Branding Advice from Unexpected Sources: Walt Disney World

I was at Walt Disney World a few weeks ago and my brand designer brain could not turn off! Despite WDW (let's not even talk about Disney as a whole!) being a giant and your small business being, well, small, I still think there's a lot you can learn from them! Who knows, maybe I'll turn this into a series where we take advice from other unexpected, questionable sources.

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Here are three pieces of branding advice you can take for your small business from my experience at Walt Disney World.

1. FOLLOW THE RULES, BUT ALSO EXPERIMENT AND HAVE FUN

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You can implement your branding in new, different, and creative ways, and still have it feel like your branding. WDW has been around for over 50 years now and their brand is constantly evolving and becoming something fresh and new while still being as recognizable as they were when they first began.

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A lot of small businesses I see get stuck doing the same thing over and over again. For example, using the same exact template for most of their social media posts. Now, I want to be clear: I love templates and templates are and a great way to achieve consistency. However, too much consistency is boring.

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When you work with a brand designer, you’ll get a brand guidelines document that gives you some rules to abide by to maintain consistency, but outside of those rules you should feel free to have some fun, experiment, and apply your branding in new ways. Your designer can help with this too! Especially if it's been a while since you've had a brand refresh, talk to your designer about how they can help your content stand out more while still utilizing the branding they designed for you.

2. THOROUGH IMPLEMENTATION IS KEY TO MAKING THE MAGIC HAPPEN

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Your branding needs to be applied thoroughly in order to be effective. When you’re in the Disney parks every part of your experience is intentionally themed and branded. That’s how the magic happens!

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This piece of advice might sound obvious, but I see so many brands who are really thoughtful with most things but a few key parts of their presence are really lacking in terms of branding. For example, their branding on social media and their packaging might be perfectly branded but the website and actual purchasing part of the process falls really flat and doesn’t feel branded at all.

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My best advice for this is to get into the nitty gritty detail of your customer’s journey. Determine all the ways a potential customer might they you all the way through to making a purchase, or making repeat purchases. Make sure every step of that journey, every way they interact with you, is documented and intentionally branded.

3. BRANDING WILL ONLY GET YOU SO FAR

This is my favorite piece of advice on this list because it's a common misconception when small businesses look into branding. Branding can do so much for your business but it cannot solve all of your problems. It will enhance what's great about your business but it cannot cover up your problems.

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The customer service and overall experience your customers have matters so much more. I don’t care if you love Disney or hate Disney, the experience they provide in the parks is an area where they really excel.

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Lesson here is that you shouldn’t expect branding to fix all of your businesses problems. You need to have a great product or a great service, and you need to consistently deliver excellence in order for branding to even be an important part of the equation.

STILL NOT CONVINCED YOU SHOULD LEARN FROM WALT DISNEY WORLD?

Obviously I'm not telling you to run your business like one of the most popular theme parks in the world. But, I do think we as small business owners have a tendency to look for advice and inspiration primarily from other business owners in our industry, or worse, Instagram/TikTok-famous creators in our industry. While many of these creators have great knowledge to share, the last thing you want to be doing is following in their footsteps for your content, marketing, product-making, branding, etc. You won't be authentically connecting with your clients and you'll be creating content that isn't designed to stand out.

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By looking outside of your industry, at a source you might at first question because they are so different from your business, you might actually learn new, unique, things and create a more diverse set of inspiration and advice for your business.

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