Lessons in Clever Marketing From the LEGO Brand
How would you like to achieve a 25% jump in revenues and a 31% rise in net profits in your business?
That’s what LEGO, the Danish toymaker, announced they achieved for 2015
How is this possible, after nearly disappearing as irrelevant in a digital toy market just a few years ago… and what can we learn from it?
Here is what happened:
LEGO began moving away from its core product of building blocks, and focusing instead on theme parks, children’s clothing lines, video games, books, magazines, television programs and retail stores in order to diversify. Listening to ‘views’ and ‘trends’, and commissioned data, management made many changes, moving away from their core business
Every big data study LEGO commissioned drew the exact same conclusions: future generations would lose interest in LEGO
People born after 1980, who’d come of age in the Information Era – lacked the time, and the patience, for LEGOs. Named ‘Digital Natives’, this generation would lose their capacity for fantasy and creativity since computer games were doing most of the work for them
Each LEGO study showed that the generational need for instant gratification was more potent than any building block could ever hope to overcome
That is…until LEGO marketers did their own marketing research, direct with the consumer, children who use LEGO. What they found out was that everything they thought they knew, or had been told, about late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century children and their new digital behaviours – including the need for time compression and instantaneous results – was wrong!
Achieving a high level of mastery at their chosen skill, whatever that skill happens to be, is valuable, and worthwhile. The children they surveyed will stick with it until they get it right, never mind how long it takes. For kids, it was all about staying with it and having something tangible to show for it in the end
This is what we can learn from it:
- Focus on your core product or service and work on refining it before you look at adding new products or services to your range or expanding into new markets
- General studies and general data have their place but your business is unique. The way you deliver your offers is specific to you. Your customers have their own unique behaviours in relation to how and why they buy them from you and how they use your products or services
- By all means be up to date with data and trends offered but ultimately, go the ‘old fashioned’ way and conduct your own customer survey, directly with your existing customers
- Using data from your own surveys with your existing customers will help you attract more of those and it will reveal what your customers are looking for in way of change
Create your own data and follow its revelations to attract more of your own customers!
