This from the New York Times: The Mickey Mouse you’ve known all these years is about to change.
Let’s face it: Mickey has become more of a corporate symbol than a loveable cartoon character. A bit boring, a bit bland and a bit of a cipher. Because when it comes to displaying true cartoon tomfoolery at the House of Disney, everyone knows it’s Donald Duck or Goofy who carries the goods. Mickey’s too busy being the nice guy, putting on the happy face for the customers.
So when your flagship product, the symbol of your company, becomes boring or out of step with the times, you’ve got to start thinking makeover. NYT couldn’t resist throwing down the New Coke comparison card here, but then again, New Coke didn’t have a video game, dedicated television channels, a Web site and a theme park to sell their new creation:
The first glimmer of this will be the introduction next year of a new video game, Epic Mickey, in which the formerly squeaky clean character can be cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland.
And at the same time, in a parallel but separate effort, Disney has quietly embarked on an even larger project to rethink the character’s personality, from the way Mickey walks and talks to the way he appears on the Disney Channel and how children interact with him on the Web — even what his house looks like at Disney World.
Kudos to Disney for trying to handle the Mickey Mouse makeover content in a consistent way across the various channels of commerce, rather than trying to dilute how Mickey’s perceived across their products. I think this is because the goal isn’t so much to revamp Mickey as it is to win over hearts and minds of their true customer base: the kids. Lock in the next generation for the decades to come.
But the important lesson here is this: Know your customers and produce for them.
Sure, parents are the ones paying for the games, the cable and the theme park tickets. You have to sell them on new Mickey too. But this is pure Pied Piper. Get the kids loving new Mickey and so goes the parents.
Disney’s got their eye on the ball. They know their core audience and they’re meeting them where they are. Their focus isn’t pleasing fringe elements or smaller segments of their customer base.
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