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Authentically disney, distinctly chinese: a case study of glocalization through shanghai disneyland’s brand narrative.

Chelsea Michelle Galvez , California State University - San Bernardino Follow

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Master of Arts in Communication Studies

Communication Studies

First Reader/Committee Chair

Corrigan, Thomas

In 2016, the Walt Disney Company launched Shanghai Disneyland--the company’s first theme park in mainland China. Entering mainland China poses significant political and cultural challenges for American companies. To address these challenges, Disney pursued a “glocalization” strategy -- it accounted for local norms and values in launching Shanghai Disneyland. This paper examines how Shanghai Disneyland constructed its brand narrative to negotiate tensions in this glocalization process. A semiotic analysis of two Shanghai Disneyland commercials illustrates the ways in which Disney tapped into culturally meaningful themes of harmonic balance and collective identity to produce the park’s brand narrative--“China’s Disneyland.” A thematic analysis also considers how Chinese citizens engaged with that brand narrative on the popular Chinese social network, Weibo. Citizens engaged with this brand narrative in ways that deviate somewhat from Disney’s messaging, such as by avoiding depictions of people in the park. Still, even these deviations aligned with and reinforced the cultural values in the “China’s Disneyland” brand narrative. The study underscores the importance strategically adjusting brand narratives for new markets and accounting for users’ engagement with those narratives.

Recommended Citation

Galvez, Chelsea Michelle, "AUTHENTICALLY DISNEY, DISTINCTLY CHINESE: A CASE STUDY OF GLOCALIZATION THROUGH SHANGHAI DISNEYLAND’S BRAND NARRATIVE" (2018). Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations . 662. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/662

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Disney: An APAC Localization Case Study

Disney, a name that enchanted the childhood of generations, continues to amaze the showbiz world with its incredible ability to remain relevant to film lovers everywhere. What is the company’s secret? How did it manage to remain centre stage when all the stories have been written, told, visualised, drawn, animated, etc., etc.? What can industry players learn from Disney’s success story?

In October 2021, the entertainment giant shed light on its expansion plans to Australia and the APAC region. In an interview with media platform Variety, Walt Disney Company’s Asia-Pacific President Luke Kang said, “We aim to create fifty original series and shows by 2023. OTT is quickly going mainstream and Disney Plus is well positioned to take part in that.”

Leaving no stone unturned, Disney plans to conquer the Australian and APAC markets with a slate of original content for Disney Plus addressing Disney lovers in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, mainland China, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

All fifty shows are produced in local languages and span multiple genres ranging from documentary productions to action hero thriller series, romantic melodramas, mystery thrillers, and everything in between. The impressive diversity of content tailored to each region is about to reach the screens of millions of viewers across Asia-Pacific and Australia is Disney’s “most ambitious effort.”

In his interview with Variety, Kang also emphasised that “local language is a critical component in making sure that we are connecting with the consumer, not just in home markets, but also regionally.”

Disney’s exploits and failures in APAC: Focus on China

Was it enough could disney have done better.

Despite the staggering investment and the film-maker’s local endeavours – casting famous Chinese actors like Yifei Liu, Tzi Ma, Gong Li, or Jet Li, sharing the script with the Chinese authorities and removing scenes and lines that did not appeal to local test audiences – Mulan started on the wrong foot.

Faced with filmgoers and reviewers’ blistering criticism for its precarious character development, historical inadequacy of the costumes and makeup, and haphazard references to Chinese symbolism – the jade symbolises military bravery not filial piety, as implied by the Disney production – the movie seemed doomed.

In his paper From Kundun to Mulan: A Political Economic Case Study of Disney and China, Hongmei Yu, Chinese Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Luther College, highlights that the movie is not even remotely faithful to the Chinese folk tale, which sees Mulan resume her homely attire in the end. Comparatively, Disney’s adaptation of the folk tale turns the heroine into a strong-willed, feminist figure.

Most importantly, Yu argues, humour is nowhere to be found in the traditional story, nor is the mischievous dragon, Mushu, or Li Shang’s warm welcome to Mulan’s family.

Although suffering from “Hollywoodization”, Mulan remains a “love letter” to China and its cinema-goers, repositioning Disney on the country’s movie map – even if only as a “no-go”. Shocking, intriguing to many, the movie saw more than 250,000 downloads in three days, on a pirated content site, after its Chinese cinema debut, according to South China Morning Post.

Yet, content piracy is not the only flaw the production suffers from. The architectural style of Mulan’s house emerged in China several hundred years after Mulan had allegedly lived and originated in southern China. In contrast, Mulan’s story is set in the northern part of the country. According to an online movie reviewer, the scenery is beautiful, “but it will make any Chinese person who has studied geography go crazy”.

Only Disney could localize music

What made disney so much loved, what does disney have in its apac localization store.

