The Medium
Member Mailing: Can Disney TikTok-ify or Amazon Prime-ify Itself?
Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney is exploring a membership program that could offer discounts or special perks to encourage customers to spend more on its streaming services, theme parks, resorts and merchandise. The objective of the program is something akin to Amazon Prime and seeks to better link Disney products and services, something I’ve been describing in recent mailings as “Customer Data Platform (CDP) business logic”.
A CDP is software that combines data from multiple tools to create a single centralized customer database containing data on all touch points and interactions with a product or service.
So: Disney, the acme of the PARQOR Hypothesis-ideal media company, is centralizing its various databases of its extraordinary first-party data on its consumers across multiple retail touchpoints. As I have noted before, CEO Bob Chapek has been a DTC executive in his career at Disney Parks, so there is both an understanding of DTC at the senior-most levels of Disney and business initiatives seeking to unlock value through consumer data (including bundle deals with National Geographic, which I wrote about in April).
The right company with the right strategy in 2022, and the right management team with the right experience in place, what could go wrong?
Activist investor Dan Loeb of Third Point Capital seems to believe plenty can go wrong.
As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, he “is concerned that Disney directors don’t have enough experience in digital advertising, the monetization of consumer data and other areas that could help Disney boost profits as the company becomes more technology-focused.”
I argued before ...