umair haque
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Design principles for 21st century companies, markets, and economies. Foreword by Gary Hamel. Coming January 4th. 
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Monday, May 23, 2011
Bubblegeneration 2003-2010
You've made this beyond awesome, both a pleasure and a privilege. But it's time to retire this blog (for now). The archives, comments, responses, and ideas are all here for your reading pleasure (like this). My real blog is now at Harvard Business Review. My mini-blog/notepad is here. I'm on Twitter here. Update your bookmarks--I'll see you there.
-- umair // 2:27 AM // 0 comments
Friday, February 11, 2011
Disney Baby: How to Create Thin Value
Marketing to preschoolers is so passe. Disney is setting its sights younger. Much younger. Disney Baby, the company's controversial new venture, aims to cultivate brand loyalty in the delivery room, and even sooner. The New York Times describes the new program thusly:"A Disney representative visits a new mother [sometimes within just hours of giving birth] and offers a free Disney Cuddly Bodysuit, a variation of the classic Onesie.In bedside demonstrations, the bilingual representatives extol the product’s bells and whistles — extra soft! durable! better sizing! — and ask mothers to sign up for e-mail alerts from DisneyBaby.com."The Consumerist adds:"On one hand, the goal is to get new moms using Disney Baby products. On the other, it's also a chance for Disney, which says that many children don't become familiar with its brand until pre-school age, to introduce the company to children from the get-go.”Disney gains bedside access to new parents through a company called Our365, a company that sells in-hospital newborn photos and also has financial ties to Fisher-Price and Proctor & Gamble.We've already ventured into seriously disturbing territory here, but Disney Baby doesn't stop at the maternity ward. Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products, describes a long-term push designed to draw new moms and even moms-to-be deep into the folds of the Disney brand, backed, of course, by the full might of Disney's marketing machine. Mooney calls the possibility of hooking a new mom before her baby is even born “a home run." Apparently, the cult of Disney begins in the womb.It's bad enough that Disney wants to commoditize giving birth, but the fact that they think it's innovative marketing, that indeed, they're "extremely excited" to turn hospitals into customer hunting grounds, demonstrates a spectacular breakdown between institutional profits and the good of humanity.This is thin value at its worst, a marketing approach that profts by taking advantage of people at a very vulnerable, emotional (and deeply private!) time, while also instilling brand awareness in the impressionable minds of children from day one.What's so striking to me is that nowhere, in all of this, does Disney even entertain the idea that what they might be doing i