Walt Disney Corporation
Marketing Audit

Max McKay
Sabrina Coady
Henrik Oiseth

Principles of Marketing 308
Professor Simpson
November 14, 2006

Walt Disney Corporation

Founded in 1923, the Walt Disney Company has predicated itself as the world’s best in the family entertainment business. After 80 years in the business, who could argue with that statement? Today, Walt Disney Corporation dominates the market of family entertainment. An unparalleled experience is the direct affect of superior quality, innovative content, and brilliant storytelling. To capture such a highly diverse market, Walt Disney has divided itself into four main business segments: Studio Entertainment, Parks and Resorts, Consumer Products, and Media
Disney benefits from implementing a low-cost-corporate-strategy while delivering superior goods and services at the same time (“The Walt Disney Company,”1996). The low-cost strategy has subsequently minimized financial risks within the organization. Once again, this is possible because of limited competition.

Internal Weaknesses

Although Walt Disney is a very successful organization, every company fights one or several weaknesses within the organization. A case study on Walt Disney Corporation points out three primary internal weaknesses. The first is an affect from the firm’s large work force. Communication is critical to any organization’s success and problems will inevitably exist with ideas and information circulating across 58,000 employees. The large work force inadvertently creates a high bureaucracy level within the corporation, which promotes stages of inequality between employees. By diversifying into more niches, Disney must be able to support the expansion of the company’s work force through efficient and effective means of communication (“The Walt Disney Company,”1996). With Disney’s persistent growth, supporting such a large number of employees and constant changes in top-management positions can become dangerous. The firm’s intentions are to bring in fresh ideas and different perspectives by changing executives, but employees may not always understand the reasoning behind this