my real life adventures

The Disney Vault... fear in advertising

As a parent I want my children to have the same sweet memories I have of certain things. Advertisers know this as "nostalgia" and they find it in your brain and use it as a mechanism to make you think that you only have one chance to buy something. This Disney Vault for example, we all know there probably is some kind of "storage" something somewhere, but "locking" it away and making unavailable to drive up short term sales... that's just rude.

And if you're going to be rude why would you be rude to parents of small children? How does that make good business sense? Sure they have a lot of movies to work with and so they can rotate them and sell more of one at a particular time than say a little trickle over a longer period of time. Maybe they've done measurements and have determined that the sales are greater with this strategy, but what has it done to the good will of their audience - to the mom or dad who just really wants to get the one particular movie that's locked away in the vault?

I'd think it would work better to just let people buy what they want when they want, maybe even put together sets that were created during a certain decade... I don't know, I'm just really really tired of seeing that vault close and feeling a tinge of advertising induced fear. So far it's annoyed me enough so that I've actually bought zero movies, how effective is that?!

posted by Heather @ 8:11 PM