Content Execution and Brand Promise Give Disney+ a 793 on the Delight Scale

May 26, 2021 · Ben Bajarin, Carolina Milanesi

We are excited to publish our first Delight Scale post covering some of the many key insights we gathered on how subscribers to the Disney+ streaming service think and feel about their experience. We strongly believe that a key driver of product experience delight is centered on how the product or service performs in relation to customers’ expectations. It is easy for a product to score well on satisfaction if your initial expectations were low. Much harder to exceed your expectations if those were already high. Disney+ did quite well in this regard, with 50% of current subscribers saying the service was better than expected. This is even more impressive when 90% of Disney+ customers stated they had high expectations of the service before signing up. Satisfied customers are great, delighted customers are even better. Being able to expand your base often relies on recommendations both from people you know and people you don’t know. We continually find a customer’s willingness to recommend a product hinges on both the product delivering a quality experience and containing experiences that appeal to a mass-market consumer. The Disney+ focus on family-friendly content was also a factor in Disney+ having a high recommendation score on the Delight Scale. As a result, 88% of customers were likely to recommend Disney+ and, perhaps more impressively, 74% of Disney+ customers did recommend the product to someone in their social circle. Disney+ hits both on service quality and on how relatable the service is to a broad set of the addressable market. This combination led to the highest recommendation score of any media service we have tested to date. The following chart highlights some of the key experiences around Disney+ and why the service ranked so high on overall quality. The above chart shows how consumers rated specific Disney+ experiences. You can see the family-friendliness of content was the feature with the highest positive sentiment, followed by the content selection, and quality of original content. Disney has a number of brands it can leverage and launching with the Mandolorian, part of the much loved StarWars franchise, was a smart way to generate interest. That being said, Disney being aggressive with a back catalog of Disney content helped make the overall experience of Disney+ feel more robust than other upstart direct-to-consumer media services. It is reasonable to think, these factors played a key role in Disney+ exceeding the expectations of many customers. The other area Disney+ shined was in price to value. The overwhelming majority (85%) of Disney+ subscribers indicated the price of Disney+ was fair. Fairness in price and a strong return on investment is clearly creating a high degree of stickiness to Disney+ as 87% of Disney+ subscribers indicated their intent to continue subscribing to Disney+. Streaming services see a high degree of churn or simply content-driven sign-ups and cancellations and while intention does not always turn into conversion, an 87% score is good news for the service. The a-la-carte option of monthly payments makes it easy to stop subscribing once a customer has consumed all the relevant content and then resubscribes later. The weekly content releases are a contributor here to the longevity of Disney+ stickiness and the continued release of new series around noteworthy Disney brands. Another noteworthy point to consider is how Disney+, and Disney’s content strategy, play out from a competitive standpoint. The three most popular services Disney+ customers also subscribed to were Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. There are only so many hours in a day people can watch entertainment content, but the lure of consuming content as a family, frequently, is a strong differentiator for Disney+. Key Insight In studying multiple media streaming services, what stands out with Disney+ and their content strategy, is the way Disney+ content aligns to the overall Disney brand and Disney’s target customer. Disney has an exceptional understanding of its customers, and the Disney experience consistently aligns with its brand promise. It shouldn’t surprise us that Disney+ shattered everyone’s, including Disney’s, first-year target subscriber goal given the equity in the Disney brand both of their theme park experience and the blockbuster movies put out by their studios. By focusing on content that aligns with the Disney brand promise and experience, Disney+ sits atop the ranks for a media service on our Delight Scale.

The Delight Scale is a proprietary customer experience measurement tool. With the Delight Scale, we crafted the 10 best questions to capture customer experience. The results are scored, weighted, and aggregated into a product’s Delight Score. This approach has proven to lead to a much more holistic measurement of customer experience, and actionable product insights and truly separates great products from average ones. Delight is the bedrock of every loyal and engaged customer.
A product’s Delight Score is derived from a proprietary algorithm that totals the sum of the points awarded for each question/answer which is reflected toward positive customer experience sentiment.