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Innovation should be a top priority for any company, and today I want to highlight one of the most innovative and creative leaders in company history, Walt Disney. Could you learn something from Disney? Nike's CEO, Phil Knight, thought that and when I worked at Nike as Director of Brand Planning and Marketing Insights, he instructed me to study Disney's business practices to see if we could discover anything that is useful for us.

Disney built a media and entertainment company that is now considered one of the most powerful in the world, has won more Oscar awards than any other in history, created a cinematic art form, and also invented a new kind of American vacation destination. Disney's work counts enthusiastic fans on all continents, but also critics who have denied their smooth facade of sentimentality and persistent optimism and their feel-good rewrite of American history.

Dream. To inspire. To run.

Walt Disney's first experience and expertise was in making cartoons. Although he later created Disneyland, he was not trained as a theme park designer, social architect, or civil engineer. But he was a creative visionary, a soulful leader and dreamer who challenged his teams to embrace new forms of entertainment while creating an entertainment brand that was second to none.

Disney's vision was also his personal pursuit to create fantasy worlds that made people happy by entertaining them in a fun, compelling, and warm way. He developed characters with pathos and heart so that the audience could develop a deep interest in the dramatic results of his stories, and after many years of drawing comics, he realized that he wanted his company and his trademark to be "The Premiere Storytelling Entertainer ”became known. ”He never lost sight of this vision as the Disney Company expanded and evolved over many decades.

The brand visionary Walt Disney created a compelling future for his company and the entire entertainment industry by guarding and managing what Walt Disney Presents would mean when defining a brand for entertaining family entertainment. He used his genius of storytelling to inspire people to make his dreams come true.

The Disney organization created many innovations in the field of storytelling and film production, including new animation techniques, more realism, a unique artistic style, ingenuity in storytelling by inventing storyboards, stop-motion photography as an aid to animation and to reach the Disney studio First the sound is assigned to the films.

He established artistic quality standards and a scientific approach to animation and founded a new university to teach these techniques. The Disney organization invented technicolor to make cartoons appear in color and innumerable wonderful stories and characters that all made people happy towards the end.

An inspiration quest

About twenty-five years after the founding of Walt Disney Studios, Disney realized he needed to diversify the company and his quest for inspiration took him around the world. Disneyland itself was largely inspired by the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, and as he graduated he began to realize that his goal was "to create a lively, ever-changing entertainment". Later, during a South American goodwill tour during World War II, he found inspiration for Disneyland's feature films Pirates of the Caribbean, the Jungle Cruise, and the Tiki Room, as well as his personal fascination and his hobby for quarter-scale model trains led to several theme park rides.

Disney was a pioneer in using storyboards as a technique to set the direction of a cartoon-long cartoon, and he designed and led Disneyland's development using the storyboard, which he used to communicate the essential nature of the type of theme park he wanted to build .

An important glimpse into Disney's remarkable genius was revealed a few days before his death in December 1966. His latest business advice given to some animators from his hospital bed was, "Get the story. The story is the most important thing. Once you have the story, everything else will fit together. "

The same is true, of course, for storytellers across all media, including those who create, develop and manage online brands. In an important sense, a brand is nothing more than a story told to entertain, entice and engage.

You can find these and other key ideas in my latest book, The Brand Bridge – How to Make a Deep Connection between Your Company, Your Brand, and Your Customers.

At The Blake Project, we support clients from all over the world at all stages of development. redefine and articulate what makes them competitive in critical moments of change through online strategy workshops. Please email us for more information on our storytelling workshops.

Brand Strategy Insider is a service from The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy that specializes in brand research, brand strategy, brand growth and brand building

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