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East vs. West
Meanwhile, there's also a bit of a dustup going on over how Disneyland and
DCA are being marketed to the local audience. In a follow-up to the successful
50th promotion, Jay Rasulo and his global marketing guru Michael Mendenhall
rolled out the awkward Year Of A Million Dreams campaign under a new global
structure that branded all Disney parks as places "Where Dreams Come
True."
Flags and banners touting both campaigns sprung up at Disney theme
parks around the world, and unfortunately Disneyland suffered as the two campaigns
competed for attention and just confused everyone. Even though Disneyland already had
an iconic and fabulously successful marketing tagline as The Happiest Place On
Earth since the 1950's, it was chucked out the window by Rasulo and
Mendenhall as they saw it as a quaint old slogan that didn't fit in with their
slick corporate juggernaut.
To make matters worse, the designs for the new Where Dreams Come True
decorations destined for Disneyland were created out of the WDW marketing
studios in Florida. The difference in aesthetics between both properties when it
comes to park décor has been mentioned here before, and the unfortunate batch of
decorations the Floridians came up with for Anaheim only cemented their
reputation for having, er, um... questionable taste.
In Florida they seem very content to go with a lowest common denominator design
that only a marketing major could love (below), while in California the
homegrown talent for the most part tries to play to the nostalgia and inherent
charm of Walt's personal playground.
Last year's Halloween decor
at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom (above),
and
Disneyland (below) shows the design approaches each resort takes.
But when it came to Where Dreams Come True, Rasulo's new corporate
mindset initially steamrolled over Disneyland's unique charm and nostalgia. When
the new decorations arrived from Florida and were unloaded from the trucks in
late 2006 the silence was deafening, and there was an attempt by a few TDA suits
to push back on the décor package. Unfortunately, the new décor was politically
tied to the expensive new marketing campaign Rasulo had just publicly
launched, and there wasn't much TDA could do but install the Where Dreams Come
True junk and try to live with it.
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