When brands come together, the biggest opportunity may not be the attention they generate, but the experiences they create for consumers. In the latest Insights@Questrom blog post, Shuba Srinivasan, Norman and Adele Barron Professor of Marketing at Boston University Questrom School of Business, examines Disney and Kraft Heinz’s new multiyear alliance and what it reveals about the evolving role of brand partnerships, from building lasting brand equity to measuring long-term value.
Disney and Kraft Heinz recently announced a multiyear alliance spanning Disney’s theme parks, cruise ships, films, television, and retail. Brands such as Heinz, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and Philadelphia will be woven into what the companies call “mealtime moments” across the Disney universe, starting with custom condiment stations at Walt Disney World, themed menus, retail products, and tie-ins with franchises like Star Wars.
Those activations will get attention. What interests me more is the breadth of the alliance, and what this signals about how brand partnerships are changing. This isn’t an advertising campaign with an unusually prominent partner. It’s an operating relationship that connects product development, food service, licensing, retail merchandising, and entertainment. Done well, Kraft Heinz’s brands won’t just appear alongside Disney content; they’ll become part of experiences families have already chosen to enter. That is a different kind of exposure than a media buy and a much harder one to put a number on.
Much of my research looks at how marketing actions show up in a company’s financial performance, and one recurring challenge is that companies evaluate long-term brand investments with short-term campaign measures. Reach, impressions, and immediate sales lift are useful, but they can’t tell executives whether an alliance is building a durable asset or simply generating attention for a few weeks. For Disney and Kraft Heinz, the more important question is whether the partnership changes how consumers respond to these brands after the novelty wears off: whether parents who encounter Heinz on a Disney vacation are more likely to reach for it at the grocery store months later, and whether that effect is still visible six or twelve months out.
Investors’ reaction to the initial announcement offers one early signal, since stock price movement, isolated from other news, reflects what the market expects the deal to be worth. Over time, the companies should track brand awareness, relevance, and consideration directly, alongside sales and repeat purchases among exposed customers. Pricing power is another important measure. One of the clearest signs that marketing has strengthened a brand is when consumers become more willing to choose it and less willing to abandon it when the price rises. A spike in attention can produce trial; a stronger brand can show up in willingness to pay.
That’s the real distinction between brand attention and brand equity. A successful launch can generate social conversation and foot traffic for a few weeks, but those outcomes can fade. Brand equity shows up when the baseline itself moves — when consumers remember the brand more readily, purchase it more often, or become less price-sensitive after the launch window has closed.
The strategic logic behind the alliance rests on something other than category overlap. Disney and Kraft Heinz don’t sell similar products, but they show up on the same occasions: meals, vacations, movie nights, and family routines built over years. I’d call this occasion fit rather than category fit, and it’s a useful lens for managers considering a partnership outside their own industry. Different business models become less of an obstacle when both brands belong in the same part of a consumer’s life.
Here, Disney supplies stories, characters, and emotionally loaded experiences, while Kraft Heinz supplies familiar products that can be folded into those experiences and then bought again at home. That movement from the park or screen back to the kitchen may be one of the most valuable features of the deal, but it isn’t automatic. The products must feel like part of the experience rather than advertising inserted into it, and execution will matter at least as much as the partners’ identities.
There’s also reputational risk that increases with depth of integration. The more tightly the two companies are woven together, the harder it becomes for consumers to keep them separate: a product-quality controversy at Kraft Heinz could shape perceptions of the whole alliance, and a Disney misstep could pull Kraft Heinz into questions that have nothing to do with food. My work on how companies respond to reputational events suggests the speed and quality of that response shape stakeholder reactions more than the initial incident does, which argues for building the response protocol into the partnership design now, not after something goes wrong. Legal protection isn’t enough on its own.
Measurement presents a separate challenge. Because the alliance runs across parks, cruises, entertainment, and retail simultaneously, attributing any given outcome to a specific activation will be genuinely difficult, and the companies should set up comparison markets, customer cohorts, or exposure windows now rather than trying to reconstruct them later. Without that discipline, a partnership this large can generate substantial activity without a clear answer about what worked.
I wouldn’t expect this to meet a same-year ROI threshold, but executives shouldn’t evaluate it against an open-ended timeline either. The more honest approach sets expectations by horizon: trial and engagement among lapsed customers in the near term, shifts in brand perception and pricing power in the middle term, and durable changes in market share and customer lifetime value, concentrated among the families most exposed to the partnership, over the long term.
The broader shift here extends well past these two companies. As consumers get better at skipping advertising and attention fragments across platforms, brands are moving toward experiences people already choose to enter, parks, streaming, live sports, travel, rather than interrupting them from outside. Presence alone won’t create lasting value. The partnerships that do will be those where the consumer fit is genuine, and rigorous measurement can demonstrate that the impact extends beyond the launch.
