Content Detonates Consumption： How Disney and POP MART Tell Stories
Recently, Disney released the newest member of the Duffy family, Ling Nabel. This little pink fox has been on the hot search lists of Tik Tok and Weibo frequently since its launch, and even invaded the WeChat emoticon team on a large scale. Lingnabel’s special identity without story background has attracted the attention of researchers from all sides, saying that Disney has mastered the traffic password and entered the era of IP image development. On the other hand, however, POP MART, a resident player in the field of IP image development, began to tell a story. On the surface, Disney and POP MART seem to be leaning towards each other’s track, but the cultural industry review (ID: WHCYPL) observes that the situation behind it is not so simple, and Disney has never given up its own underlying logic.
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author | MengMeng (Cultural Industry Review Author Group; Researcher, Sanchuan Huiwen Tourism Research Institute)
edit | Tian Jianing
source | Cultural Industry Review
The text is 5277 words in total | Estimated reading time is 14 minutes.
Da ji in Chuansha, my mother’s son, the new national eldest daughter … You may not have heard of these words, but you must have often seen a little pink fox recently, with big watery blue eyes, a big furry tail and a purple flower beside a pointed ear.
△ Lingnabeier cartoon image
△ Lingnabeier doll image
Ling Nabel, a new member of the Duffy family in Disney, is now a hot top-notch star. Since her debut on September 29th, she has been sought after by the whole network, and the surrounding areas have long been out of stock, becoming a real "money-grabbing female star" and "Disney female sales crown".
△ Long queues to buy people around Lingnabel
(Source: Little Red Book up Master "Bear Child Paper Head Old Horse Ji")
However, even if there is no hope of buying around, there will still be a large number of tourists rushing to the "Tribal Abundance Hall" of Adventure Island just after the opening of the park, just to have a moment of interaction with Lingnabeier. Fans who can’t go to the scene can only turn to the Internet for help, and even a special video account of Ling Nabel has appeared in Tik Tok and bilibili.
The explosion of this little fox has attracted the attention of researchers from all sides, and WeChat official account Big V has made great efforts to analyze the "female star" from the perspectives of "lovely culture" and "IP development". These articles all talked about the special identity of Lingnabel without story background, and pointed out that Disney had mastered the traffic password and entered the era of IP image development.
On the other hand, however, POP MART, a resident player in the field of IP image development, began to tell a story. On September 20th, POP MART’s official Weibo announced the news that the new IP Xiao Ye hirono will be launched soon. Different from the past, POP MART tailored a character story for Xiao Ye and presented it in the form of a series of short films.
△ POP MART Weibo released a new IP, Xiao Ye hirono.
(Source: POP MART official Weibo)
On the surface, Disney and POP MART seem to be leaning towards each other’s track, but is Lingnabel really a female classmate without stories?
Where does Lingna Belle come from?
Let’s go back to 2002. A doll bear appeared in the tourist shop of Orlando Disneyland. It has no name, no one set it up and no one cares. No one thought that its appearance would open the era of Disney’s traffic.
Tokyo Disneyland named this bear Duffy, and created a unique story background for this bear. The originally unknown bear turned into a bear partner given by Minnie to Mickey. With the help of the wonderful fairy, he got life and set foot on the voyage with Mickey.
△ Mickey and Duffy (Source: WeChat applet Duffy Meng Friends Association)
Tokyo Disneyland is designed for Duffy’s character background and arranged "social cow disease" people, which lays the foundation for the emergence and enrichment of Duffy family.
In 2010, Shirley Mei, the first member of Duffy’s family, appeared, with a very similar appearance to Duffy’s, and Mickey’s head marks on the soles of her feet and ass, but her gender was a girl, which was an optimistic and cheerful little public gesture.
△ Shirley Mei and Duffy
The creation of Shirley Mei basically copied the collocation of Mickey and Minnie, Donald Duck and Daisy in Disney, and its character setting also confirmed this point: Because Minnie knew Duffy’s wish to have a small partner, she specially created Shirley Mei for him, and they went hand in hand with each other from then on.
