KidZania: Spreading Fun Around the World

In 2016, Xavier Lopez Ancona, president and co-founder of KidZania—a Mexican company with international success in developing and operating theme parks where children could play as grown-ups and pretend to be adults assuming the role of countless professions—needed to decide how to continue to differentiate the brand and grow revenue in the very competitive and dynamic entertainment market. Around the world, the revolutionary and innovative edu-tainment concept developed by KidZania was the most copied. Despite the growth, KidZania corporate revenues began to stagnate in 2012 because of the depreciation of the Mexican currency. Four alternatives were being considered: Growth in number of current parks to continue building scale as a defensive strategy, developing smaller park formats to target cities where the current format was not sustainable, developing an interactive platform that could bring together the growing digital market and the role-playing experiential learning, or transforming the company into a content development enterprise. Xavier’s team needed to recommend the best alternative to pursue to the Board of Directors.

This is a Role-play case for experiential teaching and classroom engagement.