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GREAT MOMENTS IN TOY MARKETING:

Mickey Mouse Club

The Walt Disney Company has been a pioneer in marketing to children since the company began. In 1929, only a few years after Disney started making animated film shorts, the company sold the rights to use Mickey Mouse on school writing tablets and began extensive merchandising and licensing campaigns shortly thereafter. Kids with enough money could have Mickey wherever they wanted him--on underwear, jewelry, toothbrushes, silverware, toys, etc. As Roy Disney put it: "The sale of a doll to any member of a household is a daily advertisement in that household for our cartoons and keeps them all 'Mickey Mouse Minded.'"

As is the case today, Mickey merchandise helped sell movies and movies helped sell merch. The resulting synergy helped break a seasonal sales cycle that had up till then plagued the toy industry. In other words, people back then mostly just bought toys at Christmas. By tying toys in with movies, Disney found a way to create new toys and continually reinvent old ones year-round. Like moviegoing, toy buying was to be an everyday ritual. There was, however, a noteworthy difference: whereas movies were routinely criticized as amoral, corruptive entertainment, toys were actually considered educational. In his excellent essay in Disney Discourse, Richard deCordova convincingly argues that the merchandising of Mickey Mouse toys was--far from being perceived as a threat--important in making Disney sacred to children. This, he writes, is because merchandised toys, unlike movies (which exposed kiddies to worldly entertainments), pushed the image of the child back into traditional categories of childhood.

Disney's other efforts to generate yearly rituals for the toy industry reinforced a separate consumer market for the kids. Disney sponsored holidays--namely Children's Day and Mickey Mouse's birthday--and, like many other companies, started a kids' club. In fact, the Mickey Mouse Club, born in 1930, was a model of commercial children's clubs. Hundreds of thousands of kids across the country gathered at sponsoring theaters to participate in Mickey "communities." Typical meetings included the recitation of the Mickey Mouse Creed, the singing of "America," the Mickey Mouse Club Yell, the Mickey Mouse Club Song, and of course, the featured Disney films of the day.

If this seems like a big effort to go through to sell a few tickets and mouse goods, it was. But advertisers in the early part of the century, when the ad industry was still in its infancy, wanted to promote not only their product but the idea of consumption itself.

Those with foresight knew that one of the best ways to win customers for the long haul was to create communities of consumers. And what easier group of consumers to mold than kids? "Dealing in Futures," an article in a 1919 issue of Printer's Ink, shows how this strategy was articulated early on (see next page).

With the rise of television in the 1950s, Disney made the scene with an animated family program, Disneyland.. The show was a hit with vanilla lovers nationwide, but again the big money came from merchandising. In 1954 coonskin caps from Disney's Davy Crocket became a huge national fad. Sensing great potential from the box, Walt came up with a new program, which, unlike Disneyland, was designed exclusively for kids: The Mickey Mouse Club.

Putting the Mouse Club on TV is generally regarded as the birth of the children's television audience and the beginning of a whole new era for the toy industry. At the very least, it made Walt and the show's advertisers piles of money. Like the original Mouse Club, the TV version emphasized peer groups--creating a sort of televised community--and this more than anything else is considered its key innovation, marketing-wise. Advertisers found a new community to reach. In the years that followed, TV commercials made a major impact on the toy industry. As Sidney Stern and Ted Schoenhaus write in Toyland: "The most important effect of national television advertising in Toyland was not the growth of the industry or the increase in off-season sales or even the change to a demand- instead of a supply-driven market. It was more subtle than any of these, but at the same time more profound: the growing importance of television advertising changed the nature of toys themselves."

That is, toys started to be designed based on how they'd appear on television. --CM (Sources: Disney Discourse, Out of the Garden,