What Most Organizations Get Wrong About "The Disney Experience"
Walt Disney once said, "I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing — that it was all started by a mouse." What began in 1928 with a sketch of a mouse named Mickey became the most beloved entertainment brand in history — a company that didn't just create characters, but built entire worlds around them. Understanding how Disney did that is the key to understanding why so many organizations struggle to replicate what makes Disney's experience magical.
I spent nearly a decade and a half at The Walt Disney Company — including time as a Production Executive at Walt Disney Imagineering. It was the most formative, creatively engaging and rewarding period of my business career. Since Disney, I've directed global digital marketing at GE Healthcare, led the Customer Experience Practice at Cisco for some of their largest enterprise-level clients, including United Airlines, and led Global Customer and Digital Experience at the global med tech company Dentsply Sirona. But it was Disney that shaped how I see everything — and it's the lens through which I've approached every organization I've worked with since.
In nearly every engagement — whether it's a Fortune 500 company, an airline, a resort, or a hospital system — someone says some version of the same thing: "We want to be the Disney of our industry."
I admire the ambition. But most organizations fundamentally misunderstand what makes Disney's experience magical.
It starts with a worldview — rooted in language.
Disney doesn't have customers. They have guests. Disney doesn't have employees. They have cast members. That's not branding. That's an orientation that shapes everything — how people are hired, how they're trained, and how they think about their role every single day. When you call someone a cast member, you're telling them that their role in the show matters.
Everything is built around story.
At Disney, every attraction and guest experience is carefully storyboarded. Everything is organized around telling great stories and producing a great show, where guests are surrounded by the narrative in a fully immersive experience. This is what we accomplished with "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience" — a 3D attraction I served as Production Executive on at Walt Disney Imagineering. The guest doesn't just watch the story. The guest is inside the story as it unfolds.
Brand standards are non-negotiable.
At Disney, it's not just the art — it's the voices, the behavior, every detail. You will never see a beloved Disney character in the parks with their headpiece off, or speaking in a voice that would destroy the illusion. That discipline protects the magic. It preserves the bridge between Disney's animation legacy and the real-world incarnations of those characters in the theme parks. Most organizations have brand guidelines. Disney has brand conviction.
The infrastructure is invisible — by design.
Beneath the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World lies an entire network of tunnels called utilidors — utility corridors that allow cast members, supplies, and waste to move throughout the park completely out of guests' sight. Hidden entrances and exits are woven throughout every park. If there's a problem, it can be addressed and removed from view quickly and efficiently — without ever breaking the illusion. Walt insisted on this after seeing a cowboy-costumed cast member walking through Tomorrowland at Disneyland. That single moment of broken immersion inspired an engineering marvel. The guest never sees the machinery. They only experience the magic.
The experience extends well beyond the parks.
Disney doesn't stop at theme parks. Disney operates world-class resorts, a cruise line, and restaurants — on Disney properties, at stand-alone locations, and at sea — and all of it is designed to feel like a seamless extension of the same magical experience. For years, Disney's Magical Express let resort guests skip baggage claim entirely — luggage tags were mailed in advance, bags were pulled from the airport carousel by Disney, and they simply appeared in your hotel room. The guest walked off the plane and onto a Disney Magical Express bus, and the vacation began immediately. Though the program was paused in 2022, Disney has been piloting its return. MagicBand wristbands — still very much in use — let guests tap their way through park entry, hotel room doors, and purchases with a single device linked to their account. These aren't just conveniences. They're deliberate experience design choices that reduce friction, maintain immersion, and extend the magic across every touchpoint of a guest's journey. That kind of integrated, end-to-end thinking is rare — and it's what separates a truly great experience from a merely good one.
So what do others get wrong?
They make what can be described as cosmetic and surface-level changes to their existing paradigm. They create a "Customer Experience" department, give it a modest budget, and expect transformation — while the rest of the organization carries on as before. But customer experience isn't a department. It's a muscle that needs to be developed and integrated across the entire organization — through proper training, meaningful measurement, and at times aligning incentives to the effort. And they forget that employee experience drives customer experience. You cannot deliver a world-class experience with a disengaged workforce that either doesn't understand or doesn't buy into the organization's mission, brand, or raison d'être.
The real lesson isn't to copy anyone else's playbook.
It's to do what the best organizations actually do: align your mission around delivering a compelling story and an experience that backs it up. Build, train, and reward a culture that supports and delivers that experience at every touchpoint. Then build the systems and infrastructure that surround and reinforce all of the above so seamlessly that the organization delivers a unified and flawless experience, where the component service elements and the effort in coordinating them are never visible to the guest or customer.
Consistency alone isn't enough. There are many organizations that deliver a consistent experience — but consistency without depth, craft, immersion, and emotional resonance doesn't command loyalty, and it doesn't command a premium. The best organizations create experiences that are consistent and immersive, emotionally resonant, and built on a level of care that most others never attempt. The difference isn't just in what the customer sees. It's in everything they don't — by design.
That's what most organizations get wrong. And that's what I help organizations in travel, leisure, hospitality, healthcare, and other industries define, create, and improve. If I can help you — or if you'd simply like to connect — I'd welcome the conversation.
