Theme parks are giant marketing campaigns with a steel backdrop. Fact.
Yes, rides differ between them and some are slightly more technologically advanced than others but you buy into them thanks to the magic…the razzamatazz.
Put a child in a cherry picker and they’ll giggle for a few minutes- dress the cherry picker up with a giant mouse and lead them through a ‘kingdom’ to it and you’ll have a fan for life. You may even get a Love Mark.
But who does the magic best?
Given the example above, it may be to easy to just say Disney, they invented the process so just give them the title…or not. You see in recent years a number of pretenders have sprung up to wrestle Mickey and his gang into submission.
There’s Universal Studios in Orlando for a start. They shied away from the mush and went in hard- monster imagery and language that both terrified and thrilled.
Not to be forgotten is one of the UK’s leading parks- step forward Alton Towers. Here the marketing campaigns are slightly more diverse. In a recent interview the park’s marketing director spoke of wanting to create a park which was split in the mind of people depending on their demographic- a family orientated escape, with tranquil gradens in the parents minds and a dark, unpredictable environment to those in their teens and early twenties.
So how do you rate them all?
As we have said forget about the substance for once here- who has made style into an art form and made a jumped up gypsy fair ground into a desireable escape?
Posted on July 29, 2010
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