Social selling points,” he told me. “We have a very traditional attitude to those things. We all try to have a better head in place.”
Disney World is a real crucible for social-selling strategies, he said, because of the easy access to other media. At the water park, he pointed out that magic carriages and airships tell holiday stories, designed to earn discounted passes to the park.
The best ones are like the airship of the 1950s, in an effort to convey the “promise of holiday when we live in the future.” Magic cars and airborne sprinklers need designer laser programs to sell them.
Airport ads are harder. But sometimes a marketing campaign should be the centerpiece of an expansive Disney attraction, leaving a forgotten theme park park entirely disconnected from its fictional heritage.
The only way to test those sorts of fictions in a real life setting is to go with them. Orchard officials made that decision a few years ago, when DMM purchased the Tokyo Disneyland Park. Tokiwa Saiki Onna is about to go from an amusement park to a theme park. The idea was to build Disneyland in Ochsner Square, and use the money from the $20 million purchase to reduce parking and indoor space. To do this, they wanted to develop an attraction centered around the beauty of one of Japan’s tallest trees.
Necessary conditions were there in the trunk. But now the idea seems to have been turned down. The number of visitors came down, partly because of prices. The devastating fire in a temple in Toyoharima killed over 200 people, and other consecrated sites have also suffered violent attacks, leaving foreboding images of the area’s history.
Nishioka said that an early version of this idea might have worked in the Disneyland park, where Kamen Rider Frozen, based on a popular video game, attracted thousands of visitants. In particular, the Toyohara-saiki Onn Amusement Park, an amphitheater turned into a “fairy tale