PA R T D

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CASE STUDY D
The Wiggles

Dr Susan Dann, consultant

INTRODUCTION

© 2007 The Wiggles Pty Ltd

OVERVIEW—THE WIGGLES
The Wiggles is a band that targets the children’s music market and consists of four members who dress in distinctive, colourful outfits. The original members of the group, identified by the colour of their costumes, were Jeff Fatt (purple), Anthony
Field (blue), Murray Cook (red) and Greg Page
(yellow). The group is well known for its large number of short and catchy original children’s songs. The band performs a large number of live shows every year and also has five television series, which are shown internationally. Their show also includes a number of other characters—
Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog, Henry the
Octopus and Captain Feathersword.
The Wiggles’ success as children’s entertainers is now an international phenomenon. With an estimated gross annual revenue in excess of
A$50 million The Wiggles are listed as Australia’s highest earning entertainers. Over the past
16 years The Wiggles have grown from a group

CASE STUDY

For a country whose economy is traditionally associated with sport, agriculture and mining it has come as a surprise over the past decade that
Australia also excels in the arts and entertainment. Although Australian performers have individually succeeded in the overseas market for many years, it has only been relatively recently that entertainment has been taken seriously as an
Australian export.
According to Austrade, Australian entertainment as an export category has grown massively in recent years. Between 2003 and 2005 export growth in the music industry alone increased by
50%. This translates to annual sales of around
$100 million. In 2005–06 entertainment and arts companies working with Austrade completed 459 export deals for a total value of $301 000 000.
The impact and influence of the Australian entertainment industry, and the importance that the government places on it, is evident from the regular inclusion of entertainers in trade missions

to key markets such as the USA. The G’Day LA annual promotion of Australian exports to the
USA regularly features influential figures from the Australian entertainment industry such as
Nicole Kidman, Olivia Newton-John and Bindi
Irwin.
A second indicator of the fact that entertainment is now considered a serious export is the peer recognition of entertainers in the annual
Australian export awards. Not only does entertainment and the arts have its own industry category award equal in consideration to more traditional industries such as mining, agribusiness and technology, in 2005 the entertainment category winners—The Wiggles—took out the overall Australian Exporter of the Year Award.

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of local entertainers playing to audiences in shopping centres to a major international act with approximately two-thirds of their revenue coming from the US market.
The history of The Wiggles is relatively well known. Three of the original Wiggles, Anthony
Field, Greg Page and Murray Cook met at Macquarie University while studying early childhood education. Anthony Field knew musician Jeff Fatt from earlier days in the band, ‘The Cockroaches’.
Together they wrote and recorded children’s songs as part of a music project. The completed tape was then sent to the ABC, which released it as a selftitled album in 1991. In 1992 The Wiggles adopted their distinctively coloured skivvies as costumes.
Based on these songs the band developed a show that they performed initially at shopping centres and for preschools. In 1993 their spent 10 months touring around Australia and by 1996 were performing 500 shows across Australia.
From these relatively simple beginnings, the band’s popularity amongst its target audience of preschoolers has grown to the extent that in 2005 they performed for