Final Project — Disney’s Cruella Marketing Strategy

Claire Haudrich
2 min readApr 23, 2021

For my Cruella marketing strategy, the plan is to heavily push posts more and more over the pre-event period using movie posters, trailers, and graphics. Then, consistently post over the course of the event weekend, which is May 18th-30th. Let the campaign fade out during the post-event period by posting briefly for the next couple of weeks, sharing movie reviews and final movie clips. I want the social media posts for this movie to come across as fun, a bit dark, and something that’s never been done by Disney before.

The overall goal of this campaign is to get as much word out about the movie as possible between February and May in order to have a successful movie release weekend in terms of watch rate and views on Disney+. Some SMART goals of the campaign are for it to result in a 70% download increase for Disney+, and get watched by 1.75 million households by May 30th, 2021, the end of its opening weekend.

Platforms I will be using: Instagram and Facebook.

Why? — It’s very easy to post the same content to both platforms simultaneously by using the linked accounts feature and since Instagram and Facebook both are heavily dominated by visuals rather than simply text, I thought these platforms would be ideal for sharing many trailers and quality movie posters.

Target market for Instagram: Younger generations because they grew up with Disney / will be interested in the newfound “edginess” of this film, not often done by Disney before.

Target market for Facebook: Older generations who remember 101 Dalmatians from childhood / who will want to watch the movie with kids or grandkids.

Voice / tone of campaign: Mysterious, confident, dark, and playful (all characteristics of Cruella)

Hashtags: #Cruella, #DisneysCruella, #May2021, #DisneyPlus

Brand partnership + influencer relationships: Vogue (since Cruella is an aspiring fashion designer), Emma Chamberlin (young, edgy influencer), and Hailey and Brad Devine (Disney lovers).

Three Visual Examples:

Posted on April 23rd, Pre-Event
Posted on May 29th, During Event
Posted on June 4th, Post-Event

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