Customer Experience Insights

The infinity stones of sales behind Disney Store

Written by Mauricio Lang | Jun 14, 2021

We all enjoy and admire the great work that Disney does year after year when it comes to continue producing movies and series that truly captivate a large part of the population. We can't deny it, we all have at least one, two or even 3 Disney movies that marked some stage of our lives. Now, Disney has shown that not only for its movies we must admire it, but also for its marketing strategies constantly being successful and case studies for many brands. But then the big question is: What things do they do on a digital marketing level that every brand should be doing? Many say that Disney "sells alone" everything it sells digitally; let's discover together how that is totally false through these 5 Infinity Stones of shopdisney.com sales: 

  1. Buyer Persona is always present:

    Always starting with the customer. It is of vital importance in any digital strategy, not only in those of a retail company, to know and understand the way in which your Buyer Personas buy and interact with your brand. Even more so in retailers or retail companies that most of the time have a wide variety of products and types of Buyer Personas interacting with the brand. If you don't understand who your ideal buyers are and how they think when it comes to buying, you won't be able to incentivize the purchase you want them to make, or at least not at a low cost.  

    Disney, even having Buyer Personas of all ages and with all kinds of tastes, always manages to successfully profile them. It manages to make them coexist in one place, but at the same time speaking clearly and differentiated to each one of them. 

    The central page of the store is a clear example of that, communication for every buyer persona.

  2. Generating Buyer Persona-centric campaigns:

    Buyer Personas become as efficient as your marketing managers want them to be. It is of little use to create the profile of the ideal consumer and know it if it is not going to be used month after month to generate new strategies and campaigns that feed sales and boost the efforts that are made digitally. It is as sharp a weapon as the brand desires. Disney in this case does it very well because by understanding each of its buyer personas, it uses the channels that the Buyer Persona frequents and values, to communicate the products and services that fit each population.

    >>What Is Customer Experience and What Is It For?<<


    For example, if we look at social networks like Instagram and Facebook, we are not going to find many toys there. Does Disney sell toys? Yes. Are they fun enough to pay for advertising? Yes. Do the little kids who ask their parents for those toys watch Instagram? No. So why throw money away where they won't get it back? For that kind of toys Disney understands its Buyer Persona and talks to them where they will listen to them. In this same example, we have seen these ads on TV all our lives. They appear in children's time slots and in key programs. Also, in children's videos on YouTube for example. Understanding the changes in children's behavior, Disney adjusts its strategy. 

  3. Generation of valuable content and the possibility of affiliation

    Just as in a physical store there must always be harmony of sounds, colors, and smells, in digital there must always be valuable content. What makes a person stay on the site they are visiting is the simple fact that they are enjoying their visit and consider it to be more valuable than continuing to browse somewhere else. Therefore, it is always necessary to understand what kind of things our Buyer Persona searches for and consults to generate content that makes them continue discovering the site. In the case of Disney, they keep all their strategies and communications under the same URL and menu, allowing that, if the visitor gets "tired" of the store they are browsing, they can simply change sections and go to the theme parks, Disney+, among many other sections. This can be replicated at the level of stores or clothing brands with a robust blog that generates content and sections of interest to the specific Buyer Persona.
     

  4. Generating Loyalty through feelings

    Loyalty generation is something that every brand desire and seeks. However, it is no longer obtained with price. As there are so many brands and stores for all types of clothing, this loyalty is no longer based on design and quality and is now purely based on feelings and experiences that the customer buys when interacting with the brand. Any positive feeling that your brand makes the Buyer Persona feel is a feeling that can help to build loyalty.
    Disney understands this perfectly and the way it builds loyalty among its young and adult buyers is through feelings of nostalgia and amazement. Why? Because they understand that most of them grew up with some character or movie of their productions, they generate products, videos, quizzes, among others, that help the customer to stay connected with the brand and maintain the sense of belonging that those movies make them feel; and once they feel part of the brand, of course it is easier for them to feel attracted to buy because now if they don't buy they are "letting go a part of themselves". In the same way this type of thinking can be done not only with nostalgia but with many other emotions that human’s value. 
  5. The best platforms on the market and their tools

Digital growth must always be accompanied by platforms that allow you to maintain and enhance this growth. Today there are good digital marketing and e-commerce platforms. However, we must not confuse this quality with the capacity of growth and functionalities that they allow us. In the case of Disney, they have worked with industry leaders to build the digital architecture that ensures success not only to have their products online but also to achieve cross-platform integrations, omnichannel marketing and customer service, etc. Disney uses Salesforce Commerce as its e-commerce platform and Salesforce CRM for customer management and omnichannel information, Adobe Experience Manager for portal and content management, Adobe Target for marketing automation, among other leaders in each market segment. 

Digital marketing is changing the way we grow brands. Digital sales depend on many factors that, although it may not seem like it, it is possible to control and influence them in the right way. Disney is a clear example of these 5 key points that we analyze. However, it would be a mistake to see these points as a distant ideal that medium-sized or even small companies cannot reach. They are all points that can be achieved in some proportion and will have a positive impact on sales results.