The Single Huge Mistake That Doomed DCA

Have you ever had an idea or insight but had no one to tell it to?  Well, that's one of the nice things about having a Blog - it gives me a way to share some of the things that have been floating around in my head for a while.  And here's a thought that's been stuck in my brain for about three years now, since shortly after Disney's California Adventure (DCA) opened to poor reviews and underwhelming crowds.  And it's a big one:  it's the single mistake that doomed DCA to failure.

It's pretty easy to create a large list of things that Disney did wrong in designing and building DCA:  there's not enough things for small kids to do, there's not enough shade, there are too many movies, not enough traditional "dark rides", not enough brand-new attractions, just not enough rides and attractions period.  While these are valid criticisms, they're mostly small, tactical mistakes.  Yet there is one big strategic blunder that allowed all the bad small decisions to happen:  They built the wrong park for the right customers.

I'm going digress a moment here, and call this a "Marketing Strategy" mistake - because that's what it is.  "Marketing Strategy" means figuring out who your customers are and dividing them into groups called "segments" (that's the "Marketing" part) and then figuring out which of those segments you want to serve and how best to serve them (that's the "Strategy" part).  And I think Disney did most of this exercise correctly with the Anaheim second gate expansion:  they chose to try to get existing visitors - especially those coming from out of the area - to stay an extra day at The Disneyland Resort.  That would mean an extra day's admission, an extra day of meals and souvenirs, and maybe even an extra night's stay in a Disney-owned hotel.  Just like what has been so successful in Florida.

So far so good.  And then, as happens in way too many recent Disney theme park rides, something went terribly wrong.  When they started designing the new park, they should have built it to appeal to the target customer segment - in this case, people who are already visiting Disneyland for a day or two.  Thus, DCA's designers, planners and managers should have figured out what these people like and want - and then gave it to them.

Now I’m sure that Disney’s managers and marketers did a lot of studies, surveys, focus groups and analyses to figure this out in excruciating detail.  I’m sure they looked at demographics like age groups, income, family size and where the people are visiting from, and probably a heck of a lot more too.  All of which are fine things to know.  But even without doing a single survey, there is one extraordinarily simple thing that we know about all of these targeted customers:  They all like Disneyland.  After all, they're already spending a lot of time and money to visit Walt's original park.  Pretty simple, huh?

And yet DCA was built to be very unlike Disneyland.  Sure, it has a few of the expected Disney touches - the cleanliness and the attention to detail - but that's about it.  It doesn't have the other things that make a theme park a Disney theme park:  the large detailed dark rides that Disney is famous for with lots of animatronics and gee-whiz special effects (like Pirates of the Caribbean or Indiana Jones), the highly-themed thrill rides like Space Mountain or the Matterhorn, the C-ticket family-friendly dark rides and shows like Peter Pan or the Country Bears, and of course the Disney characters, which were almost non-existent at DCA's opening.  And worst of all, no berm around the park or any separation from the real world.  I've always said that one of the keys behind the success of Disney theme parks is that immersive experience that lets you escape from the real world for a while - and DCA misses that entirely (although having a theme of real-world California doesn't help matters).  And finally, in terms of the value that the customers expect from Disney, DCA had - and still has - way too few attractions compared to Disneyland even though admission price is the same.

Now, part of this I can understand.  Building a brand-new theme park of Disneyland's size, style, and detail with Disneyland's mix of big animatronic E-ticket rides, multiple smaller dark rides, and highly-themed coasters would be incredibly expensive.  For example, Tokyo's DisneySea expansion cost 2.5 times DCA's $1.2 billion price tag, and while DisneySea is a great park (and yes, I have been there), it could still use more C- and D-ticket attractions to go along with its mostly E-ticket line-up.  I have no way of knowing if financial targets drove the design decisions, but if so, that's pretty shortsighted.  Still, I have to wonder whether the losses Disney has taken on DCA's underperformance added to the ultimate costs to fix the park will be greater than what they "saved" by doing this on a Wal-Mart budget.

Now the reasoning (rationalization?) I kept hearing as DCA was being built was, "We’re not trying to build another Disneyland; we’re building a different kind of park here."   Disney was certainly successful at that goal:  DCA is not like Disneyland.  It's more like a lightly themed regional amusement park - say, Marriott's (now Paramount's) Great America in Northern California when it opened in the mid-1970s.  And while DCA probably would make a good (although pricey) regional park, it's not what was needed across the Esplanade from The Happiest Place on Earth.

My point here is that what was needed in terms of Marketing Strategy should have been pretty obvious:  if you're building a park right next door to Disneyland and you want the people going to Disneyland to visit it, then you should make it appeal to the people who already like Disneyland.  I can't imagine that anyone in their focus groups said, "I like Disneyland, but there aren't enough movies there", or "What Disneyland is really missing is a tortilla factory", or "Disneyland has too many rides!"  Whoever made the decision to the make DCA different from Disneyland made a gigantic error, and once made, all the brilliant Imagineering design details or all the advertising campaigns in the world could not save it.  By deciding to build the wrong park for the right customers, Disney set themselves up for DCA's failure, and they could have - and should have - easily avoided that mistake.

Next time:  Can DCA be saved?  And if so, how?  Not surprisingly, I have an idea or two on that, too.