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| In lugnet.general, Mark Tarrabain wrote:
> Ken Koleda wrote:
>
> > TLC has said on
> > numerous occaisons that AFOLs are just not a big enough market segment.
>
> Are you serious???
>
> If by "big enough" they mean more than 50% of the actual head-count,
> they may be right... but I'd bet anything that if they looked at the
> bottom line, how much money gets spent, they'd find that more is spent
> annually on LEGO that ends up being in the hands of adults than kids
> (simply because adults actually _have_ more money than kids in the first
> place).
Actually, Brad Justus and Jake McKee have always told us that they believe
the adult LEGO buyers to make up less than 5% of the retail market. We AFOL's
think it's a bit higher, but not much. A good way to put it into perspective is
this: go to a store where you buy LEGOS and look at everything on the shelf.
Then ask yourself what percentage of that store's stock you buy in a year. It's
probably less that 5%.
Of course, AFOL's buy WAY more than the average kid, but kids who buy LEGOS
outnumber adults who buy LEGOS by so much that we're not LEGO's main focus
group.
David "Fuzzy" Gregory
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| In lugnet.general, David Gregory wrote:
> Actually, Brad Justus and Jake McKee have always told us that they believe
> the adult LEGO buyers to make up less than 5% of the retail market
While I agree with this, what keeps adults buying Lego instead of the cheaper
clones which have appealing set designs than when we were kids?
The answer is brand loyalty. The parents played with Lego when they were kids,
not MegaBlocks. These are the same parents who grew up knowing that typical
Lego clones were clearly inferior.
The challenge for Lego is to maintain that image of superiority in the current
generation of kids. If kids today don't think Lego is superior, they won't
become adults that buy Lego for their kids, which is 95% of Lego's current
customers. Unfortunately, for AFOL's, this doesn't necessarily mean higher
quality bricks. It could mean sets that are more "fun" or "easier to build".
It could also mean sets that contain other brand images such as Star Wars or
Spiderman (I can still recall how I wished for official Star Wars Lego back in
the late 70's).
It could very well be that this is a very forward looking change in order to
maintain and build Lego's brand image with today's children.
Jeff
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