Since Shirley Mei, the kitten Geratoni (2014), the rabbit star Dai Lu (2017), the puppy Ke Qi ‘an (2018), the tortoise Orle Milla (2018) and Lena Belle (2021) have appeared one after another, and joined the Duffy family in the form of friends that Duffy has known all over the world.
Different from other cartoon characters in Disney, members of Duffy family are traffic stars without works, and they don’t even have a complete identity story background. Only a paragraph is put in the character card to explain the origin of the character.
However, unlike the IP image that POP MART has always used, the Duffy family exists as a derivative branch of Mickey’s story, although it is not supported by the original story, and it is still supported by the underlying logic of Disney’s fantasy world.
In Disneyland, you and I are both screenwriters.
Undoubtedly, Disneyland is a surreal utopia, and a fantasy world is constructed by creating an immersive environment and realizing cartoon characters.
In essence, Disneyland is a "huge movie scene". All the staff are characters in the movie, and every function in the park is trying to establish a spiritual link with tourists in order to awaken their emotional reaction.
Every staff member in the park, whether playing cartoon characters or not, has entered his own role from the moment he stepped into the park and started his homework.
△ Donald Duck and its little relatives
(Source: WeChat WeChat official account Irish Portal)
△ Draw a Disney God-level employee in Shi Diqi with a mop.
(Source: WeChat WeChat official account Irish Portal)
In other words, Disneyland is a large theater experience center. John Hanch, a former director of Disney Fantasy Engineering, once said that they think Disneyland is a 3D movie, and the employees of Disneyland are also called "actors". The area open to guests is the "stage", while the area closed to customers is the "backstage". The supervisor in the park is the "stage manager", who is responsible for ensuring that the "actors" do not deviate from their own personnel during the performance.
Every animated character in Disneyland adheres to strict humanization, so that customers can strongly feel that Disney’s dream world is "real".
Due to the different experiences of tourists themselves, there will naturally be personalized reactions in the interaction with the staff, so there will be a sense of gain that triggers special events.
During the Eleventh Period, a short video released by Tik Tok’s account "Change your name" to discuss nicknames with Ling Nabel attracted the attention of the whole network. Since then, "Er Er" has become the new name of the Disney woman.
△ Want to know where "Er Er" comes from? Look here!
As can be seen in the video, although Lingnabel can’t communicate directly with customers through language, with the help of body language and "breeders" around her, she can express her small emotions very freely and have a dialogue with tourists. Especially when hearing the nickname "Er", she will express her feelings of "don’t" by covering her ears, petrifying (stupefied), waving her hand, akimbo, stamping her feet, etc. She is so cute and cute that she is really a good son of her mother.
Although Ling Nabel has no story support, they still live in Disney’s dream world. The mark of Mickey’s head on his body reflects his identity as a derivative branch of Mickey’s family, but what really enriches the design and story of Lingnabel is its daily interaction with tourists. In other words, Lingnabel’s story is in the present continuous tense, and we are all writers of the story.
For example.
Cartoon characters in Disneyland are often played by several staff members in turn. Visitors who observe this phenomenon have created three characters, namely "cropped trousers", "cropped trousers" and "piled trousers", according to the length from the legs of Lingnabel to the ankles. The audience in bilibili also summarized the characteristics of the three "sons" according to the different action habits of the three staff members:
"cropped pants" is a wild sweet girl with the biggest action. BGM looks like a woman when she comes out.
"Jiufen Kuer" is a free and sweet girl, who likes to sit on her hips and is a small expert in non-physical performance.
"Ducky pants" is a simple and sweet girl, who likes to hold her chest and is a lively dancer playing HIPPOP.
Disney employees who can play will even imitate the "business model" of entertainment stars, create various small interactive events between Ling Nabel and other cartoon characters, especially the first generation female star, Dai Lu, and create topics such as involution, competition and sister flowers, which constantly strengthen the human characteristics of Duffy family members and guide tourists to write stories of family members together with "cloud viewers" on the Internet.
△ shocked! The "out-of-date actress" actually imitated the new top stream
(Source: Little Red Book up "Rabbit Breeder")
POP MART who saw the power of stories.
