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Ageing Mickey tries new tack

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Simon Parry

He's cute, bright yellow, 20cm tall, and comes with a squeaky-clean reputation and the most famous pair of ears on earth. And if you want to take him home with you, he'll probably cost you around $100,000.

That's the price tag expected to be placed on the most expensive item on sale in the jewellery store inside the Hong Kong Disney theme park - a gold statue of Mickey Mouse, with a matching Minnie if you have more money to spare.

The golden Mickey is more than just a glitzy example of what's going to be on offer to shoppers at the new theme park. It is also a conspicuous clue to how Disney is changing the way the Magic Kingdom is sold in Hong Kong.

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Marketing Mickey hasn't been easy lately. With a year to go before the theme park opens, Disney has decided to close down four out of seven of the Disney Stores it opened in Hong Kong from the mid-1990s onwards, keeping open only its flagship Tsim Sha Tsui branch and the two airport outlets.

It is not just in Hong Kong that Disney Stores have been struggling. Globally, they have been disappearing faster than Pluto's dinners, retreating from a peak of more than 700 globally in the mid-1990s to fewer than 550 today.

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Gerard Gorn, professor of marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, speculated that the closures might indicate that Mickey Mouse and his animated friends no longer held the appeal for youngsters that they used to - raising potential questions over the viability of the new theme park.

'Is Mickey Mouse passe? Maybe it's true,' he said. 'It was once said that Ronald McDonald was more recognisable to American kids than Santa Claus, and the same was probably true of Mickey Mouse. But maybe now the hi-tech video games kids are interested in are more attractive than cartoon characters.

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