Disney Cell Phone: Bad Idea From the Start

Disney is putting an end to its cell phone business. But...what in the world was the company thinking in the first place? Sure, the cell phone demographic is getting younger all the time, but most kids past about third grade would no sooner want to get caught by their friends with a Disney character cell phone than with their secret favorite blanky.

So all along, Disney was basically marketing a cell phone for toddlers. How big a market is that?

UPDATE: After the above was posted, Lily Bedrossian of Disney's Internet Group got in touch to say that the Disney phones were designed for families and were "very well received." I asked why Disney is ending the business. Her reply:

We developed and marketed a great product (Family Center suite of services) that received critical and customer acclaim (see attached). Between the time we conceived and launched the product and today, much changed in the retail environment of the U.S. relative to mobile phones, and we were unable to achieve the distribution scale we had counted on to succeed. In the business planning process for FY08, we were faced with either making major investments to overcome those obstacles (e.g. inability to ply certain retail channels because the major carriers had made semi-exclusive deals there already), or to take the great product and try to find another way to market it, perhaps through a licensing arrangement with a major carrier.

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