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• Disney in China (A)

Disney faces a very tough strategic challenge in the Chinese market. By any measures, Disney is a content provider. At the heart of its sprawling business operations lies a film studio that continuously produces enduring characters with blockbuster animations such as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King. But in China, the problem of DVD piracy eliminates any meaningful differentiation that Disney could have. This is a market in which competitor’s products (in this case pirated DVDs) are exactly the same but with no cost of development. To make matters worse, the clearing process of film screening by the Chinese government can be complicated and time-consuming. At times, before the official movie is even released locally, pirated DVDs based on the international version have already flooded the market. In other words, not only do competitors not need to spend anything on R&D, but also their speed to market is better than Disney! How could Disney respond? Could Disney develop a local product that allows the firm to generate meaningful profits? The teaching note illustrates the unusual but effective solution Disney adopted to address this challenge, leveraging its brand equity in china.

Participants learn how to think beyond traditional product categories. It is important to recognize that Disney did not just come up with the right product, it also moved de facto into a new product category altogether. To counter product commoditization, executives must first rethink what problems their organizations can potentially solve for a specific audience, then reintegrate the firm’s activities in a radically new way, and be prepared to go beyond traditional product categories in order to achieve profitable growth.

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• Disney in China (B)

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This case study examines the Walt Disney Company’s foray in the Chinese market from a political economic perspective. It focuses on two film-related events: 1) the Kundun incident in 1996 that displays the ideological confrontation between Disney and China in the post-Cold War era, and 2) the production of Mulan in 1998 as both a political compromise and a strategic marketing decision for Disney to regain the Chinese market. The conflicts and negotiations between Disney and China provide a telling example to study the local operation of global capitalism, especially in terms of its interaction with the state. While many believe that the advent of globalization will open more free markets for fair competition, this study reveals how government policy intervenes in the global entertainment industry, and sheds light on the political and economic struggles behind the silver screen.

Kundun, Mulan, Disney, China, Globalization, State Capitalism, Political Economy

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• Volume 22 • Issue 1 • 2015 • Volume 22

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AUTHENTICALLY DISNEY, DISTINCTLY CHINESE: A CASE STUDY OF GLOCALIZATION THROUGH SHANGHAI DISNEYLAND’S BRAND NARRATIVE

• Chelsea Michelle Galvez
• Published 2018
• Linguistics

3 Citations

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The Rise of Domestic Theme Parks in China Compared with Overseas Markets Based on Investigation and Data Analysis

93 references, collectivism, relations, and chinese communication, disneyfication and localisation: the cultural globalisation process of hong kong disneyland.

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The Qualitative Researcher's Companion

An ideological/cultural analysis of political slogans in communist china, glocalization as globalization: evolution of a sociological concept, displacing disney: some notes on the flow of culture, rethinking globalization: glocalization/grobalization and something/nothing*, when luxury advertising adds the identitary values of luxury: a semiotic analysis, interpersonal harmony and conflict for chinese people: a yin–yang perspective, confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century, related papers.

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Disney rethinks its China strategy

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Personnel Strategy for Multinational Firms: A Case Study of the Walt Disney Company in China

Asian Political Science Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, (January-June 2017)

6 Pages Posted: 17 Nov 2017

Samuel Wilson

Mahidol University

Date Written: January 1, 2017

This paper investigated the nature of personnel strategy of multinational firms, focusing on the Walt Disney Company in China. The experiences of executives with extensive experience working for Disney in China served as the data for this qualitative case study. The method involved semi-structured interviews and qualitative data analysis in order to study the challenges faced by multinational corporations when developing their personnel strategies, and the policies they implemented to overcome these obstacles. The result of this investigation shows how multinational firms can design their personnel strategies to succeed in a range of different environments. Executives can use the results of this paper when developing personnel strategies for their multinational firms. The findings contain suggestions for how multinational firms can formulate successful recruiting, on-boarding, training, and retention policies to develop successful personnel strategies

Keywords: Strategy, Personnel, Multinational, Disney, China

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Mahidol university ( email ).

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A Reversal of Cultural Dynamics in Disney’s Shanghai Dream

Cheerios, Nescafé, and Disney—if you happened to be living in China in the early nineties, those brands likely constituted the coördinates of an impossibly opulent universe that existed mostly on glossy poster boards or the opposite side of the TV screen, reflecting the life you wish you lived. There were other iconic Western emblems, like “Dynasty,” the television series about the proudly capitalistic Carrington clan, whose melodramatic plotline (and magnificent shoulder pads) mesmerized a generation of socialists. But if you were about seven years old, as I was, its narrative of love triangles and corporate succession paled in comparison to the vision of a life in which everyone feasted on Cheerios—ubiquitously advertised but decidedly unaffordable to the masses—sipped “ka-fee,” and, most fabulously for the children, was granted access to a fortified Magic Kingdom. Still, although everyone knew its name, and its vague association with the duck and the mouse, no one I knew had ever visited the fantastical spires of a Disney park. The happiest place on earth evidently was not accessible to China’s people.

