. The number of people doing animation dwindled until the new management put resources into it and found good stories to do and tell. Movies such as the Little Mermaid and Lion King were be made and equally important sell very well.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, Disney is shown as an example of a stock with great assets than needed to be renewed to connect to audiences. Many companies have the same thing, they have a great brand but something slips along the way, the assets constantly need to be evaluated to ensure they connect to their customers. At annual meetings, you want to know how does the company keep connecting to its audience? and do you think they are?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions