When Walt Disney opened an amusement park in the middle of Southern California orange groves in 1955, he changed the way that Americans, and the world, viewed such entertainment. Once the domain of carnival hucksters, amusement parks underwent a significant makeover at the hands of the head of the Disney Studios. Through shrewd marketing, including a tie-in to a national television program, Disney successfully marketed Disneyland as a unique entertainment experience and made his theme park world famous. In the mid-1960s, plans were made for a second park, this one located in Florida, which was significant larger than the Anaheim park and which opened in the early 1970s. A third theme park opened in the 1980s in Tokyo, and a fourth in Europe in the early 1990s. The company also operates resorts at each of the theme park sites (with the exception of Tokyo). A cruise line was launched in 1998, and the company owns ABC/Capital Cities television, once the third largest network in the nation, but now a network which is struggling to avoid slipping behind Fox and becoming fourth. Having survived significant personnel changes in the early 1990s, including the sudden death of Frank Wells and well-publicized departures of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Ovitz, the company is no longer one which its founder would recognize. This research considers whether the new Disney, and specifically the Disney theme park operation, offers an attractive employment opportunity.
It is important that a company undertake international marketing with the same care and consideration that it uses when introducing a product domestically. This means that the company needs to understand the key features of the target market. Such features include the size of the market and its anticipated rate of growth, the stage of development that the market is in, the stage of the product lifecycle that the company would be entering (along with the saturation levels of ...