POP MART never tells stories. Founder Wang Ning once said in an interview with the media that IP without stories allows consumers to express their understanding of these images more freely and form a unique spiritual connection with them. In short, a hundred people can have a hundred Molly in their eyes.
However, since Dimoo launched in 2019, POP MART’s IP image has begun to have a story. Dimoo is set as a little boy who enters the fantasy world from a dream, and meets Candy, Niko and Snooks with different personalities during the adventure. Huh? Is this story familiar?
△POP MART x DIMOO WORLD
The story logic of POP MART Dimoo is exactly the same as that of Duffy family. In order to facilitate the later addition of new images, explorers have become the best starting point for creating new IP.
The IP Skullpanda released in early 2020 almost copied Dimoo’s persona, and the designer set it as a planet explorer. However, Skullpanda’s image design incorporates the concept of "symbiont", and all the characters in the series are Skullpanda in different forms. "Traveling freely between the universe, finding yourself in division, playing different roles and experiencing different lives" is the best explanation of its image.
△Skullpanda series
In August this year, POP MART established its own Paradise Management Co., Ltd.; In September, POP MART led an animation company at 2: 10 to deepen the IP animation development sector; On September 24th, Xiao Ye hirono went online, and POP MART Guanwei guided consumers to join the discussion of Xiao Ye’s story in the promotion copy. All these indicate that POP MART is beginning to conform to the Disney model.
From animation to paradise, Disney has never given up on stories.
Story-driven and content is king, which are all commonplace topics. As Joseph Pine and James gilmour said in Experience Economy, the key to experience economy is to provide customers with the whole experience. And the unforgettable degree of these experiences will greatly affect the customer’s sense of value identity to the brand.
Looking back at the history of Disney, it took 29 years from the founding of the company to the completion of the first theme park. Since the beginning of animation, Disney has been trying to transfer the audience’s feelings about animation and movies into reality by shaping the emotional environment. Even if the Duffy family didn’t have a complete story background at the beginning of its birth, the story of the Duffy family can be written constantly in the interaction with the audience because of the existence of Disney’s dream world.
Rather than saying that they are flow stars without stories, Disney has built a new channel between dream and reality by making flow stars. The real social environment has been transplanted to Disneyland in a complete, timely and dynamic way, which fully stimulates the sight, hearing and memory of tourists. In the process of environmental immersion and interactive participation, tourists really feel the existence of a dream world.
Wang Ning, the founder of POP MART, once said in a media interview that POP MART is the most Disney-like company in China, with a large number of super IPs, but POP MART will incubate IP in its own way and repeatedly tap its commercial value.
However, from the perspective of increasing user stickiness with stories, the existing IP in POP MART obviously does not have this ability. As a practitioner of experience economy, POP MART has always focused on the manufacture of goods and services and the development of new IP image, and the emotional encouragement to users is limited to the moment when he gets the blind box of his mind and draws the blind box of the central instrument. These experiences are short-lived and incomplete.
To complete the closure of user experience, we need to deepen the content and create real emotional communication between POP MART IP and customers.
tag
Lingnabel has never been a female classmate without stories.
Disney’s greatest contribution to the industry lies not in how many industries it has linked and how long the industrial chain has been driven, but in its practice and exploration of the experience economy, which has shown us the power of stories and emotions.
From IP without story background to creating a new image with stories, POP MART obviously gradually noticed the value of content in creating consumers’ emotional ignition and cultivating consumers’ sense of value and loyalty. It can be predicted that more enterprises will join the team of content discovery in the future.
And our analysis of Disney has just begun.
References:
1. "POP MART wants to use" stories "to prop up his new story"
2. "Chuansha da ji PK Star Dew: Mickey Mouse has become a thing of the past, Disney has made a new star."
3. Disney’s 2020 financial report
4.Chytry J. Walt Disney and the creation of emotional environments: interpreting Walt Disney’s oeuvre from the Disney studios to Disneyland, CalArts, and the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT)[J]. Rethinking History, 2012, 16(2): 259-278.
5.Allen D. Disneyland: Another kind of reality[J]. European Journal of American Culture, 2014, 33(1): 33-47.
6.The experience economy: Work is theatre and every business a stage , Boston, MA : Harvard Business School Press.