Why Disney Wants Consumers Celebrating Disney+ Day Every Year

Almost exactly two years ago, Disney took the wraps off streaming service Disney+ with an immense, nationwide marketing push celebrating the platform's debut. Now, ahead of the streamer's second anniversary, Disney+ is once again planning a global celebration—and this time, it’s hoping to make the birthday bash an annual event. The Nov. 12 event, dubbed Disney+ Day, is really more of a week-long effort: it kicked off on Monday with certain discounts and special deals for customers buying ebooks and NFTs. But the real celebrate will take place Friday, when new titles debut on the service and the company starts a full-court press to promote the service, its upcoming series and films, and all of its associated merchandise and experiences. The company has activations planned across the entire company, from a Disney+-branded blue carpet roll-out at the company's parks to its substantial consumer products arm, Disney CEO Bob Chapek told investors Wednesday. In-person installments are also popping up around the world, including enormous inflatable Disney characters and Disney+-branded arches in cities like New York, Nashville and Paris. While the efforts are varied and numerous, the refrain around the announcements will be simple: Disney and its deep roster of talent will repeatedly wish consumers a happy Disney+ Day. Disney Kicks Off a Week of Promotions Leading Up to Disney+ Day Disney’s effort to claim Nov. 12 as its unofficial companywide holiday is a tried-and-true marketing tactic. The strategy is akin to Alibaba’s Singles Day or Amazon Prime Day, two enormous consumption-centric holidays that both ecommerce giants have used to drive sales, said Mike Proulx, vp, research director, Forrester, who described it as “a classic loyalty strategy with a tentpole PR twist.” The effort, Proulx explained, is “designed to flame anticipation and advocacy for existing Disney+ subscribers, as well as demand through FOMO for potential subscribers.” Disney’s substantial merchandising arm factors heavily into its Disney+ Day celebration, making the comparison to Singles Day and Prime Day even more apt. Disney’s ecommerce site shop is offering free shipping beginning tomorrow through the weekend and is selling customizable Disney+-related products, and collectibles maker Funko is offering discounts to Disney+ products. Target will also highlight in-store activations promoting Disney+ items for sale. The timing of those discounts is particularly useful for the company. Ahead of holiday season, deals and discounts can entice consumers who are increasingly being primed to holiday shop earlier, said Jana Arbanas, vice chairman and U.S. telecom, media and entertainment sector leader at Deloitte. “This is prefacing holiday gift-giving season and actually enabling people to get some of that done early, but it is probably likely going to drive additional consumer goods through the holiday season,” Arbanas said. Building brand loyalty For streamers like Disney+, owning a specific day of the year isn’t just about driving awareness and sales in one quarter. The effort can also build ongoing customer loyalty and help services break through the noise of an increasingly crowded streaming landscape, offering an opportunity to make more connections with consumers and bring in new eyeballs, Arbanas said. “When there’s a hyper-focus on the brand and the brand is bringing together a number of different elements of the company, that is a really powerful strategy in terms of differentiation,” Arbanas said. “It’s going beyond a release of a particular set of content and tying in other parts of the business that appeal to a broader audience. The brand loyalty built by repeatable marketing tentpoles like Disney+ Day is also powerful tool in reducing churn, which is an ongoing pain point among streamers. Industry-wide, 38% of consumers said they cancelled at least one streaming service in six months’ time, according to Deloitte. That’s at least in part why other streaming services, like Netflix, have looked to build consumer loyalty with efforts into merchandising and video game expansions. “What we’re seeing is an opportunity to take it beyond the streaming service and tie in other elements of a company’s business to create a greater connection with the consumer,” Arbanas said. “That greater stickiness is truly important.” Streamers Won Over Viewers During the Pandemic. Now They’ve Got to Keep Them However, there are also some downsides to the strategy. Stunts like Disney+ Day require a considerable amount of marketing spend to pull off, which will need to be matched—or even increased—year-after-year. “The key to success for following Disney+ Days will be to make them increasingly bigger and bolder in order to wow consumers and generate new subscriber demand,” Proulx said. This time around, Disney+ Day may not deliver the kind of eye-popping subscriber growth that might otherwise be suggested considering the amount of marketing resources devoted to it. Behind the fanfare and balloons, Disney executives have asked investors to temper their expectations for subscriber growth in the next two quarters, citing the relative slowdown in original programming, a holdover from Covid-19 production delays. That will hopefully change by mid-2022, Chapek told investors Wednesday. “We are nearly doubling the amount of original content from our marquee brands—Disney, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and National Geographic—coming to Disney+ by FY22, with the majority of our highly anticipated titles arriving from July through September,” Chapek said—at which point the company expects to see subscriber rates once again soar.