Brand: Baby Einstein (Disney)
Execution: TV
Target: First time Moms
Rating: **
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
A testimonial-style commercial for Baby Einstein. The spot starts off showing the green door to a suburban house and superimposes “A Real Mom Talks About Baby Einstein DVDs” over the door. Then we meet Antonia and her son Hudson. Antonia talks about how much she likes Baby Einstein DVDs. As she speaks we see images from the DVDs as well as scenes of her playing with her sons both in an out-of-doors. The spot ends with a voiceover “Make new discoveries with Baby Einstein DVDs” and a product shot of the DVD lineup.

What Works:
If you buy the premise that you must advertise mass-distributed brands on mass media (and we do not), then this spot does the job as well as it can be done. It is not overly slick and would look equally comfortable if shown on a cable access channel. It speaks directly from one mom to others, just as the Baby Einstein videos do. It is fairly single-minded about the brand positioning “by a mom, for moms” which is the strongest positioning for the Baby Einstein product. It doesn’t splash the Disney name – a temptation that lesser marketers in large corporations might have succumbed to. It also is simple, uses strong images and has a good product shot and good branding.

What Doesn’t
I was particularly interested in reviewing this ad because I wrote a chapter of Accidental Branding about the Baby Einstein founder, Julie Clark. When Disney bought out Clark and took over the Baby Einstein brand, they did a good job of keeping the Disney name away from the product. But to make their return, they moved Baby Einstein into broader mainstream distribution and created spinoff products – everything from toys to sippy cups. This expanded the sales of the brand tremendously, but it also began to erode the expertise of Baby Einstein which had been narrowly focused on producing videos for babies.

Disney also started advertising the Baby Einstein brand. It was an unsurprising move, as Disney clearly wanted to bring mass marketing to Baby Einstein. I was very curious to see if they could pull this off, because the brand always struck me as a consummate ‘insider’ brand that thrives on personal recommendation. It is impossible to know if any mass media campaign might be clever enough to sell Baby Einstein without ruining the “it’s my secret” appeal of Baby Einstein, but this spot does not work. The ad straddles the unhappy line between diet supplement testimonial and infomercial. The production values are not bad but it still feels far less well crafted than the Baby Einstein videos themselves and clearly a corporate product.

Branding Bottom Line:
Baby Einstein reminds us we still want a set of Ginsu Knives.

Issue: Marketing silos can hurt the brand
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

Last week, Disney closed the door on one of the most successful promotions in its history. Virtual Magic Kingdom was opened in 2005 as an online role-playing game set in a virtual version of the Anaheim Disney theme park. The game allowed players to create characters (commonly called ‘avatars’) who would roam the park, interacting with other players, participating in promotions and playing games in the virtual world. Some of these yielded virtual prizes like hats, pins or furniture for the game. Others could be used to get real world prizes or promotions in the (real) theme park.

Virtual Magic Kingdom was intended to last only for the duration of the 2005 celebration of DisneyLand’s 50th anniversary. Because of the tremendous popularity of the promotion, however, it was kept running and only in April of 2008 did Disney announce that it would close forever on May 21st.
Which raises the question: why? Disney’s stated reasons sound like political talking points:

As many of you know, Virtual Magic Kingdom was created and launched back in 2005 as part of the Disneyland 50th Anniversary Celebration. VMK exceeded expectations in terms of performance, and as a result we extended the promotion (that is, VMK, the game) well beyond the 50th Celebration.

Eventually though, all promotions must come to an end, so I’m announcing today that on May 21, 2008, VMK will open our virtual gates for the last time. You read that right: VMK was never intended to last forever – we’ll close the game for good at the end of day on May 21st, 2008.

On its face, this would be a terrible reason to close a world which has drawn such a dedicated user community. The cost of maintaining this virtual world is minimal compared to attracting the same users with new promotions. Simple ROI analysis on the existing users of this type of virtual community would almost certainly show that their increased interaction with the (real world) Disneyland more than paid for the cost of maintaining the promotion.

