Disney made Baby Yoda famous and still lost a lot of money.
We all remember what a year 2019 was and how beautifully it ended with Disney launching their top-rated series “The Mandalorian”, the spin-off of the famous Star Wars franchise. The Mandalorian became an overnight success, and the reason was not only the crispy script, but Disney surprised its fans all over the world by introducing the cutest character of all time, “Baby Yoda”.
Most of us here are already well familiar with the animated character Yoda from the Star Wars franchise and how famous he is for his wise and reversed dialogue delivery. When people were still thinking that baby Groot was the cutest of all animated characters, baby Yoda came with a storm and suddenly the internet was filled with his cute gifs and meme templates.
So, what went wrong?
Well, Disney wanted to keep the identity of baby Yoda a secret until the show is out there in the world but what they failed to predict was that the character they were about to launch was too cute for the fans to resist and their immediate need to get their hands on to the merch. Even though Jon Favreau said they were okay with having no merch prepared as they wanted the audience to connect with the character at a different pace but the actual outcome hit them in a way they didn’t expect.
Here comes the part where the dominos fell. The moment they aired the show (the Mandalorian), it became an instant rage amongst the Star Wars fans, and the tsunami of baby Yoda memes came flooding in, attracting even those who were not aware of its background and thus came the inevitable.
Jungle Scout used a keyword tracker tool to provide this information. As of the first week of December, people searched the term Baby Yoda 90,000 times just on Amazon. “Baby Yoda Plush” had 27,000 searches, for an increase of 4,782%. And the keyword “Mandalorian” also jumped for 125,900 searches on Amazon”
My 2 cents: -
Disney learnt its lesson of miscalculating the trend, costing them 2.7 million dollars, but for a big name like Disney, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but despite that, it’s worth noticing how easily it could’ve been avoided. Disney also made the very rash decision, after realizing their mistake, by launching an imperfect copy of baby Yoda merch and by doing so they ended up shooting themselves in the foot as the end product was a public display of bad marketing which they soon fixed but this gave people a clear example of how to read trends, especially when you’re the one making them.