Lisa Green
Euro Disney

After the success of Tokyo Disneyland, Disney decided to place a theme park in Europe. Two locations became targets, Barcelona and Paris. After much deliberation and governmental cooperation, Paris was chosen. However, Disney was bounded by the Republic of French to make sure Euro Disneyland was a French corporation and that it’s developed into a major international theme park that can create 30,000 jobs. The reasons for Disney choosing, as far as finance and market share opportunities, seemed to only be able to prove successful. However, little things that were simply over-looked caused collateral damages. What sort of things did Disney ignore in order to create a loss of over 1.7 billion French Francs? Will restructuring the park ever prove successful? Companies are increasingly becoming globalized and inherently internationalized in order to cut costs with cheaper resources and materials. This would normally allow for them to increase their revenues, avoid expensive tax and labor laws, while gaining market share. However, Disney has proven unsuccessful thus far because they did not conduct necessary research. They were determined to implement the same philosophies that were used in the American theme parks to Euro Disney. By disregarding the importance of research, the Walt Disney Company overlooked important factors such as the reality of the physical, financial, and cultural environment of their planned site. The Walt Disney Company chose Europe as the place to develop its fourth park because the Disney movies themselves have actually shown to be more popular there then in America. More specifically they chose Paris over Spain, despite Spain’s year-round warm weather, because of France’s warm weather and easy accessibility via transport networks. They developed in a large suburban area outside of France, in which they were given the land a highly discounted price. This upset local farmers to the extent that they protested until the company successfully worked over this problem with those farmers. A lot of internal conflicts were brought up with the company due to the ignorance of French laws, requirements and wants. This put a big blunder on Euro Disney’s profitability. Euro Disney was able to meet their target guest range of 11 million people in their first year; however their revenues were not as sufficient as expected. Some Human Resource mistakes were the fact that Disney’s requirements for their employees were exceptionally high, so much that only one out of every ten candidates was hired. There were language requirements and an expressed need for an “Americanized” look, which limited the individuality that the French enjoy. Many French people expressed their concern for the cultural imperialism that was becoming increasingly evident with the Euro Disney establishment. At first, Euro Disney did not allow alcohol inside of their parks, which they do at all of their locations. However, after much turmoil from customers they decided to allow it. The Walt Disney Company also over emphasized the fact that the French don’t necessarily sit and enjoy the kind of breakfasts that Americans do, so they only offered self-service croissants and coffee. They also reacted quickly to that demand from the French. A lot of the marketing efforts with Euro Disney also seemed to have offended the French, because the marketing was eliminated the emotional aspects for consumers and just expressed the largeness of the park. The French perspective was completely ignored when coming up with the marketing plan. Most of the planning in this case came from a very ethnocentric place. The Walt Disney Company also had a hard time communicating, with both investors and the media.
In more of the financial spectrum, there were also a lot of miscalculations made by the executive, especially with regards to the per-capital spending that the guests would indulge in at the park. Unlike the U.S and Tokyo, the