Chapter 7 Business Marketing

Business Marketing - The marketing of goods and services to individuals and organizations for purposes other than personal consumption.

The key components that distinguish business products from consumer products is intended use, not physical form.

Disney's Strategic Alliance

A strategic alliance is defined as a cooperative agreement between business firms. In 2002 Disney formed a strategic alliance with Bank One and Visa Form for the Disney-Branded Visa Card. They announced a two multi-year alliance that will create the first Disney Card as well as providing Visa with joint marketing opportunities across Disney's various business units. This Visa Card would be issued by Bank One's credit card subsidiary. The benefits that came with Disney's first Visa Card was allowing consumers to earn rewards that can be used toward the purchase of Disney Park vacations, videos and other Disney related merchandise.

 

Major Categories of Business Customers

The four major categories of customers in the business market are; producers, resellers, governments and institutions.

Institutions are the fourth major segment of the business market that consists of institutions seeking to achieve goals other than the standard business goals of profit, market share, and return on investments.

The Disney Institute is the professional training of the Walt Disney Company showcasing "the business behind the magic" through workshops, seminars, presentations and programs for professionals from many different industries including health care, aerospace, government/military, food/beverage and retail. An example of Disney's Institute achieving goals is with The Boeing Company. They worked with the Disney Institute to develop a customer service training course specifically for their airline customers. The Disney Institute helped them to understand how their service standards can have a drastic impact on the experience they can provide for their customers.

Buying Centers

A Buying center is defined as all those people in an organization who become involved in the purchase decision. Typically for the Disney company their CEO is in charge of making the decision of purchases for the company. Recently CEO Bob Iger made the decision to purchase LucasFilms for $4 billion.

Chapter 8 Segmenting and Targeting Markets

A Market is defined as people or organizations with needs or wants and the ability and willingness to buy. Since there can be many similar characteristics with similar product needs we have a market segment, which is a subgroup of people or organizations sharing one or more of these characteristics that cause them to have similar product needs. Different categories of segmentation includes geographic, demographic, psychographic, benefit and usage-rate.

Walt Disney's Market Segmentation

The Walt Disney Company's market segmentation has included geographic, demographic and psychographic. A geographic segmentation markets by region of a country or the world, market size, market density or climate. Some of their Walt Disney Theme parks are located in California, Florida, Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong which are all tourist hot spots. Aside from these areas being tourist hot spots, California and Florida are known for their warm climates increasing their vacation rates.

According to the 2009 theme park attendance report, Disney has ranked at the top dominating theme park attendence wordwide.

Demographic Segmentation is segmenting markets by age, gender, income, ethnic background and family life cycle. Disney uses demographics in order to decide how to market their products and services. An example of the demographics used is age and ethnic segmentation through their movies and shows. Disney recognizes that their audience range in age so they have distributed entertainment accordingly. Their Disney Junior network markets to toddlers with shows aiming to teach them skills such as counting and spelling. As oppose to The Disney Channel which appeals to tweens and teens in which the shows depict life situations that relate to them like dealing with friendship and school while using comedy and music.

Disney's ethnic segmentation has been shown through their movies which target different cultures. To meet the needs and wants for the vast ethnic population Disney has aimed at representing various ethnicity's so their movies can be more relatable.  Earlier this year Disney released their movie, "Brave" featuring their first Scottish princess which debuted at number 1 with $66.7 million. Over the years Disney has shown interest in creating story lines with characters from different cultures examples include Native American and Arabian.

Psychographic Segmentation is defined as the market segmentation on the basis of personality, motives, lifestyles, and geodemographics. One of the variables in this segmentation is motives in which Disney uses emotional motives, bringing out the happiness and kid inside everyone through their entertainment. Disney has been known not only to provide entertainment for children but for the whole family.Walt Disney once famously said, "You're dead if you only aim for kids. Adults are only kids grown up anyway."