Does an iconic brand really need to react to changing preferences?

Lindsay Hahn, an Assistant Professor of Communication, and Tahleen Lattimer, a graduate student in the Department of Communication, and their co-authors tested whether there was a change in Disney’s content-creation values over time, based on the box office success of previous Disney pictures.

Hahn says it’s not surprising her study shows Disney heroes to be altruistic and moral, while its villains are egotistic and selfish, But what is surprising is that the results suggest no deviation of values to this over time.

“Disney holds to this pattern regardless of what audiences like and don’t like, and they don’t appear to change what they do based on audience appeal,” she says. 

“There’s obviously an extensive [approval] process going on before these films ever see the light of day, but Disney’s enduring popularity is likely at work here. The Disney brand alone is enough to predict success.”

The findings appear in the peer-reviewed Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media.

Understand how Disney portrays its values to audiences

“Questions surrounding the effects of Disney content on audiences’ value systems are as old as Disney films, so we should try to understand how the values in these productions are being portrayed,” explains Hahn. 

For the study, Hahn’s research team conducted a content analysis of all 734 Disney Studios films. Nature documentaries, concert films, anthologies and musicals without dialogue were not included.

The researchers then trained human coders on the model of intuitive-motivation and exemplars (MIME), a recent theoretical advancement that provides a framework for investigations such as the current study. The MIME’s long-term component suggests a reciprocal relationship between media and audiences. If audiences appraise media content higher when it presents values that they like and relate to, then the creators of films are, in turn, more likely to produce content featuring those values.

Although Hahn observed no relationship between the number of films produced and box office earnings of value-consistent films, several factors led her to the conclusion that ‘absence of evidence’ is not ‘evidence of absence’.

“I think that even without clear evidence in our study for this claim, it makes logical sense that profit-driven media creators like Disney would want to create content that they know their audience would like, otherwise profits would be at risk,” she says. 

“Given the likelihood that creators are responding to audience preferences, it could be that we simply need to develop more sensitive methods for assessing entertainment content.”

“We might also say that Disney doesn’t need to react to any changes in audiences’ value preferences because they have been successful in the past and continue to be. But, at the same time, we should be trying to answer questions about how this is affecting audiences.”