Disney Mobile in Japan: Why it is not just the second time around

Disney Japan announced details of the upcoming March 1 launch of their so-called MVNO Disney Mobile on SoftBank Mobile’s network. According to the official company line, they are “extremely confident” about this endeavour - and we believe they have every right to be.

Whereas dead or barely holding-on bodies of past MVNO’s line the roads in many a country - Disney Mobile USA, Amp’d Mobile, ESPN Mobile, Helio to name a few - these cases are mostly owed to a lack of compelling content/service offering and/or weak distribution. Disney Mobile seems to have solved both these issues textbook perfect for the Japanese market, taking a very different approach from what they tried to do in the US with its MVNO on the Sprint network before. Contrary to many reports in international media, it is not at all a “similar service” to what they tried before.

In Japan, Disney will simply throw in their brand value and content, wisely staying out of the devilish details of trying to be a mobile network operator, something it has no experience in (cf. their US failure for details on how well that worked out the first time around) and leaving that whole part to SoftBank Mobile, which certainly does have its fair share of clout, ties to handset makers, distribution power and armies of customer service reps.

So tight is the cooperation that the Disney Mobile site on the PC web actually looks, works and feels almost exactly the same - except it’s white - as the SoftBank Mobile one.

It could be argued that Disney’s model is working so closely with the operator (by not running their own infrastructure etc.) that it’s actually more of an “MVCO”, a Mobile Virtual Content Operator. I guess you could also call it an OEM model.

Disney will be able to leverage SoftBank Mobile’s massive distribution network of thousands of SoftBank stores across Japan: want a Disney mobile contract? Get it at the SoftBank store.
Billing plans are exactly the same as SoftBank Mobile’s, including the wildly popular “White Plan” which features free intra-network calls between 1 am and 9 pm at a mere JPY 980 per month - whether the person you’re calling is on Disney Mobile or SoftBank Mobile.

Then, there is the fact that Disney is already a major content provider in Japan - serving about 3.5 million loyal customers, some 75% of which are women in their 20ies and 30ies, delivering content via a total of 88 sites across the three carriers NTT DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank Mobile, with subscription billed at a monthly rate of JPY 105-315 (about 90% of which goes to Disney).

Disney will be giving its subscribers free access to 23 of these sites, which offer all kinds of branded services, from ringtones to screensavers and from DecoMail (HTML email with graphic elements) to fortunetelling. And for extra coolness (I wouldn’t want to be caught dead using one, but that’s a story of personal preferences), they throw in a username@disney.ne.jp mobile email address.

In the hardware department, it’s wall-to-wall Disney, too of course: The first three handset models, made by Sharp and coming in “Shiny Silver”, “Glitter Gold” and “Sparkle Pink” (cuteness, anyone?), ship with a Disney button that leads directly to a Disney mobile portal developed in cooperation with Yahoo! Japan (which SoftBank owns, and which provides all of SoftBank’s proprietary mobile content and services).

Here, users will be able to access news, weather, horoscopes and all the other types of popular content - all wrapped in Disney look and feel, of course. Needless to say, the terminals themselves are chock-full with more Disney characters and animations than you can shake a stick: from the idle screen to the menus to the pre-installed applications.

Hardware spec-wise, the phones are pretty average if you’re living in Japan (and pretty mindblowing if you’re not): Music player application supporting Windows Media Audio and SD-Audio, Oneseg (digital mobile TV) receiver and FeliCa (NFC chip for contactless payment, ticketing and loyalty card schemes). A 2.6 QVGA liquid crystal display to display all that glorious content, and, of course, HSDPA high-speed 3G delivering it at up to 3.6 mbit/sec. Disney has announced they will launch new handsets three times a year.

As could be expected from Mr Masayoshi Son at SoftBank, this is a smart move indeed - the carrier has a third of the spectrum, but only 17.5% of the market, leaving much network capacity unused. Disney is certainly a partner with enough pull to keep pushing SoftBank Mobile subscriber growth - and with the billing plans covering both networks, Son doesn’t risk losing customers of his own.

So, which other brands in Japan could pull off this type of model? The answer is: not many, if any. Disney is uniquely positioned in that it has very loyal fans while at the same time being a brand that does not lose credibility and coolness the bigger it gets - something that can’t be said, for example, of fashion brands like A Bathing Ape that are built on a foundation of exclusivity. Secondly, Disney has a really strong portfolio of mobile content already - as opposed to brands like ESPN in the US, who only really tried to get into the mobile content space around the time of launching their MVNO. Disney has been a major player in mobile content since the early days of i-Mode, which is seeing is 10th anniversary next year.

Sanrio, creators of Hello Kitty is one potential candidate for a Disney-like model, but I wouldn’t bet the bank on it, considering that Sanrio is far less strong in mobile content than Disney. Sports teams? Not big enough a fan base as potential MVNO customers, not to mention their complicated content rights situation.

But, as Tomi Ahonen over at Communities Dominate Brands wrote a while ago, relying on branded content is not the only way an MVNO can work - advertising-funded MVNO, especially if targeted at a precise niche along the lines of Blyk is a different story entirely. And while it would be hard to get a foot in the door in Japan and would require some tweaking of the model they run in the UK market, this could be an extremely interesting proposition if executed well and with the right partners on board.

What the announcement didn’t include (to be honest though, we weren’t expecting it to) was any information regarding the rumoured Disney Mobile launch of the iPhone in Japan. But we still think Wireless Watch Japan has it right.

Posted by:Billich | Entry Date: January 24, 2008 3:59 PM