Since then, Chinese tourists have become fairly regular visitors to Disney resorts, including one in Hong Kong. But it was still a milestone when, this month, the conglomerate opened its sixth and most expensive resort in China’s preëminent financial hub, Shanghai. Fifteen years in the making (negotiations began in 2001), with building costs upward of 5.5 billion dollars, the Shanghai Disney Resort has been hailed by its chief executive, Robert Iger, as the “greatest opportunity the company has had” since Walt Disney himself bought swampy land in Central Florida, in the nineteen-sixties. The new resort may occupy a thousand acres of mostly developed land in Pudong, the city’s financial district, but in many ways the venture is embarking upon similarly untrodden territory.

In a country where the government retains ultimate ownership of all urban land, Shanghai Disney’s prime real estate required unprecedented compromises from an American company accustomed to holding tight its corporate reins. A big reason why the resort took so long to open its doors had to do with its delicate terms of negotiation. Unlike Disney Hong Kong, built in 2005, in which the city footed a large part of the construction bill while Disney retained management control, the state-owned Shendi Group holds fifty-seven per cent of the Shanghai resort; Disney also handed the government thirty per cent of the Disney management company that runs the property, giving the state a say in the choice of rides, ticket prices, and other structural decisions ordinarily kept within the company.

“Ten years ago, all foreign companies wanted to get into China, and the Chinese were curious and excited about all things foreign,” Nancy Qian, a professor of economics at Yale, told me. “China’s come a long way in the past decade. Now, for there to be excitement on either end, the foreign company must offer something that the Chinese still can’t or haven’t yet produced themselves.” Qian’s words sum up a sentiment about the changing flow of cultural currency and capital as China, the world’s second-largest economy and unapologetic superpower, revises its indiscriminate idolatry of all things Western. Gone are the days when Cheerios and instant coffee marked the heights of luxury purely on the basis of their provenance.

Instead, Shanghai Disney arrives at a time when the Chinese possess greater bargaining power than ever and are disposed to being selective in their accommodation of foreign entities. Analysts have forecast that once Shanghai Disney is fully up and running, it could generate as much as five hundred million dollars in operating income a year, and no one is more attuned to the profit potentials of the world’s largest untapped market than the Chinese government. (Three hundred and thirty million “income-qualified” people live within three hours of the Shanghai resort, more than the entire population of the U.S., and Disney is eager to court them.)

This reversal of dynamics—in which the Magic Kingdom is eagerly knocking at the gates of the Middle Kingdom—speaks to the economic might of China’s middle class, whose growth and penchant for travel may go a long way toward shaping the market and the economy. “China currently has a middle class consisting of one hundred million people, perhaps the world's largest,” Liu Qingmin, an associate professor of economics at Columbia University, told me. “This population has a huge demand for high-quality cultural and entertainment products.”

Shanghai Disney’s tagline, often repeated by Iger, is to be “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese,” underscoring the growing emphasis placed upon both import products and services that recognize the relevance of the country’s own culture and seek to replicate aspects of it, a standard that was far less of a priority for foreign companies as recently as a decade ago. The park’s signature restaurant is a Chinese tea house, designed to represent different regions of the country, and eighty per cent of the rides are unique; there will be no Space Mountain, and the Shanghai version of Main Street, U.S.A., is called Mickey Avenue instead. There are mosaics of Disney characters representing Chinese astrological signs, in the Garden of the Twelve Friends.

But even without pressures and stipulations from the state, foreign companies in China face steep competition from home-grown rivals. Wang Jianlin, the billionaire chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group conglomerate and the richest man in China, has warned that Disney will be no match for his own amusement park, which opened earlier last month. (Wanda boasts a roller coaster that is China’s fastest and longest, as well as a porcelain-themed building complex.) Wanda is planning on twenty more parks in the coming years, and Wang has hardly been reticent about his opposition to Disney. “The days of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck being able to create a frenzy are over,” Wang told CCTV, China’s state-sponsored station. “They are entirely cloning previous intellectual property, cloning previous products with no innovation. . . . Disneyland is fully built on American culture. We place importance on local culture.”

For the time being, not everyone agrees. In the words of Liu, “The creativity and optimism of Disney, and American culture more generally, are attractive to Chinese. This element might not be what Wanda has at this point, and can take years to develop. This is an opportunity and challenge for both foreign and local companies.”

None of this can happen, of course, without sustained economic growth and the support and patronage of a stable middle class that may, in time, demand choice and quality in all aspects of life. Rather than watching the fantastical lives of the Carringtons and Colbys with the sort of resignation both adults and children alike learned to nurse and repress, a large swath of the Chinese have decided that some dreams, like a vision of the happiest place on earth, are eminently within their grasp. And the choices they make then can be hard to predict. Once families like mine could actually afford Cheerios, I found to my dismay that the adorable loops tasted like chalk.

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