The real answer is disarmingly simple:

Disney says it never intended the 50th-anniversary promotion to run this long, but money is also a factor: Virtual Magic Kingdom is free, and full access to Disney’s other online game sites — like Club Penguin and Toontown — costs as much as $9.95 a month in the case of Toontown. – Peter Sanders, The Wall Street Journal

Viewed from the narrow lens of a Disney division responsible solely for online promotions, Virtual Magic Kingdom is a loser. Even if most of the users never return, and think horrible thoughts about the Disney brand, the small percentage who will migrate to paid content make this look like a sensible economic decision.

And this is where typical corporate organization fails the brand. In fact, closing Virtual Magic Kingdom is a mistake for the Disney brand and certainly a dis-economic decision for the franchise overall. Disney like most consumer marketers spends millions of dollars in advertising hoping to engage consumers for a minute or less and get them to think about the Disney theme parks. Virtual Magic Kingdom got consumers to engage with a faithful representation of Disneyland for hundreds of hours, even tying in actual on-park activities, for a fraction of the cost. These consumers became brand evangelists – the type who get others to engage with the brand.

Disney should not fool itself that its paid games are a substitute. Those are pure branded entertainment, and will be judged by a different yardstick. Many consumers who interacted with the free promotion will never pay $120 a year to play the online game.

When I was researching Accidental Branding, I discovered that successful entrepreneurs understand that everything affects the brand. They are loathe to turn every corner of their business into a profit center, understanding that generosity often builds brand equity. Disney’s move to shutter Virtual Magic Kingdom will certainly spruce up the balance sheet this year. But it’s a bad brand move and one that could have been avoided by tearing down marketing silos.

Issue: Disney increasingly becomes a mainstream brand
Commentary by: David

Buried amid all of the hype for the spectacular $132mm opening weekend take for “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” is an interesting branding question. What effect will releasing PG-13 movies with the Disney name have on the brand? The Wall Street Journal today summarized Disney’s strategy:

Disney said moviegoers of all ages turned out to see the PG-13-rated “Dead Man’s Chest,” which stars Johnny Depp as swashbuckling pirate Jack Sparrow. That interest is a prime example of Disney’s movie strategy: The studio is extending a move in recent years toward making more Disney-branded fare appealing to a broad audience.

While this strategy seems to make financial sense (PG-13 = broader audiences = more potential moviegoers = bigger profits), this advertising blog believes that Disney is making a serious error which will hurt the brand in the long term. The question Disney should be asking is:

What Does Disney Stand For?
We know what Disney has traditionally stood for: children. Family-friendly entertainment was a means to creating the best possible experience for children. In fact, Disney has been so successful in this quest that the brand has a created a huge reservoir of trust with parents. Want to pop a DVD in the player for the kids to watch? If it has “Disney” on the box you don’t need to worry about it – it’s fine for young kids.

How Does Pirates Change This?
Disney’s move to use the Disney name instead of Touchstone Films (which they had set up to insulate the children’s franchise name Disney from adult titles) on films like the original Pirates and the sequels is slowly but surely undermining Disney’s expertise in children’s entertainment. It is clear that Disney believes this to be a good thing. But it is not. Imagine all of the places that your children would like to go for a vacation. Disney is somewhere near the top of this list, right? To get your tourism dollar, Disney World and Disneyland simply have to keep you from vetoeing your child’s vote.

Now imagine where you might choose to take your family for a vacation if it was entirely up to you. The Bahamas? Europe? This list is much longer and Disney may not feature so prominently on it. Here is the central dilemma of this Disney positioning choice – when Disney stops being the #1 choice for children and starts being family fare – or even worse mainstream entertainment – it loses its competitive advantage. Like thousands of brands from Pierre Cardin to The Ground Round, Disney risks losing its expertise and thereby its competitive power.

This will not happen overnight, of course. Pirates of the Caribbean will not confuse many parents who know what to expect, and the Disney name is fairly small on the original movie’s DVD packaging. But over time, expect to see a real shift in what Disney means. Competitors from Six Flags to Time Warner should be licking their chops because if Disney continues to follow this path they will be easy prey to more focused brands.