From Woke to Broke
Plenty of analysts on the right are crowing about the turmoil at the Walt Disney Company. The still-new CEO was shown the door just before Thanksgiving, with his predecessor returning for a two-year period to calm the waters. Then a rather politically correct $100 million animated feature premiered to disappointing box office results.
“Go Woke, Go Broke” the critics happily assert. But it’s actually a bit more than that.
Companies spend decades establishing a brand identity. If you go against that brand, or what the people have come to expect, the public won’t take kindly to it.
They changed the formula of Coca-Cola, and still now, forty years later, it’s seen as one of the top business blunders of all time. There’s a reason hard rock music stars don’t release gospel albums…but many country artists do.
The Disney brand, over the course of nearly a century since Mickey Mouse’s debut in 1928 and “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” a year before that, has come to mean certain things. All brands need to grow and evolve with the times, and I’m certainly not suggesting that everything Walt did 100 years ago would be appropriate today.
But the previous progressions…from animation to live action, from theme parks to television…all still fit under a general “family friendly” theme. There are other places to get some of the other depictions of life in our times. But when Disney went there—it was clearly too far of a stretch from the original brand.
Returning CEO Bob Iger says his focus will be back where he says it belongs, on profits. The question is how well he can repair the alterations to the Disney brand…or else his job will be a lot harder than it may sound.
