Few new enterprises, if any, have had the ballyhoo and free publicity garnered by Disneyland, Walt Disney's "magic kingdom," which opened last July on the outskirts of Anaheim, Cal., on the fringe of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
This. plus the unprecedented tie-in advertising of the many regional and national advertisers who are exhibitors in Disneyland, may tend to obscure the fact that as a new enterprise it has had to meet and continues to meet new problems of promotion.
Although Disney officials never term it such, Disneyland is an amusement park. The best estimate is that $17,000,000 was spent for construction of the 160-acre park. Plans are based on a gross of $10,000,000 a year.
The facilities and staff needed to handle such a volume of business represent a substantial overhead which demands the clocking of the 5,000,000 attendance estimated for the first year.
The problems related to promotion are many-fold. For example, once the location of Disneyland had been selected, based on studies by the Stanford Research Institute, the first promotion concern, surprisingly, was that of traffic. Estimates were made as to how many people would be coming into the park, and when. Estimates were also made of how long people would stay in the park and at what times they would be leaving. Special attention was given to these factors on weekends.
This priority of attention was based on the simple fact it would do no good to persuade people to come into the park if they found it too difficult or time-consuming to do so. Traffic frustrations could dull the pleasure of coming.
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